Uncertainty, The Future & Other Ramblings

 I have been sick for about three weeks now, loosing feeling in my feet and my legs. Discovered I had a birth defect (Spina Bifida Occulta) on my 27th birthday (yay!...not) and a few days later found out I had a 1.9cm lesion on my spinal cord around T 7 (this is most likely the cause of the numbness). So, now that I have had 3 rounds of IV Solumedrol, I am only feeling slightly better in one leg and amazingly better in the other. Compared to how I was when this weirdness all started, that's not bad I guess.

Alright, now that I have gotten that out of the way and gone parentheses happy, lemme get to it. Nothing like a serious illness to not only knock you on your ass, but also put things into perspective a bit. I have realized yet again that I spend way to much freaking time worrying about, taking care of and being there, for EVERYONE. Even though I am seriously sick, I am still trying to take care of everything like nothing is wrong. How is that normal?!

When am I gonna stop putting everybody, their needs, and what they want before my own, when I'm dead? Cause at the rate my body is going, who knows just how close that possibility really is. I firmly believe that part of the reason I got sick is because my body just had enough of the worry, the stress, taking care of everyone else and not myself, that it fucking quit. I'd apologize for cursing, but I just don't care right now.

I have always been a planner and here I find myself once again in a position of extreme uncertainty. I honestly have no idea if I will regain full feeling again, even if the Neurologist is optimistic. I don't know what this means for my future as a midwife and that terrifies me. I will literally fall to even more pieces if I have to give up that dream. I don't even know what this birth defect means for me in terms of being a midwife either or having children. I thought I had come to some sort of peace with the possibility that I might be infertile thanks to the troubles my ex and I had, but obviously I have not, because thinking about this possibility devastates me on a level I didn't know I had.

This crap has once again forced me to completely change....almost everything. To take a long hard look at, well...me. I don't like this feeling very much. Being "selfish" is so against my nature that I feel guilty to do it. It obviously needs to be done, because how can one concentrate on healing themselves if they aren't just a little selfish?? I feel like such an idiot because this has been a...theme, so to speak throughout my adult life.

What do I do now?? Well, I've been thinking a lot lately (another of my faults lol) because let's face it, I have had A LOT of time on my hands. So much time in fact, that I am going crazy. You'd think with all these books laying around that I would just sit here and read nonstop. That's difficult to do when you can't get your mind to shut the hell up. I am reading one book finally. Eat, Pray, Love and that has probably been the inspiration for this post.

This illness has made me realize that nothing is more important than doing what one loves, all the time, no matter what. Follow your bliss, every moment that you can. Even if that means eating ice cream for breakfast and yes, I have done that recently. I felt like I needed to drown my sorrows in ice cream and it was awesome :)

We all spend so much time worrying what other people think, do, or say, that we are not focusing on ourselves...even a little bit. How are people supposed to be happy if they don't realize their divine right to do what they love?? I guess what I am trying to say is that I now have an opportunity with being home sick, to at least come up with a plan to get closer to my goals. Am I going to waste this opportunity or embrace it?? I have a feeling that I will have days where I just want to do nothing but lay here, but that's to be expected. What I am going through is pretty tough shit. Uncertainty about the future is always like that and some days you just need to curl up in bed and hide from the world.

I have the start of a plan brewing in my head right now. It starts with finally getting the hell out of this town when our lease is up. I cannot stand living here anymore. I want to move to a smaller town, closer to the country, but not so far away that it takes me 1.5 hours to go to the grocery store. Been there, done that. While I enjoyed it at the time, its just too difficult for me at this time in my life. I think I need a place to have a bit of a starting over. The other part of my plan is to do everything I can to bust through school. That's about as far as I have gotten with the school aspect of my plan. I am in still in the beginning stages after all.

First and foremost though, I need to get better. I am so thankful for all the support I have gotten, from Aaron, my family and my amazing friends. I don't know what I would do without each and every one of you! The phone calls, the texts, etc have meant so much and have helped me stay relatively sane.

Doing It Again

I am doing it again, I am making someone and something else my whole world and loosing myself. I keep trying to stop the process and refocus on myself, but its freaking difficult. I feel guilty for not taking care of everyone and everything else over myself.

If I am completely honest with myself, I am not fully happy with my life. I am working a job that I despise, its nowhere near what I want to do with my life and it seems like every. single. day. something goes wrong to fuck with my life outside of work. I do not get paid enough to deal with the crap (literally) that I have to deal with every day.

I hate the town I live in, it stresses me the hell out. This town has entirely too many snobby, rude people and I am just tired of dealing with it. The cost of living is too high. We pay so much money for our dinky apartment and its crappy complex. This complex doesn't really have room for Lucian to play, no gym, no playground, etc. Its full of constantly partying assholes too. I do not want to raise children in this town either.

