The Cost of Sacrifice

The other day, my daughter was talking enviably about a girl who'd made it big as a performer. She's been on TV, in music videos, commercials. We've had these conversations before - nearly every time she watches the Olympics or sees someone break big on America's Got Talent, or hears a story of a teen who publishes a book. It is always the sort of wistful, why-can't-that-happen-to-me kind of talk that leads to me talking about discipline and hard work and commitment.

This time, though, the conversation was ripe to talk about sacrifice. This kid who is now famous, I told her, gave up pretty much everything in her normal life years ago. She stopped going to school and having friends so she could spend all of her time in a studio and at lessons and traveling. She gave up free time on weekends to work. She gave up eating whatever she wanted. She gave up privacy. Just a few years ago, her parents divorced because one supported (pushed?) this fame agenda and the other just wanted her to grow up a bit more like other kids.

Would you be willing to give up all of that to be in her place, I asked. Would you give up your friends, your swim team, your band, your sleepovers with friends and Pinterest cooking parties and vacations? Would you give up Dad or me?

It's a discussion we've had in our house a lot lately, this cost of achieving a dream. How much are we willing to give up to get what we really want?

Going after what I want is something I've been wrestling with in particular over the past year. This week's question - how much are we willing to give up - has put a good perspective on it for me.

I want to write. I want to be able to do that much more than I've been doing it lately, which is not enough. It always seems that life is crowding in on me, and in the back of my head, I've thought, if I really wanted this, wouldn't I make it happen?

But the fact is, there are only so many hours in a day, and there is a lot that fills those hours.

What would I be willing to give up to get what I want?

I know a writer who realized she couldn't be a full-time writer if she had a mortgage hanging over her head. So she doesn't have a big house with modern luxuries. She lives a very minimalistic life so that she doesn't need another job. I know a writer who knew if she had kids, she would never have time to write, so she chose not to marry and have kids. I know people who have married and had kids, and still walked away from them to pursue their own dreams.

Am I willing to give up my family and house? Absolutely not.

When I think about what takes up my time, it is this. My kids. My husband. My home.

I am forever doing dishes, doing laundry, cleaning floors, cooking and packing meals, running errands so there is food in the fridge, clothes that fit, band instruments that work. I carpool kids. Endlessly carpooling kids.

I do a Bible study. I pray. That gets me through each day like breathing.

I work. I work now because my oldest is looking at colleges and we need to pay those looming bills so that he has the opportunity to live out his dreams.

What is there in my day that I could trade for a few hours of writing?

Not even sleep. There's not enough of that as it is.

It was good this week to look at what fills my hours and realize that there is hardly anything there I can sacrifice. Would want to sacrifice.

For now, what steals the hours from writing are those things even more valuable to me than writing. My kids. My husband. My home.

That realization gave me a few moments of peace. And then, I wrote a few lines in my novel, and went to bed.

Chaos

 (I wrote this blog post sitting in the car waiting for my daughter just a little over a week ago. It seems fitting that I couldn't post it here until now... because things have been so chaotic.)

Sometimes I feel like life is blowing up around me. I wake to the house rocking and shaking, the toiletry items falling off shelves. I walk through a maze of bricks and upheaved trees and mounds of red clay, the driveway under rubble. Our kitchen and stairs are tracked with a thick white layer of dust that won't go away, no matter how often I vacuum and mop.

I don't even live in California anymore. I live in a home being renovated. And while I knew it would be difficult, while I know what it will be is worth the what it is now, I can feel my heart clenching, my blood pounding under the stress of the chaos.

Everything is chaos now. Not just the house, which has parts of the roof ripped clean off so that you can stand in a room and stare up at the stars at night, but life in general is void of the order and routine I thrive on.

Summer is usually a bit lacking in constants, but this year has been worse. Three kids, three different schedules, three different sets of activities, and I find myself most often in the car, a hundred miles a day under my belt going no further than twelve miles from my house. Back and forth, pick one up, drop one off, trying to figure out where to fit buying more milk and eggs into the equation, nearly running out of gas because the gas station is not on the way to anywhere my kids go. And other people love this kind of craziness, but my stress levels are going up and the sight of more white cement dust and red mud tracked through the foyer is about to send my blood busting out the ends of my fingertips and tips of my hair, my face in a perpetual frozen state of The Scream.

