Tag: Challenges

New Year, New Promise, and Welcome Back

I missed this place, I missed writing on these blank pages, I missed talking to all of you. I miss reading all of your words and finding a connection in the infinite digital cosmos we have here. It’s been far too long, my dear friends. It feels good to be back. I hope 2018 finds you all well and full of hope for the coming year.

This past fall I decided to finally plunge headfirst into something that scared me- that’s why I wasn’t here as often. Life has been so busy and full, I was trying to keep myself from being too overwhelmed. Although in hindsight, I missed this too damn much. I decided to go back to school after nearly a decade of talking about it. The stars aligned, I was so sick of spinning my wheels, I had a little bit of money saved up and I was finally ready to leap into it. I was terrified- I work full time and decided to take classes full time in the evenings as well. I learned very quickly that you are always capable of so much more than you ever realized. I did it- every single day was planned and regimented, every waking moment had a schedule attached to it- but I did it. I walked away from my first quarter with all A’s and an unhealthy addiction to energy drinks.

Just when I thought I couldn’t take anymore something happened, something that shook me to my core. My dad got hurt the day after Thanksgiving while hanging Christmas lights. We beat the ambulance to the hospital and watched him get wheeled out on a stretcher, pale as a ghost. We heard the call for an emergency surgical trauma team over the speakers in the ER and wondered if it was for him. They put us in a separate waiting room before telling us what his condition was. I remember sitting there wide eyed and counting the tissue boxes piled up on every end table- 12. He had fallen from his second story balcony while putting up Christmas lights. By the time the ambulance made it to him his lung capacity was down to 20% and he was making peace with his maker. I met the doctor that sliced a hole in his chest and put a tube into his lung when he was reaching the point where he nearly stopped breathing. In spite of everything, we were lucky. He broke five ribs, punctured his lung, broke his collarbone into five pieces, cracked his scapula and fractured his spine in three places. But he was alive and, miraculously, he wasn’t paralyzed. We were lucky. Three days in the ICU, nine days in the hospital, a month of in-home care provided mainly by myself with a little bit of help from siblings, two trips to the emergency room, a plethora of doctor visits, and a long road ahead of him, but he is alive and he can walk.

It’s a strange thing to see your parent walk for the first time after an accident that nearly left them in a wheelchair. There’s an odd sense of pride that kept me wondering if he had felt the same way when I took my first steps. It’s an odd moment when you take care of a parent that once took care of you, when you learn the struggles and frustrations that come with care work. It’s a terrifying moment when you realize how easily life can change, how little control you have over the things that happen to you and the people that you love. It’s a liberating feeling when you decide to use these dark moments to inspire you to be better and to live more fully.

2017 taught me many lessons. My family had far too many ‘almosts.’ We almost lost my childhood home to a fire, we almost lost my cousin to the Las Vegas shooting, we almost lost my dad. With every single ‘almost’ we were reminded that there is still hope that comes with every lesson. There is no time to wait to tell someone that you care, spend quality time with a person you love, read that book on your wishlist, go back to school, chase that dream- if all you have is right now, then you need to make ‘right now’ count. That is what I am taking with me into 2018. A hope and a promise that this is the year I won’t hold back.

I don’t want to wait until I am ‘less busy’ to write. I don’t want to wait until I’m done with school before I start climbing towards my other goals. I don’t want to take tomorrow for granted anymore. So here I am, doing something that I love simply because I love it, not because I’ll get anything else out of it.

To all of you, I hope you don’t take this new year for granted. I hope you feel the world so very deeply. I hope you laugh and cry, fall in love with others and yourself all over again. I hope you push hard, fight for what matters to you, strive to reach your goals. I hope you find more than you did a year ago. It won’t be a perfect year, you will face challenges and struggles that you never expected, but I hope you find something beautiful in each of them. In 2018 I will be looking for hope and living a life that I can be proud of if I don’t get to see another sunrise. I want to be excited about the life I have lived, not just the one I am striving for. Happy new year, my beautiful friends, it’s good to see you all again.

