First Post

As the title says, this is the first post of this new blog that I decided to write. I think that it can be helpful to write things down and I've always believed in sharing my feelings with others who are experiencing similar struggles with the hopes of being helpful to others. I guess maybe thats the teaching nature in me. So I thought I'd use this forum to share my story, track my journey and hopefully help others in the process.

First, I'm 28 years old and I'm from Pennsylvania though I currently live in North Carolina with my boyfriend and our two kitties! I graduated college in 2012 with an elementary and special education degree and I recently finished a post-bacc certificate add-on licensure for birth-kindergarten teaching. I've  had a pretty "normal" life. I had no health issues and only some difficulties in school but they were generally solved with pushing myself to study extra hard, stay after school with some amazing teachers who went out of their way to help me and parents who stayed on top of me and my school work. In November of 2018 my doctor noticed that my tongue was sticking out crooked. She referred me to an Ear, Nose and Throat doctor who had me do a scan which proved that I had something called paraganglioma. This is a benign tumor on my carotid artery that has caused the crooked tongue. I have seen many specialists between then and now to determine a treatment plan and my last appointment with a neurologist also enlightened me with the information that I had something called Complete-Agenesis of the Corpus Callosum (C-ACC)

What this basically means is that I have some level of an intellectual disability. It explains why driving was so hard for me to learn and why my social life was never really existent. It explains my troubles in school and probably why I'm still so disorganized.

I guess I have always been weird when it came to social interactions. I am a talker, at the age of 2 or 3 I was given a sweatshirt that said "I'm talking and I can't shut up." We still often refer to this shirt as a joke but I'm pretty sure if there was an adult shirt somewhere, someone in my family would purchase it for me now. I generally had one or two friends at a time and clung to them hard. This made it tough growing up because all of my friends that I have had over time had many other friends so if they were not free to hang out I ended up hanging out alone or with my parents. This was especially apparent in high school as I can remember spending many a Friday night with my dog instead of being out with my friends. Sometimes the companionship of a dog is just better...you know they won't blab your secrets. And this dog especially was the best at secret keeping.

I am sure I will have more to share as time goes on but I'm going to sign off now. I hope this will be helpful to someone who reads it.

Signing off

Jamie