I think part of my less-than-loving attitude about all of this is that I'm not involved anymore. Summers are usually are time to reconnect as a family. During the school year, the kids are out all day, home only long enough to do homework and drop into bed, exhausted. But the summer is OUR time. Time when we get to go hang out at the pool together, do crafts together, obsess over tv shows together, go explore DC and the zoo and museums, have picnics, go to restaurants and laze over milk shakes and burgers.

But now, I'm just the chauffeur and cheerleader. I'm the alarm clock in the morning, the laundrymat for their muddy, stinky, sunblock-smelling clothes. I buy the cases of water on one end of town and drop it off at camp at the other end. I fix breakfast and pack lunches and somehow try to squeeze in a homemade dinner that is well-balanced enough to replenish the kids' energy before they drop into bed.


I am with my kids in some form all day, but I miss them. I miss when summer meant you got to kick off the high-stress, packed days of the school year and sleep in, hike along the creek, lay in the sun reading books, stay up late and watch movies together and build forts in their rooms and watch the glow in the dark stars on the ceiling until they went dim.

I miss writing. I've hardly written at all this summer. This summer, when my novel was absolutely, positively, without excuses going to be finished. I haven't even read much. No time during the day, too tired at night, a few books started but not that made me want to finish them.

All the magic has leaked out.

And yet...

I watch my daughter from the car where I am waiting for her. Her head is thrown back in laughter, surrounded by a group of equally giggling girls she hadn't known three weeks ago. She's found her place in the high school before the year has even started, happier than she's been in ages.

My son bounds to the car, asking if he can go with the guys to buy balloons and back to a friend's to spend the next hour filling them because his drumline is totally going to demolish the brass section tomorrow at the afternoon battle. I agree, because percussion rules, and I know this.

Parents stop to ask if I'll be there for the football game, if my youngest is going to help this year, too. Yes, I say, pointing to my youngest in the back seat, already decked out in her band helper t-shirt, a week early. We wouldn't miss it for the world.

Summer will end and routine will come back. The house will eventually be finished, the dust settled, the multitude of cars cramming our drive gone on to another project. I'll find time to write again. I'll probably still be in the car too much. But that's okay. My kids are there with me - most of the time my oldest now driving. And we'll crank up the radio and we'll sing along, and we'll talk about books and kids at school and band and art and politics, and everyone will be talking all at the same time, and it will be chaotic, but I will love it. This is the kind of chaos I can love.

We will eat on the run again, but together, and we'll go separate ways one last time before the summer ends and school begins. But there's one weekend left - one glorious weekend where we all will be home, after the crazy summer schedules and before the still-crazy school schedules. Maybe we'll fire up the fire pit. Maybe we'll roast some s'mores. And as long as the garage has no roof, we might as well just lay out there and watch the stars. The real ones. And maybe, if we can find a sliver of time, we might just build a fort under them.

Life is Not a Sticker Chart

A week ago I found this quote. I'm not sure it resonated with me so much as it hung around, clanking about in my head. It seemed right, mostly, I think, because it confirmed what I've most feared: I am no longer a writer.

From 2007 until 2010, I wrote nearly every day. I didn't make much money on it, and working strictly as a novelist, I spent far more time writing than I did submitting my writing. But I viewed it as my job, to work each day creating stories I'd hoped would one day launch a career. I called myself a writer.

For two years after that, I was a student, but still, writing every day. It felt more like work than writing ever had before. I had deadlines and revisions and people to please.

In the year since, life's been more a roller coaster, as I've added a "real" job - one with scheduled hours and a regular paycheck. I poked around a couple different projects, trying my hand at some non-fiction and flash between the novel I was working on. I submitted a few stories. But it's been sporadic... weeks of obsessive writing, then days, even weeks, without.

