I have complained a couple of times this week. I have also written some pretty emotional things. That is PSP. It can make one bad day, or even one bad hour, feel like the whole story.

But it isn’t.

The week is ending, and the bottom line is that I’m still good.

My cognitive ability is still there. My physical ability has not declined significantly this week, if at all. I spent time with my family. I played chess with friends. I disappeared down a few scientific rabbit holes that interested me. I did some mentoring, which I find enormously fulfilling.

That was not a bad week. In fact, it was a pretty good one.

There was pain. There was anguish. There were some genuinely bad moments and one particularly unpleasant night. I have also developed some breathlessness that I don’t entirely understand yet, and I will have to see how that develops. I am not ignoring it, but I am also not going to let it become the headline of a week in which so much else was good.

Because life goes on.

My kids are happy, plus or minus. My wife is doing okay, plus or minus. I spent time with all of them, including husbands and girlfriends, and everyone is okay. That matters enormously to me. Things are certainly not ideal, but perhaps one of the tricks of living with something like PSP is learning not to demand ideal before allowing yourself to call something good.

And this week was good.

I don’t really measure my life in years anymore. Days are probably too short a measure because PSP can make individual days wildly different from one another. But weeks are interesting. A week is long enough to contain the bad and the good, the pain and the laughter, the frustration and the chess games, the difficult nights and the moments when I forget for a while that I am ill.

Perhaps weeks are becoming my barometer.

And as I sit here, about an hour before Shabbat begins, I can look back at this one and give it a 7 out of 10.

With PSP, I’ll take a 7.

That may sound ridiculous to some people, but it is the honest score I gave the week. It reflects the fact that, at this point, I think I am holding up about as well as I could hope to be. I am still myself. I am still doing things that matter to me. And, importantly, I still have things to look forward to.

Because another week has passed and I am still here. Still thinking. Still interested. Still laughing. Still contributing. Still spending time with the people I love.

Still very much living.

That is the message I want to take into Shabbat.

Not that everything is good.

It isn’t.

But there is still plenty of good.

And that is hope.

Shabbat Shalom and best wishes for a good weekend. I hope next week is a good one for all of us.