What Okinawa’s 80% and Mary Kay Taught Me about Writing with Chronic Illness
Updated September 28, 2021 I ran out of spoons around the middle of June. Then I spent the next six weeks teetering on the line between having just a few and being deep in energy overdraft, while mentally (and repeatedly) chanting just hold on until August 1 and not quite understanding why I was flaring…
A Learning Experience
Last Monday, the stairwell next my apartment got painted. I have massive problems with paint fumes — it triggers my asthma in about two nanoseconds. I have an arrangement with my landlord that involves advance notice (so I can plan to be elsewhere), taping up the door to painted areas, etc., but through a farcical…
Opening Up
This is why I’m five days into a very necessary two weeks off. Actually, it was worse than that. It was the eyes going *boing* the minute I turned off the light, but no actual ideas coming, because my brain was moving so fast with everything I had done that day and needed to do…
The Best We Can
Back to work I went on Monday, humming that song from Snow White (except I always thought it was “it’s off to work we go” and now it doesn’t make any sense at all in this post). Okay, it’s entirely possible that I wasn’t humming – I spent my week’s vacation having a massive sinus…
Resolved
It’s commonplace to make promises to yourself around this time of year and normally, my primary promises to not get caught up in the resolution obsession. Too often, it leads to a severe case of self-loathing as you take stock of your life and find it wanting, making promises to yourself that you don’t keep….
The Best Advice You Ever Got
I’m reading The Best Advice I Ever Got: Lessons from Extraordinary Lives by Katie Couric. She asked a plethora of well-known people from entertainment, industry, philanthropy, sports, politics and everything in between to tell her what was the best advice they ever got. It’s a terrific compilation of nudges, comfort and encouragement. It’s good if…
Firsts
It’s been an interesting week for new experiences. This past weekend found me down by the lake and two very exciting things happened. I saw the Snowbirds in person. Well, not exactly in person, but with my own eyes in real life, as opposed to images on the television screen. There they were, flying in…
7 Habits of A Reasonable Life
Hello, world. So nice to see you again – have you lost weight? Got a new haircut? Whatever you’ve done, you look fabulous. I, on the other hand, probably look like I’ve been dragged through a hedge backwards. Twice. The last two or three months have been hard and crazy and utterly unreasonable. I developed…
Do You Lose When You Gain?
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about learning to protect myself. About finally getting it. Finally acting in accordance with my alleged intelligence and bowing out of the celebrations for International Day for People with Disabilities because if I didn’t, there was a significant risk that I would lose several months of my life…
Personal Growth
A week ago, something happened in my shoulder. I still haven’t been able to pinpoint the exact time or act that caused the calamity, but the end result was a majorly crapped out shoulder, neck and arm. Complete with buzzing in certain fingers, jolts of sharp pain in my thumb and a seized-up neck, shoulder…
Epiphanies
It all started last Thursday morning as I was making my way to the grocery store after having kicked in 30 minutes on work. I’m making a mental list of what I’m going to do after I’ve been shopping, actually keeping it fairly reasonable, trying to take it easy on my shoulder. As I get…
5 Lessons Learned While Sitting Still
The first thing I learned came on the very first day of my 2 weeks leave. And it was the sheer exuberant relief of knowing I had 2 weeks, 14 long days with no responsibilities, no to-do lists, nothing on my plate but to sit still and heal. In a comment on last Friday’s post,…
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