I felt guilty about this. The mantra among published writers is that you find time to write, no matter what. If you have a job, you get up a 4am to write. If you have kids, you stay up until 1am to write. You find time. And for years, this is what I've done. (Well, not the getting up at 4am. That is just crazy talk.)

The past few weeks have been exhausting, though, and not just work-wise and family-wise, but just emotionally. By the time I shut the work computer, carted my kids around, cheered them on, cooked dinner, tucked them into bed, I sat with my novel open and stared at it, then chose instead to read. Or watch TV. For years I barely watched any TV, but these days, the hours between 9:30 and 11:00, it's about all I can manage. And then, I've actually be going to bed rather than stay up another two hours to write.

The last few weeks, as I've struggled through a single chapter that has proved to be a bit difficult to wrangle, I've not been writing much.

The words of my husband last year kept reverberating in my brain: If you don't get paid for it, isn't it really more a hobby than a job?

Then I read this: "You are not a writer anymore, just someone who dreams about being a writer."

I let that sludge around my heart, every time I turned on the TV, every time I chose to read rather than write. I knew every time that I was making a conscious choice not to write, making a conscious choice to be a person who dreamed about being a writer but not really being one. This is, after all, the thing that is what writers pride themselves on - sacrificing personal time to persevere as though this were a second job.

Then I thought of my friends who love to scrapbook. They don't do it every day. Sometimes not at all for a month or two at a time. But they are scrapbookers. And my friends who knit, even if they only do it for stretches at a time, they are knitters. And the bikers, even if they only ride in warm months, are bikers.

Who is to tell us how to label ourselves, or tell us what name we are worthy of?  Is there some star chart I don't know of where we get to put stickers on each day we write, and you only get to be a writer if there are a certain number of stickers per week? Seriously, peeps, is this the kind of regulation and guilt we need heaped into our lives?

So while I might not answer the question, "What do you do for a living?" with the answer, "I'm a writer," I am most definitely a writer. Even if tonight I choose to turn on the TV.

What I Would Have Written if I Could Have

Last week I spent an unexpected 8 days sailing the Caribbean on a catamaran. With barely time enough to get flights and pack, my husband and I left our kids and the winter that would not end for a week in the sun with friends. It was crazy, spontaneous, glorious... and a world away.

With no phone, no internet, no connection to anything on land, I discovered that the constant buzzing in my head began to still, and for the first time in a very, very long time, I found quiet.

Still - 8 days without social media left a few things unsaid, so here they are - the statuses I would have put on facebook had I had facebook on the boat... my vacation in a nutshell.

*******

Thursday 3:30am: Momentarily I wonder, as my alarm goes off, if anywhere is worth going at this time of morning.

Thursday 7:30am: In Miami. I'm down to short sleeves. I decide getting up in the middle of the night was totally worth it.

Thursday Noon:  We literally walk out of the Charlotte Amalie airport, across the street, onto a beach, and into a boat. Best commute ever.

No Internet. Don't send help.

Dolphins off the bow! I'm told this is a good omen. As if the 84 degree weather, turquoise water, Asian shrimp, fresh mangoes, and rum punch waiting upon arrival weren't enough.

First Sunset. Not too shabby.

Daily routine established: Wake up. Snorkel. Breakfast. Snorkel. Sail. Snorkel. Lunch. Sail. Anchor. Sunset cocktails. Dinner.

 

It's been three days since I've had a pair of shoes on my feet or seen a clock. I'm strangely okay with this.


First time setting foot on land. Off to see the petraglyphs, which, as it turns out, are writings on stone. Who coulda guessed? Also, this stone wall reminds me of Robert Frost... good fences make good neighbors. Wondering who, two hundred years ago, needed a wall between them and a neighbor.

As seen on a school near the dock. Obviously schools in the Caribbean keep their standards reasonable.

Holy Mother of Honey!! That is a bee's nest!!

My favorite fish so far is a Sergeant Major, but I can never remember the name so I just call him Captain Morgan.

Hunting for shells in the Conch Graveyard.

