Leap of Faith

I have a confession. It’s something I don’t really talk about or tell those that I’m close to out of fear of failure and disappointment. So I think I’ll start here, in my anonymous little corner of the internet.

I am a closet artist.

No, I don’t mean that I decorate closets. Rather I am secretly a very artistic person. I drew rabidly from the age of about seven all the way through my teen years and even took oil painting lessons at one point. I received lots of encouragement from friends and family. Then one day someone close to me, whose opinion I gave far too much weight to, damned me with faint praise. I took it to heart as only a sixteen-year-old could and stopped painting and drawing. Instead I studied math in college, another great love of mine, but it never replaced that longing in my heart to create beautiful images. Every now and then I would draw something, and it would turn out well enough that I would think… maybe…

So here is what I want:

I want to start exploring my artistic abilities again.

I want to do so in a way that is fearless. No fear of others’ opinions. No fear of failure. Completely. Totally. Fearless.

I want to see where it all takes me.

I suppose I hope it will return some of the passion I gave up in exchange for safer waters.

That step between thinking it and doing it seems so large sometimes. Really, it’s only the stroke of a paintbrush away.

This one's on me. Sort of...

The last couple of days have been the roughest days of a rough month. All of this roughness had to do with a couple of projects at work. It was one of those situations where everyone is stressed out and a few people dropped the ball so I kept picking up slack and picking up slack until next thing I knew I was working until midnight and crawling home for five hours of sleep before crawling back to do it again. In addition, I admittedly have a problem with allowing my boundaries to be crossed when something urgent comes up at work. I found myself dropping all the healthy and mindful habits I had been developing because of this rush.

Yesterday I finally left on time. I went home and napped for a little while before getting up and going to the gym with Terry, a dear friend of mine. My brain was still so exhausted that it just wasn’t tracking like I needed it to. I wasn’t paying enough attention and tripped over an exercise machine and landed pretty hard on my shoulder and hip. Normally this wouldn’t have been that big of a deal, but I just had hip-replacement surgery on that hip in October and dislocation is a risk until it is firmly healed in. It didn’t dislocate but I was shaken by the fall and went home. This morning I woke up still tired and sore from the fall. My brain kept saying to my body, “Okay… go! No? You don’t want to go? How about now? Please?!” Eventually I got out the door and into the sub-zero Minnesota winter morning. All in all it was one of those days where you survive instead of live.

In other words, it was the kind of day where you treat yourself to a latte.

And that is just what I did. I pulled up to the pickup window and was holding my card out to the barista only to be told that the gal in front of me had paid for my drink. I immediately said that I would like to pay for the person’s drink behind me as well. Then I started to think about it. Was this really even an act of kindness? So I pay for the person behind me and they get the person behind them and so on. It will end in one of two ways. Either there comes a point when there is no one else in the line so the last car gets a free drink by default, or someone decides they don’t want to keep going. Why? Selfishness? If that’s the case then the person who benefits from this little act is the least deserving, right?

Maybe not. My now caffeinated brain kept chugging along with it. Maybe the selfish are the ones to whom random acts of kindness would be the most meaningful. How could they make sense of it otherwise? So perhaps if that is how the chain ended it planted a seed of kindness in the recipient and they were the most in need of it. On the other hand, maybe a person who was struggling financially, but had been having a difficult time and just wanted a small treat to ease their day was given a gift. Either way, everyone in that line had a moment when they actually thought about the car behind them as having a driver. A driver who was a human being and liked Northern Light Mochas.

The Year I Single-Handedly Took Down the Health Insurance Industry (or “The Year of Pain”)

Prior to this year I have rarely sought medical attention (I swear!). I have gone years without a checkup, even going without asthma medication until I was just too miserable to go on without it. In retrospect, this may be the reason why my medical claims for this year alone have reached the catastrophic level. Having let the small things go until they have built up my leaky faucet has turned into a geyser of hurt and need for medical attention.

I chose not to go to the doctor for many of the same reasons everyone else has for not going. I didn’t have health insurance. If I did have health insurance, I couldn’t afford the co-pay. If it required time out of work or school, then it would have to wait, etc.