Technology: Friend or Foe?

Oh technology, my strongest ally and my fiercest foe. Why do you constantly deem it necessary to torment me? My dearest laptop, after all of the time I have invested with you; all of those hours we logged together clickity clacking away on that keyboard, scanning page after page of research, bonding with faraway strangers at the speed of light, creating worlds and galaxies with nothing more than twenty-six letters constructed into infinite possible words. I’ve been good to you, haven’t I? I’ll admit, I’ve been a tad clingy in the past, especially during the frazzling Nano months; but we had a good time, didn’t we? And I’m sorry I spilled my coffee on you once- but your lid was closed, I cleaned you properly- will you ever forgive me for that accident?

You see, I hate to admit it, but I’ve come to depend on you. A lot. And yet lately it just doesn’t seem like you care as much as you did once upon a time. You are distant, you keep locking me out of my word documents- documents we created together, I can now only look at them through Microsoft Windows, but I cannot touch. I cannot even copy them to a new word processor. I can simply stare at that spelling error mocking me without the tools to correct it. It’s because you’ve disconnnected- from me and the worldwide web. You don’t like your old friend, the router. And so you just arbitrarily decided that you were done with it. But now I can’t even back up my work to the cloud, and my word processor locked me out because it can’t verify my ongoing subscription if it can’t connect to the internet. It’s a sad day when your best technical ally becomes your enemy, hiding your written secrets even from yourself.

I don’t want to move on, I don’t want a new laptop- and truthfully, I can’t afford one. I just don’t know why we can’t work together anymore. I always tried to do right by you. I’m not perfect; I didn’t always put you where you belonged, I let the baby type on you (with supervision), and yes, I have spilled my treats on you. But I’ve always tried my best, I’ve always ensured you got your updates and were protected from outside viruses. I thought we were close. 

And yet, here I am, having to pull my old laptop out of storage- you know, the one that is slow and clunky, the one that just got worn out and tired- the one with the exposed wires for a charging cable. It was supposed to be resting, enjoying its technical retirement- but it’s having to join the workforce again- my workforce. Because you left me. Because modern computers now need an internet connection for even the most mundane of tasks. Because the world has evolved and my dependence on your abilities is so much stronger than it used to be.

Please, I hope we can work this out. I dream of a day when I log in and see those little bars that mean you’ve decided to reconnect to the outside world. I won’t give up on you, my friend, even if it feels like you gave up on me. Because at the end of the day- we need each other. We are peanut butter and jelly, popcorn and butter- sure you could get by with one of us, but it is the combination that knocks it out of the park. Until then, I will miss you my friend. And I hope the old laptop is okay with coming out of retirement. I am so glad I held on to it.

One Step in Front of the Other

A couple years ago my fiancé and I packed up the car and drove five hours to Leavenworth, WA during Oktoberfest. But we weren’t going for the beer, no, we were doing something much more reckless. The Oktoberfest Half Marathon! That is right- while college students were piling into beater cars and taking over the town for a weekend of boozy frolicking fun, we were pinning numbers to our tank tops and stretching nervous muscles in the freezing cold early hours of the day. This in itself wouldn’t have been a big problem- if I had taken my training seriously in the months prior to the final event. I stepped up to the starting line knowing that I was in way over my head. I don’t think I had run more than two miles straight without a break, and here I was expecting to push my body for 13.1 miles. Now, don’t get me wrong- a few weeks before the race I had decided it was important to know what I was getting myself into- my fiancé and I went for our ‘practice run’ one night. It took us hours winding through two towns to get in the full mileage. At one point I was running while dry heaving over the side of a bridge (that would be thanks to the pile of gummy bears I ate), but we did the full thing. So going into this event, I had an inkling of what to expect. And I knew it would involve a lot of pain.