Not a surprising discovery: I am as ungraceful on water as I am on land.

Serenity Now!!

Whales!!! We've gone all Ahab on them and are on the chase!

Drinking mojitos, watching the sunset, dancing around the deck to "Happy."

Dock Rock: Looking drunk without the alcohol.

Dingy Damp... this is a thing.

I've decided I could live in an aquarium. Not the building. The actual aquarium.

Bay-to-bay in a dingy in the black of night - never have there been so many stars!

Pelicans off the starboard side! If you want to live, jump in my mouth...

Turns out I can't read my Nook with sunglasses, and I can't see without sunglasses. Good thing the boat is FULL of hardback books!! I've been buried for two days in The Climb... a book about Everest. Because nothing says enjoying the Caribbean like people dying of frostbite.

I never ever ever get tired of this.

 Or this:

Our last day.. .we've anchored for the night.  I've finished The Climb and traded it for Lost at Sea by Patrick Dillon. It's a book about two boats that went missing in the 80s when they sunk. I've been told now is a safe time to read it.


Sitting in the bay with the chatter of the radio like white noise and suddenly we hear an SOS. A literal SOS. And a Coast Guard report that a sailboat is sinking not far from us, and help is needed. Must be time to head home.

Heading home. Goodbye beautiful water.

Things That Matter

 
It's been over a year since I turned in my thesis and unofficially finished grad school. I'm not sure what I thought would happen after that, but this year was not it. I barely had time to breathe after my advisor signed off on my stories before I ended up in a flurry of medical worries. Last December I spent running from doctor to doctor, ultra-sound to MRI to biopsies and, in January, just days after returning from my thesis presentation, surgery.

I might have harbored dreams of surgery recovery that involved the required off-my-feet recoup time being blissful non-stop writing time, but that didn't happen. Instead, I slept. And watched bad TV. I researched some literary magazine and submitted my short stories to a few, and played with a few beginnings of new novels that didn't go anywhere. I job hunted for a job that wasn't there.

I thought I'd have time. I thought all this time I'd spent writing and reading for school would suddenly be open time I could do amazing things with. Turns out, time is like a hole in the sand near the ocean. You can scoop out the water that's in it, but more water will keep pouring in and filling it. 

Finding the time to write became harder the harder writing became. I second guessed everything I wrote. Instead of hearing my own voice, I could only hear the voice of my advisors, whispers that kept my fingers hovering over the keys rather than pummeling out words. With all the demands of the day, was it worth it to stare at a screen for hours on end, only knowing I'd end up deleting it all anyway?

I wrestled a lot with the purpose of writing. Why was I doing it, anyway? While the piles of ideas stacked up in a folder, scraps of characters and plots and themes, none of the stories really mattered in the scheme of life. They were just stories. And I wanted what I wrote to matter.

After graduation ceremonies in June, I returned to a tutoring job with an online tutoring company working with college and grad students on their essays. I love it - best job I've ever had - but it doesn't pay much more than working at fast food and I don't see the same students over and over, necessarily, and I wondered a lot: Am I making any kind of real difference?

I suspect most people at some point ask themselves, Am I doing something that matters?

Stories themselves matter, I know. They matter because they help people see from another point of view. They help people empathize and broaden the scope of their thinking. They provide escape and enjoyment in what might otherwise be a life burdened with demands and worries. Stories let people know they are not alone.

I know all this, and yet, every time I sit to write, I wonder, "Is this worth it? Am I writing something that matters?"

I don't know the answer to that. But I keep writing. I keep at it because I love it. Because I am compelled to. Because I think I have a story to tell, if only to myself.

And when I get frustrated that I have no time to write because I am running my kids to band concerts and helping them with homework and cooking dinner and answering a million questions that fly at me every time I sit to write and cleaning clothes and tutoring some panicky college student through a med school application essay, I think, "This matters. All of this. Investing in people always matters."

The truth is that no matter what we do for a living, what fills the hours of our days, what really matters is how we do what we do, and how that impacts people. People matter.

