This I Believe - Catherine Royce

HOST: Catherine Royce was a dancer. She was the Deputy Art Commissioner for the City of Boston and a consultant for small businesses. Several years ago at the age of 55, she was diagnosed with ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease. She has developed her belief as she has lost control of her own body. Here's Catherine Royce with her essay for This I Believe. ROYCE: I believe that I always have a choice. No matter what I'm doing. No matter what is happening to me. I always have a choice. I have spent my life typing on a keyboard, but now I can no longer use my hands. Every day I sit at my computer speaking words into a microphone instead of typing. In 2003, I was diagnosed with ALS, Lou Gehrig's Disease. Over time, this disease will weaken and finally destroy every significant muscle in my body. Ultimately, I will be unable to move, to speak and, finally, to breathe. Already, I am largely dependent upon others. So every day I review my choices. Living with ALS seems a bit like going into the witness protection program. Everything I have ever known about myself?how I look, how I act, how I interact with the world?is rapidly and radically changing. And yet, with each change, I still have choice. When I could no longer type with my hands, I knew I could give up writing entirely or I could go through the arduous process of learning to use voice recognition software. I'm not a young woman. This took real work. Interestingly, I write more now than ever. Every day I choose not only how I will live, but if I will live. I have no particular religious mandate that forbids contemplating a shorter life, an action that would deny this disease its ultimate expression. But this is where my belief in choice truly finds its power. I can choose to see ALS as nothing more than a death sentence, or I can choose to see it as an invitation?an opportunity to learn who I truly am. Even people in the witness protection program must take with them fundamental aspects of themselves which can never change. What are these aspects for me? So far I have discovered many unique things, but one stands out above the rest. I have discovered in myself an ability to recognize, give and receive caring in a way far deeper than anything in my life before. I have always been an intensely private and independent person. But now I have allowed a wide circle of family and friends into the most intimate parts of my life. Previously, I would have found such a prospect appalling. I would have assumed that living with ALS meant a life of hardship and isolation. Instead, because I believe that I always have a choice, I opened myself to other possibilities. And now the very thing that at first seemed so abhorrent has graced my life with unaccustomed sweetness. It was always there. Only now I have chosen to see it.