Emotions Don’t Queue

One of the strangest things this disease has taught me is that human emotions are nothing like I once imagined them to be.

Before PSP, I think I subconsciously believed emotions arrived one at a time. Happiness or sadness. Gratitude or anger. Hope or despair. In good old fashioned British style, each one waiting its turn, queuing politely.

Now I know better. They don’t queue. They collide. They coexist.

This last hour or so reminded me of that more powerfully than ever.

For the past hour, I was in acute physical pain. My leg was in absolute agony whichever way I moved it, particularly my hip and thigh. I was worried about swelling and pins and needles in my foot. I was frustrated, exhausted, and honestly furious at the world. The only things that eventually calmed it were muscle relaxants, hot water bottles, and a massage gun.

Pain does that. It narrows your world. It makes everything feel heavy, close, and relentless.

And yet, at exactly the same time, something else happened.

I received a message from an old friend and former client. It may genuinely have been one of the most meaningful messages I have ever received. They wrote to tell me that the writing I’ve been doing had helped them personally, genuinely, in ways that clearly mattered to them. They were thanking me, but I was thanking them, because reading it gave me a profound sense of meaning, purpose, and something close to joy.

And suddenly I understood something I could never quite have articulated before tonight.

I was simultaneously deeply angry and deeply grateful.

I was in real physical pain while also feeling genuine happiness.

Part of me was furious. Another part felt pride and quiet satisfaction.

Both were completely real. Neither cancelled the other out.

Years ago, I would have assumed that was impossible. I thought emotions worked like opposing forces, that the dark ones crowded out the light ones, or that happiness required the absence of struggle.

PSP has dismantled that assumption entirely.

Emotions are not civilised. They do not wait for better timing or more convenient circumstances. They arrive together, uninvited, in whatever combination life sends. And human beings, it turns out, are built to hold far more than we imagine.

Suffering does not cancel gratitude.

Pain does not eliminate purpose.

Happiness does not require the absence of struggle.

I don’t write for praise or validation. I write because it helps me process a journey that would otherwise be impossible to explain, and because putting words to these experiences is itself a form of meaning.

But moments like tonight matter deeply.

When someone tells me that these words have helped them, it does something beyond encouragement. It reminds me that even in the middle of limitation, frustration, and real physical pain, something worthwhile can still emerge. That the writing reaches places I’ll never see. That it matters, even when I’m lying here with a swollen foot and a massage gun.

Perhaps that is the lesson I keep relearning.

Not despite the difficulty.

Sometimes because of it.