Little Grain of Sand Things

There was a time when New Year's meant a flood of glamorous invitations for my husband and I. You know the kind - the swanky hotels with the pricey dinner and dancing and midnight toasts; the black tie parties, the high-above-the-city or floating-on-the-ocean kind that made my heart yearn for just one night without changing diapers or wearing sweats.

We never went, the cost seeming a bit extravagant or the idea of a babysitter too scary. There was always time for that when the kids were older, I told myself. I shelved the idea with all its glitter and promise onto the same bucket-list-shelf as going to Time's Square to see the ball drop. One day....

What no one says is that the bucket-list is not written in stone. It is as changeable as we are, and while I might feel a twinge of regret for never having seen Times Square on a New Year's Eve, I don't wish to do that now. After an exhausting fall of keeping up with my hectic teens, starting a new job, and escorting my husband to a dozen embassy and business events, I desperately wanted some down time. The idea of standing in the freezing cold for hours on hours crammed like sardines, no bathroom in sight, sounds horrible. By New Year's Eve, I just wanted to stay home next to a fire and spend time with my kids. Honestly, I had no energy for getting all dolled up and dancing and being perky.

But I did want time with my family. Time that wasn't running around, in the car, in a stadium, in an auditorium, in a waiting room. Just time to reconnect and have fun without the pressure of homework and time constraints.

Instead, I got a night of total tech obsessions.

My mother-in-law had gotten a tablet for Christmas, so she enlisted my son to help her set it up and install apps and figure out how to use it. From about seven in the evening to nearly eleven at night, I don't think they looked up once. My father-in-law enlisted my husband to help him with something on his iPad, and they never looked up. My eldest daughter, who'd gone out babysitting earlier, came home around 9:30 and upon seeing the lack of interaction, took out her phone and began to text and search Pinterest. I had a puzzle out and tried to enlist the help of my youngest, but in her excitement and determination to stay up until midnight, she wanted to watch the countdowns. It didn't take much TV hunting to realize New Year's celebrations are not G-rated TV anymore. She settled on a movie.

And I... I worked my puzzle, gave up trying to have conversations, and realized that this would never be one of those nights everyone looked back on and said, "That was a New Year's Eve to remember!"

The thing is, it doesn't take a black-tie affair or a pricey dinner with confetti or - as it seemed on TV, a ton of alcohol - to make a memorable night, but it does take interaction. We could have played some crazy board games, made a huge tent in the living room, built a fire in the pit in our backyard and told ghost stories under the stars. We could have made the sugar cookies we'd planned all month to make, turned our fingers blue and red and green with the icing and sung loudly and off-key to the radio. We could have written down our favorite memory of the year and talked about it. We could have written our biggest failures and fears and tossed them ceremoniously into the fire. Instead, everyone buried their heads in a screen.

I've become more sensitive these days about technology. When I take time off of work and writing to have coffee with a friend and she checks her phone every time it dings and tweets, I feel slighted. When I am in the middle of a conversation with my husband and he picks up his Blackberry to answer an email, I feel devalued. When my kids come home and immediately attach themselves to their technology rather than talk to me, I feel like the housekeeper and cook rather than a mom.

My husband reminds me this goes both ways. That I have, for many years, buried myself in my computer. This is the trap of being a writer and working from home. I have ill-defined work hours and a difficulty in breaking away from a chapter when the writing is going well.

But I'm trying. I've curtailed my facebook use significantly. I rarely blog. I close my computer from the time the kids get home until homework is well underway and we can work together in quiet. I'm not perfect. I still can't just sit and watch a movie with the family without doing something else, but I've begun to substitute crocheting for surfing the web. I'm working on it, anyway.

Our family does a lot of things together. We love being together. We eat dinner most nights all together, and those dinners are full of talking and laughing. We take day trips often, vacation occasionally. We build memories all the time. But in the day-to-day, it is harder to make those memories and easier to get sucked into technology. So this year, I'm making a plan to get myself out from under that, with hopes that my family will want to follow.