I would love to stay home again and be able to concentrate on school full time. I took five days off with the intention of at least devoting ONE DAY to school and that didn't happen because I was too busy being there for everyone else. I guess its took much for me to ask to put what I want first. Everything I had planned on for my five days off didn't happen and I am angry. I feel resentful too. I'm sitting here almost fuming because I took that time off unpaid and didn't do anything *I* wanted to do. I played cook, maid, taxi, etc. I think the only "me" time I got was being able to shower.

I want out of this town, out of this life. I want a REAL break where I can do things that I want to do. Unfortunately, I won't be able to do that anytime soon and that makes me angry too. AHHHHHHHHHHHH! I wish I could do that for real, for a long time.

I am so stressed out and tense that I'm going to snap soon and it probably won't be pretty. Maybe getting this all out is a form of snapping?? IDK, all I know is that I want me back. I want to live the life I choose, not what everybody else thinks is the "right," or "normal" way to do things.

I am tired of saying these things over and over again. This has been the theme of my life for over two years now and I am nowhere nearer to the things I want than I was before. It hurts so much to be so....stuck. I guess I should just practice patience huh? However, I think my patience was shot on those 1.5 deployments, that basically wasted a good portion of my life.

I do not want to end up like the woman I was two years ago. I won't survive if I go back to that dark place.

Raising My Vibration: Day 6

Day 6. I am "free" to.... Write a story, could be a vision of something you would like to create for yourself.

This is the example that I have to work with from Lillian Gaffney's site. The first thing that pops into my head after reading it is "I am free to be me." I spend so much time worrying what others think, putting other people first, that I pretty much always loose myself. This has to stop.


Last week Aaron proposed to me. I, of course said yes! However, it brought back some of the memories I had of my first marriage and how long it took me to recover from it....actually, I am still recovering a bit. I realized that I had lost myself in my last marriage. I was so committed to being the best wife ever, to doing anything and everything for my husband, that I put all of my dreams on the back burner.

I now know that in order to have a successful marriage, both parties have to be able to be themselves. They both need to be able to achieve the dreams that they want to, achieve dreams together, etc. I am feeling myself more than slip back into the position of loosing myself and I need to stop.

I already know that I have let myself go quite a bit, in terms of my health. I eat like crap, I don't work out, I still smoke, drink loads of caffeine, etc, With our wedding a little over a year away, I need to get myself back on track. I want to look and feel amazing on my wedding day. I don't want to get the photos back and end up crying because I look huge.

I've decided to make a plan of sorts. Planning things out is what I do, much to Aaron's chagrin. He's a fly by the seat of his pants type of person and I plan...a lot. This week will be my last week of eating lots of crap. Starting next Sunday, I will give myself a cheat day and the rest will be spent trying to eat a bit healthier, especially at work. I tend to completely skip eating while I am at work. I also need to increase my water intake, getting a bigger water bottle like the Klean Kanteen will definitely help. I also need to remember to take my supplements. I am so bad at that, guess I will just have to set an alarm on my phone to remind me.

The working out thing is difficult. I think the reason that I had so much success loosing the almost 40 pounds, a couple of years ago is because I was home....alone in a duplex, not an apartment. I hate having other people around when I work out. It embarrasses me for some reason. Not to mention my crazy work schedule. I have got to get over that. OTOH, I really wish Aaron would just go on a walk or outside for 30 minutes so that I could get my workouts in without feeling like a total freak.

I have got to be me. The person that would give anything to be a midwife, a mother, a wife, a neo-homesteader, "dirty hippie" as my sisters calls me, a do-it-yourself-er, etc. I want to grow and preserve my own food, I want to help women trust their bodies and realize that they can birth babies without interference, I want a house with land so that my children can run around as much as they want, I want chickens, goats and horses. I want to homeschool my children because nobody will know them as well as I do. I want what I want and I am tired of having to defend who I am.


I am going to be ME and nobody is going to stop me from that anymore.

Well, I didn't exactly write a story like the prompt says, but oh well.

Raising My Vibration: Day 5

Today's post will talk about my plan on how to encourage others tomorrow. I seem to be the most effective at encouraging others at work, Aaron tends to roll his eyes at me and give the "yea, sure babe" look.

This comes at a great time because I am just finishing up training our part time shift at work. Tomorrow is her first day doing it all alone, well for the actual closing part since I am off around 10:30pm and we close at midnight.

I basically just plan to build her up a bit more. She is actually quite good so far and I am very pleased with the progress that she has made in her 2ish weeks of working for the company.

One of my cashiers has been going through a rough patch, attitude wise, lately. Its very concerning because he's usually a very positive person and always trying to lend an ear to all of us who need to vent. I really need to start building him up more, encouraging him and giving him tasks that are different from his norm. I think once he gets a little more mature (he just turned 20), that he would make a great closing manager.

