Lonely are the brave

There is just a brief period of time just once a week that I cherish so gratefully, a time where I feel I am completely in control and that powerlessness fades for just 20 minutes. 20 minutes that are completely mine.  On a weekend  morning when the normal world snoozes, I leave home down our sleepy cul de sac and up the lane to work. It's a time of day that you share only with the paperboy and early morning dog walker's. The world is silent and I am alone. In the best way possible.
Several things remain true to Claire pre 2011.
1. I still get annoyed by people who come along and press the button at pedestrian crossings when you've been stood there for ages, and clearly already pushed it.
2. I'm impatient when I'm hungry, ovens don't work fast enough when my belly's rumbling.
3. I'm still convinced Mark got a pay off by my family to marry me, funded by some hidden
secret fortune.
4. Saturday dinner always has to be something nice to look forward too. I do not like salad and baked potato on a Saturday.
5. I  am like an elephant - not in the overeating wibbly belly sense (well maybe a little after last nights curry) - but that I never forget, especially faces.
6. I have three personalities, One a confident manager, can talk to a customer at work about anything and everything, another a quiet, slightly introverted in new or unfamiliar company, often mistaken as rude or standoffish and the last is the real me, the face my true friends see, loyal and generous to a fault and constantly wanting to try and make everyone happy.
I am not the same person I once was, remnants and flickers remain but nearly everything has changed and shifted and to be brutally honest not always for the better. Finding a role for myself in this whole new and unusual world that is completely entangled with mazes, riddles, false starts and dead ends is proving a battle far greater for my state of mind than 6 months of isolation and chemotherapy.  I felt like I was on route down this straight road with signs in the distance directing me right ahead, now I feel I've been pushed down a side road, done a U turn and been redirected the long way round through back roads.
Sometimes I feel like I'm being punished, not for any wrong doing but for the choices I've had no alternative but to make since I got very ill. Either through recommendations from doctors or by my hand being forced in certain circumstances, not one of the decisions I've made have been deep down heart and soul what I have wanted to do. It makes for a lonely existence not having the choices and options other people do so easily take for granted, I admire endlessly the positivity of those individuals that are sicker or less fortunate, I imagine their distaste at my self indulgent moaning at circumstances that to them, must seem trivial. 
But yet to me it feels like a hole, a missing piece of the puzzle and my sense of isolation is just the result of the powerlessness you feel when you are at the mercy of your own body's ineffectiveness.
There was a time 3 years ago when as arrogant as it sounds, I felt like I was on top of the world. Proud of my achievements, a wonderful partner, family and a job that I felt I was well respected and admired in. How rapidly, by a twist of circumstance, I discovered that most of it can all come undone. With the exception of my family and Mark it all fast became worthless and unrecognisable, with me in turn not recognising myself. From the outside everything seemed fine and with life as we know it carried on.  But in reality I struggled to identify with nearly everything I once knew and still to this very day trying to find a place in this whole new world.