I want to sit and listen to my daughter practice guitar. Not just half-listen as I do dishes or work on writing, the way I usually do, but really sit and give her my undivided attention. Sing with her as she plays.  Create a project with my youngest; paint with her or teach her something new. Cook dinner with my kids rather than just for them. I want to build a sand castle with my kids like I did when they were too little to do it themselves. To get out of the beach chair and out from behind my book and get sandy and wet and create a masterpiece. Instead of wasting the day at home, I want to use the kids' teacher workdays to go to a museum in DC we haven't been to before. Replace a few of our Saturday movie nights at home with a game. Turn off my phone when I'm out with the kids, and when they come home. Ask them to turn off theirs in the car. Treat my family's updates on their day with the same interest as I do near-strangers on facebook. Ask more questions. Look at them when they answer. Pray for them. Pray with them.

I don't really have a bucket list. We will probably do enough grand things this year to fill a scrapbook. But what I need to mind is those little grain-of-sand things that fill our hours that either say, "You don't matter much to me," or "You are the most interesting thing in life right now." I love my computer. I love my phone. But in the scheme of things, the people standing in front of me are the ones I value the most. Maybe it's time I showed that.

The Girl Who Was Hungry

A little less than two years ago, my sister came to visit. We are both type 1 diabetics, and there's a sort of sad hilarity in our conversations at dinner.


"I'm out of reservoirs for my pump. You have one I can borrow? I need tubing, too. And maybe an insertion set if you can spare one."

"How many carbs do you think are on that plate? I bet I can calculate the carbs on this table faster than you."

"Yay! Food with lots of fat! Fat slows the absorption of carbs! Fat is a diabetic's best friend!"

"This entire side of my abdomen is now over-saturated. I've run out of places to put the needles that will still absorb; I think I'm going to have to start sticking the needles in my feet."

"Your pump is purple! That is so cool!"

"Your pump is blue! I love it!"

"Did you hear about that celebrity that was diagnosed with diabetes and claimed it was type 1 and that she cured herself by not eating sugar? Bahahahaha!!!!"

Yeah. It's pretty hilarious. Sometimes it's like a code no one else at the table gets.

Two years ago, though, she pulled out a new drug to shoot up before dinner. Something called Symlin that her endocrinologist told her every T1D should take now. I'd never heard of it.

"What's it for?"

"It makes me feel full. I never felt full before. I used to just stop eating because I saw other people stop."

That was the oddest thing I'd ever heard. She never felt full? How could you not feel full?

After she left, her words stuck in my head. In the afternoons, I realized I was always famished. Like eat a horse and the saddle with it kind of hungry. I'd eat lunch, and feel like I'd eaten nothing. The entire day from lunch to dinner was a struggle not to shove everything in the house into my mouth. I'd been that way for so long, I thought that was normal. Wasn't that everyone's afternoon? Isn't that what vending machines in office buildings are for?

But now I was thinking about it. And I realized that when I put dinner on my plate, it had nothing to do with how hungry I was, but how much I thought a reasonable portion should be. I didn't get seconds most of the time because I didn't think I should. But I rarely left the table full. I mostly left the table thinking I could eat an entire new plate of dinner if someone placed it in front of me. Or not. But probably I could if it were there.

And slowly I realized... I was hungry all the time. And I realized that maybe wasn't how everyone else felt all the time.

It's easy to think we are always at the pinnacle of science and medicine. Sure, we don't have a cure for many diseases, but gosh look how far we've come! Look how much we know! I thought we knew everything about T1D except how to cure it. In reality, we are still, every day, learning things.

Just a decade ago, the thought was to cure T1 diabetes with pancreatic transplants. If diabetes is caused by the pancreas breaking down and not working, you just replace it, right? When the transplanted pancreases also stopped working, some smart scientist discovered that the pancreas doesn't just break down... it is attacked by a person's own immune system. The immune system, for some unknown yet reason, sees the organ as a foreign object and attacks it. Put in another one, and it'll attack that, too. The problem isn't even the pancreas... the problem, it turns out, is the immune system.