I am all about positive reinforcement. Nobody likes to hear all the time how much they suck and its not a very good motivator, in my opinion. I think by breathing a lot more positivity into the workplace, that the morale of the store will go up and that we won't have as many days where we all seem to just be blah.

I guess we will find out how all of this goes by the end of this little blogging experiment.

Raising My Vibration: Day 4

What a better way to spend a day off than to concentrate on the phrase "I am doing" and paying attention to how I feel when I am doing things that I actually enjoy? Now, some of the things that I enjoy doing have pretty consistently made me feel like an outsider, especially to my family. You should see the looks I get when I talk about midwifery, how Aaron and I parent/plan to parent, etc. You'd think that I sprouted another head. This is something that has been very difficult for me, because I do not have very many outlets to share with others about things I love.

We were at my family's home earlier and I was talking about how we did not allow Lucian to watch Spongebob, that got me "the look" mentioned above, from my mother. She didn't understand why not, even after I explained a little bit about why.

It hurts to feel like the outsider because of my interests, views, etc. It makes me long for the day of the crunchy commune my friends and I discuss. I picture being the midwife, all of our kids running around playing, all the parents pitching in for the schooling of our children, growing our own food, etc. These are the types of things I think about, talk about, dream about and most importantly, things that I love.

I've noticed that I am much happier at home, compared to when I am at work. I love to cook and take care of my family, read, write, talk with my friends, and just absorb all things midwifery. I cannot seem to fit all of that in when I am working and it makes me a horribly grouchy person. I long for the day when I am able to stay home again. I miss being able to devote myself to my studies full time, compared to the sporadic times that I get now.

I cannot wait to have a house of my own and not an apartment. I hope to one day have a home with a few acres and be able to serve women with midwifery out of my home, grow food, have chickens, kids running around, etc. Maybe one day, the crunchy commune will be a reality and I can convince Aaron to move there lol.

All of my dreams and the things that make me feel great seem so few and far between. Some of them seem so horribly far away. I just have to stay positive.

Raising My Vibration: Day 3

The task for day three was to concentrate on the phrase "I am cheerful" and then, list all the reasons I was cheerful throughout my day. Needless to say, this did not go well the first few days I tried to do this. I kept trying to do it while I was at work and it was a very stressful few days. I am currently having a problem with my knee and that is making my job a million times more difficult, not to mention the crazy customers and my sometimes crazy crew. I kept trying to refocus myself on why I was cheerful and it just wasn't working.

I decided to really concentrate on it today, my day off and I must say it went pretty well. Today was a very long, but pretty amazing day. Here's my list:

• Waking up to the sounds of Aaron and his son laughing.
• Spending the day with my family.
• Getting coffee and breakfast
• Getting pampered by my sister (new hair color and cut).
• Going into my work for a few random things and joking around with the crew.
• Realizing that while I'm not a fan of the retail politics some days, I have a pretty awesome job.
• Watching my niece get a huge grin on her face when she sees me.
• Playing with my niece and my nephew.
• Watching Aaron play with my niece and at one point catching both my nephew and his son only to spin them around.
• Realizing that all my bills are paid and I have some play money until the next payday!
• Playing on my Dad's iPad for a bit.
• Finally being able to take a nice hot bath, no more turtles in the tub!
• Sliced cucumber with ranch dressing, my latest obsession.
• Fresh fruit. 

All in all I will say that I had a pretty good, but exhausting day. I feel like I could sleep for a week right now, but instead I think I will go order a midwifery textbook.

Raising My Vibration: Day 2

Day 2. Write 10 minutes, finish this sentence. I am "believing" in ..... because I am brilliant." Write without censoring.

I am believing in myself, because I am brilliant. I know that may sound a little selfish to some, but I need to start believing in myself more. I believe that good changes are coming to my life, I can feel it. Now, I just need to let it happen. In order to let that happen, I need to believe in myself more, in my own power so to speak.

I am believing in love, because I am brilliant and know that above everything else, love is the most important thing. Love will be there after all the jobs, money, cars, homes, etc. Love is what makes the world go round. Love of family, love of a spouse, love for and from children, love of friends. Love from anybody.

I am believing in abundance, because I am brilliant. Like yesterday's entry shows, I am more abundant than I realize in those moments of crap, what else can the universe throw at me? I believe that if I focus more on my own abundance and show more appreciation for it, that I will attract even more abundance to myself.

It took me awhile to get this blog entry started, because I wasn't exactly sure how to start it. I'm pretty sure the "because I am brilliant" part was throwing me off my game and while this entry might not be as spectacular as the one from yesterday, I am okay with it. I'm not sure if I wrote for exactly ten minutes, but oh well. This works.