It all started out innocuously enough. I decided to test the waters of healthcare and go in for a routine physical and to get my annual lab work done. After being told I was overweight (Um, hello? Not quite a news flash, that one) and my HDL was a little low I carried stoically on until the hip pain I have been living with for fifteen years finally got to the point I could no longer ignore it and continue to live any sort of life at all. After a referral to an orthopedist and several x-rays later it was determined I had an advanced case of osteoarthritis in both hips and needed to have them replaced. This was when I first began to understand just how I was going to be affecting my employer insurance group’s utilization. I could hear the faint groaning of actuaries as their estimates failed to take a 27 year-old needing a bilateral hip replacement into account in their calculations. This was to become typical of the kinds of medical predicaments I would find myself in. Experienced medical professionals scratch their heads in disbelief at me.

Before getting either hip replaced I had received instructions to take care of any outstanding dental work, but here’s the thing: It was mid-August when I learned that I needed to get both hips replaced. Being somewhat educated about the health insurance industry (seeing as I work in it) I knew that the most cost-effective way to get these procedures done would be to have both hips replaced before the end of the year. In addition, I live in Minnesota and I didn’t particularly like the idea of learning to walk with prosthetic hips when there was snow on the ground. I decided to get both hip replacements as soon as possible. My left hip replacement was scheduled two weeks after the diagnosis, so this left me with scant time to look into catching up on over a decade of dental care. Oh, but don’t worry. I still managed to squeeze a root canal in two days before my first surgery. This is the year of pain after all.

By the time I had my second hip replacement surgery my leg and lower back muscles had understandably atrophied. The recovery from this surgery was slower and more painful than the first, but I was slowly making progress so I wasn’t too worried about it. It was just getting to the point where I could lay off the narcotics on Friday. I had a slight cold and decided to take it easy and stay home from work. I had enough room in my schedule where it wouldn’t be devastating to take the time off, and I could use the rest.

That day I watched TV and worked on a knitting project. I was making a blanket for my roommate for Christmas. I had made quite a bit of progress with that panel. I set the knitting down on the couch and cleaned the kitchen before my roommate came home and then made a start on my bedroom. I had fallen behind on the housework during my convalescence and was looking forward to finally catching up. I walked into the living room to pick up the blanket I had been snuggled up in all day to take it into my room. I was stepping off of the leg I had the most recent surgery on and so I was bearing all my weight down on my other leg as I set it down. I felt a hard poke in my leg and looked down to realize that my knitting had gotten knocked off the couch and the 9mm (size 13) knitting needle was pushing against my leg. I reached down and realized that the needle had punctured the skin. Later I found out that it had actually entered 3-4 inches and had almost poked out the other side. And that is how I brought the health insurance industry to its knees. I’ll write more on my KRI (Knitting Related Injury) at a later time, including a photo for you folks who have a strong stomach and macabre interest in bodily injury.

What is the most embarrassing injury you have had?

Hello World!

I have tried this blog thing before, but I have always felt so pressured to do it ‘right’ that eventually I just gave up in disgust with my attempts. I don’t think I had it straight in my head what I wanted to write it for in the first place. Was it to please others or to get some thoughts out of my head and communicate with other like minded people, bounce some words off the wall, and maybe learn something about myself along the way? Ostensibly, it was the second reason, but underneath it all I kept feeling so inadequate as a blogger. How sad is that?

And maybe that is a better reason than any of the others. Maybe I should blog with the hope of someday believing I am worthy of expressing my thoughts and ideas. It’s so basic, but I really struggle with this concept of worthiness and self-acceptance. No matter what I am, it seems like it’s never what I want to be. I’m 27 years old, and when I look back sometimes all I can see is the smoking wreckage of 27 years of self-civil war.

Once I went to an Overeaters Anonymous meeting (yeah I have a weight problem, big surprise) and I was chatting with a couple of women in the parking lot. One woman was talking about how much she screwed up by having left the program for a few years and gaining a lot of weight. The other woman told her, “Put the bat down girl, we all screw up.” More than anything I want to call a ceasefire. Whenever I get to a point when I’m ready to put down that bat, there is this part of me that thinks I am condoning those parts of me that aren’t working, even though I consciously know the difference between accepting and condoning.

So anyway. I guess this a step I want to take toward accepting myself as I am and moving forward with changes in a way that is respectful toward me. I figure if I go online and write a blog entry and then have to live with my thoughts and ideas being concrete and out in the open, maybe I’ll learn to confront these thoughts and walk away a healthier person.

And if anyone happens upon this blog who doesn’t like me or my thoughts, I will leave it to the reader to move on. I guess I just can’t worry about it anymore. Other than that though, welcome!