In light of this sudden awareness that I was hungry all the time, I began researching this new drug my sister was taking, and I found out something mind-blowing. A scant few years ago, scientists discovered that the pancreas, contrary to popular belief, actually makes TWO hormones... insulin, and something called amylin. This second hormone, amylin, is the hormone that helps your body use the insulin it produces better and more effectively. It keeps the liver from dumping excess sugar into the bloodstream and helps keep the glucose from the digestive track from building up in the blood. Beyond that, though, it slows the digestion of your food and sends the signal to the brain that you feel full.

Mind. Blown.

When type ones lose their beta cells, they not only lose the ability to produce insulin, they lose the amylin as well, and over time, like a frog in cold water set to boiling, you forget what it feels like to feel full. Food goes in the mouth and through the stomach like water, barely stopping to fill it up. You brain doesn't get the signal that your stomach is full. And all that glucose from the food (not just sugar foods, but everything from milk to vegetables have glucose in them) rushes straight into the bloodstream, where the insulin cannot possible work fast enough to catch up.

This is all so complicated. Much more complicated than it sounds, because everything is connected.

Type 1s don't make insulin, so they have to take it in the form of shots (or through a pump). That insulin, over time, makes many diabetics gain weight. (This is controversial, unfortunately. Science has shown it to be true, just ask the NIH, but insulin manufacturers and many doctors and websites resist this idea.) The more weight you have, the more insulin your body tends to need. The more insulin you take, the more weight you gain. It is a vicious circle that I've found screamingly, cryingly, depressingly true.

Add into this not being able to feel like you've gotten enough to eat.

Over the past five years, despite a five-day-a-week gym membership for two years, despite walking miles a day for the others, despite kettlebells and zumba and small-portioned meals, my weight kept going up.

And here... suddenly here is the key.

A synthetic hormone called symlin that mimics your natural amylin, that will make me feel full, slow the glucose into the bloodstream so that the insulin I take has time to work, makes the insulin work better and blocks the liver from dumping glucose so that I take less insulin, so that I can finally lose weight, so that my blood sugars are more even and low.

It sounded like a miracle.

Do I hear angels singing?

I began hounding my endocrinologist. My endocrinologist was frustratingly resistant to symlin. He didn't think it was effective. He didn't think it worked. He thought it was far too expensive. He told me if I wanted to lose weight, I should walk more. He told me my blood sugar averages were fine, even though they'd gone up above the acceptable range. He disregarded my research. He wouldn't listen to my reasons. He shooed me out the door.

This went on for a year. Finally, last May, I parked myself in the chair and said, "I want Symlin. It is my money, and my body. I want the chance to have what your body makes naturally. I think I should have the chance to at least try it, and see if it works. And I'm not leaving until I get it."

So I got a prescription. And a healthy dose of skepticism.

Three months later I went back. I'd cut my insulin use by a whopping 30%. My blood glucose averages (taken by a test called an HbA1C), which had peaked at 7.5 - a whole point above what is considered decent control - were down to a near-non-diabetic 5.5. I'd dropped 17 pounds. My doctor was speechless.

I feel fantastic for the first time in years. I have energy. I am not falling asleep at 2pm every day in the middle of work or struggling to stay awake while driving. I hardly ever have to correct a high blood sugar reading.

I am not hungry. I didn't even remember what not hungry felt like.

I feel like... like me.

Today is World Diabetes Day. It is Type 1 Diabetes Day. We, as type 1s, are suppose to help others know what it is like living with diabetes.

Yes, it is shots. Yes, it is counting carbohydrates and being careful of what we eat. Yes, it is the danger of heart disease and kidney failure and amputations and blindness, but less and less of that as knowledge increases and medicine catches up. Yes, it is pricking my fingers ten times a day to check my blood sugar. It is all of this.

It can be feeling hungry. All the time. Not because we have no self-control. Not because we crave the foods we shouldn't have. It is because we don't have the hormone you have that tells us we are full. It's because we don't have the hormone that let's our stomachs fill up as we are eating.