The first few miles were fantastic, I felt like a superstar. There is something inspiring and invigorating when your feet are clipping in line with thousands of other people surrounding you, people who were just as crazy as you. We all went out there with something to prove, a goal to accomplish- and the excitement in those first few miles were palpable.

After a while though, even the buzzing thrill couldn’t keep my body motivated. The next miles were a collection of jogging bursts coupled with walking breaks. Intervals, they call them- and they seem to save my life every time. 

When we hit the halfwalf mark, we came across a woman dressed as a bar wench, in the full German gear- she was running with us while carrying a stein full of beer. Beer that she was actually drinking. College students in town for Oktoberfest were lining the streets and filling her stein for her as she went. And you know what really killed me? She was beating me. I like to tell myself that she was drunk enough not to feel the pain in her legs, but I know the truth; she was just better, stronger, and perhaps even a bit more prepared in spite of her inebriated state. Although I can’t help but be impressed; drunk me knows better than to go outside for a jog. Drunk me wants to sit in bed with hot french fries while singing old Backstreet Boys songs to my always-patient fiancé who simply wants me to brush my teeth and go to sleep (and upon his request, this is where you insert the lyrics from ‘You Don’t Own Me’- thank you First Wives Club for introducing this little gem into my bag of tricks. This is quickly followed by some Joan Jett ‘Bad Reputation’ in response. Oh yes, drunk me can be quite clever with her song choices. She also becomes a fiercely independent woman- until she can’t open the pickle jar.)

By the end we were exhausted, everything hurt, but we were almost there. When we got within sight of that finish line we started running, every muscle in our bodies screaming, our lungs ready to burst. When we hit the finish line we clasped our hands and raised them in the air in triump- until the race attendants pointed to ANOTHER line several feet (it felt like miles) away, saying that was the actual finish line and racers had been confused all day with the inexplicable first mark. I personally think they did it because they thought it was funny- it was the cruelest joke that has ever been played on me. So we shuffled forward, arms still raised painfully for what felt like another five miles- until we were able to joyfully cross the REAL finish line.

At the end were apples and treats, along with a winning tshirt and a medal. That first bite of my victory apple was the best thing I have ever tasted. Everything hurt, the journey had been a rough one and I had been horribly unprepared. But you know what? I did it. I fought through the pain, I pushed myself beyond anything I ever believed my body to be capable of. And I crossed that finish line. Both of them. Looking back, it isn’t the pain and the cold that comes to mind first- it’s the pride, the deep satisfaction in knowing that the chips were stacked against me and I still pushed myself to do it.

We went back to our hotel, took hot showers (oh how I deeply craved a tub in that moment), and then we joined the crazy college kids at the bar for a celebratory beer while proudly wearing our medals. It was an amazing day. And it doesn’t matter that I could barely stand for the rest of the week, or that stairs made me want to cry for my mommy. I still did it.

The thing that I’ve learned: this life isn’t that different from that race. Especially for us writers (and most certainly during Nano). We all are jumping into these dreams and adventures feet first, with nothing but hope that we will be successful. We don’t always know what to expect. We don’t know what struggles we will endure. Sometimes we are rockstars, zooming through the crowd. And sometimes it feels like that woman in leiderhosen has all of her shit figured out while you are bumbling around like a blind man. You lose your faith in your abilities, it seems like everyone else has the secret except for you. But you keep pushing and you keep fighting, even when every fiber in your body wants to give up and call for a ride home. We are fighters, we push through all of the odds. We are plagued with fatigue, with feeling ill-equipped, and occasionally with false finishes that hide the distance you still have left to travel. But you don’t give up. As a writer, I sit down in front of my laptop even when the words won’t come. I type out my blog on a tiny touch screen cell phone when a roadblock falls in my lap (yes, I am still raining curses on my laptop and it’s inability to miraculously fix whatever is wrong with it). We find a way, no matter what. Because it all that we know, because standibg still means defeat and we aren’t ready to throw in the towel yet. We owe it to ourselves, we deserve our success. We must believe it, even if we don’t feel we are ready for it.