I didn’t notice it at first, at least not in the way I should have. It’s hard to be body aware when life keeps moving and there are things that still need to get done. Work needed to be finished. Projects around the house piled up. The fence post still had to come out. The floor still needed refinishing. When your body changes slowly, you learn to explain it away. You tell yourself you’re tired because you worked hard all day. Your back hurts because you’re getting older. Your legs feel heavy because you pushed too hard yesterday. There’s always another explanation ready before your mind ever lands on something being truly wrong. So I kept pushing through it. I’d spend an entire day working, then come home and tackle another project because that’s just what needed to happen. And at first, I could still do it. That was the confusing part. I wasn’t incapable, I was just paying more for it afterward. A job that used to leave me sore for a night would suddenly I wouldn't fully recover from it the next day. I’d wake up expecting to feel normal again, but the exhaustion would still be there, sitting in my muscles like wet concrete. Over time, recovery stopped feeling like recovery at all. It felt like I was slowly borrowing energy from tomorrow just to survive today. The hardest part is that decline doesn’t announce itself all at once. It sneaks in quietly enough that you adapt to it without realizing you’re adapting. You stop doing certain things as often. You take breaks more frequently. You avoid tasks that leave you wiped out for days. You start building your life around exhaustion before you even understand exhaustion has become part of your life. The biggest loss, though, was hiking. I used to go every weekend, and the last time I did was five or six years before my diagnosis. Back then, I didn’t know. I thought I was just out of shape, overworked, getting older too fast. Now I can look back and see MS already there in the background, quietly reshaping what my body could do long before I had a name for it.