Perspective

Our Mood Kyrie today is actually her son, Ajax, on his birthday. Kyrie, for her part, refuses to wear silly hats.

So this January--after six various surgeries and other medical procedures--I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease. Upon this happening I was advised by my doctor to go gluten-free, which can help with inflammation. This was a big change--for the way I shopped, the way I cooked, the way I went out (almost being in tears because I couldn't order what I really wanted one night is a memory that will stick with me).

And of course I was still busy with everything else in my life. Trying to make sure the Shiloh Shepherd sticks around, for example. A breed is a fragile thing. When you're not AKC, who's keeping a breed of dog alive? I'll tell you--it's a world full of people milling around, disagreeing with one another. (Oh, just like real life, you say? True enough.) And just like with real life, if enough people stop caring about a thing, it dies. With a breed of dog, you'll never get that gene pool back. So here I am in the midst of everything else taking populations genetics courses and trying to absorb that too.

And the writing. Though I've been bad about blogging, I haven't stopped with the writing, nor with the submitting. The rejections slowly pile up, some of them with attached notes; others, from places that actually hung onto the story for ten months, with nothing more than a form. (Really? Ah well.) I have taken to writing every day after work, with the lights out, in my office, plugged into my mood music, for fifteen minutes to an hour. I don't track words because I can get obsessive about that. It's much like with weight loss; the scale can be depressing, so I measure instead. Word counts can be depressing, so I am happy getting something--anything--done on my current story.

It's all perspective.

In the midst of all of this and family and husband and a house to clean and work to do just like everyone else, a birthday came along.

Birthdays for me (and New Years, too) are days of forced perspective. They can't be ignored or blown off. Not totally. Because somewhere on that day, be it while I'm playing frisbee with a dog or when I'm finally falling into bed, my brain will sit up and say, "Well?"

What are you going to tell your brain when it does that? You're probably going to feel a lot like you did when you failed your parents or failed remembering your friend's birthday or failed on your latest diet. You're going to feel guilty or you're going to feel depressed or you're going to feel disappointed in yourself, which is the worst. Or maybe you'll just want a donut. And you can't have one (because you're gluten free).

But what you HOPE you can tell your brain is, hey, look, I'm progressing. Which is why, when I originally thought that I shouldn't bother to sit down and write at the end of my workday if I only had fifteen minutes, I ignored myself and sat down. It's all perspective. I'd rather be looking at the world--chronic disease, dogs, diet, donuts--and say that I'm at least still in there, slugging away and messing things up and every once in a while doing something pretty darn good.

On occasion, I even write something that seems to indicate that all the time my Viable Paradise instructors and fellow students (and my writing buddy, Jarrad) spent critiquing me wasn't wasted. Maybe I get the Final Fantasy "level up" music in my head. It does happen.

Hey, look. I'm progressing.