I may not be a celebrity who is able to somehow, miraculously, reverse the damage done to the pancreas and make myself not diabetic anymore. But a little science on my side goes a long way to making me feel like I am.

The Family That Reading Saved

 (This is a photo from Humans of New York. It melts my heart!)

My teenage son and I were standing outside an audition room earlier this month with another mom and son, waiting for orchestra placement. My boy was talking up a blue streak about what the audition had been like, what they'd asked him to do and how he'd bumbled through some parts and aced the others, and what he'd do if he made it and what he'd do if he didn't, and his words came out like this sentence, in long, unstopped, unpaused thoughts, and the mom looked over at me and said, "Does he always talk this much?"

I had to laugh, because the answer to that is yes. And I have two other kids that do the same. Talking on top of each other sometimes, so that I have to hold my hands up and say, "I know I have two ears but I can only make out one of you at a time!" There is a constant stream of conversation in our house that doesn't even end when I turn out the lights and say, "Goodnight! I'm going downstairs now!" Sometimes they keep talking, even louder, so I have to yell up the stairs, "I'm downstairs. I can't hear you anymore. Go to sleep!"

The mom sighed a bit and looked over at her not-a-word-said-yet son. "I can barely get anything but one word answers from him."

It's a blessing, I know. This conversation overload in our house from two teenagers and a pre-teen is not the usual fare in a lot of homes, and I soak up every minute of it.

There was a period where that wasn't as true. When my son was in fourth grade, something shifted in our relationship. It was no longer cool to be close to your mom, to hang out with her and act like you liked her. He developed more commonalities with my husband, and I could see the guy thing edging me out. While I knew that was normal, was indeed preferable, I didn't want to lose him altogether. So I handed him a Harry Potter book.

Harry Potter is my thing. My husband has kindly gone to the movie with me as they came out, but that was really an act of selfless love. He didn't read the books. He didn't care about the movies. When I gave my son the books, and he devoured them like I did, we had something in common no one else in the family did.

While I made dinner, he sat at the counter and talked about the books with me, excited about the triumphs, sad about the losses, in awe of the magic of it all. By the time the sixth movie came out, he'd finished the series and went to the movies with me in place of my husband. When the last movie came out, he was invited by a friend to go to the midnight opening show, and I heard him say on the phone to his friend, "That sounds awesome, but I want to see the last one with my mom. It's kind of our thing."

We've had lot of other books since. He skipped the YA books altogether and jumped into my old reading list: early Michael Crichton, the entirety of John Grisham, the Left Behind series, Animal Farm. Ender's Game. Fahrenheit 451. With each book, he sat at the counter at dinner and talked to me. When carpooling got quiet, I'd ask about what he was reading, and that would start a flood of conversations.We talk about the stories, but also the issues they bring up. Justice and politics and faith and science.

In middle school, my daughter entered that phase of "I don't really have much to say." I handed her Harry Potter. Then, The Hunger Games. To Kill a Mockingbird. Animal Farm. The Princess Bride. A Wrinkle in Time. And the same phenomenon happened. We talked. All the time. And even now, when she gets quiet and withdrawn into that 13-year-old self-conscious world, all I have to do is talk about a book, and she is back.

Once, in the summer between my junior and senior year of high school, I sat in a college room full of students from all over Virginia discussing why we read. And one person said something I'll never forget: "We all come from different backgrounds, different schools. We love different things. But we ALL read Romeo and Juliet in ninth grade. That is something we all have in common."

There are a lot of reasons why we should read, but this is my favorite. To connect to others.

I worry sometimes that if I take time to just sit and read, I am neglecting more important things that need to be done. The laundry, the dishes, meals, shopping, volunteering at the schools, cleaning. But then I remember how books saved my relationship with my growing kids, and I think, What could be more important than that?

Life after an MFA

This week I climb on a plane and head to Oregon for the last time. Even though I officially finished in January, my thesis presentation over and my diploma in the mail, the cap-and-gown hooplah isn't until this weekend.  On Saturday, despite having my Masters for over six months, I will finally walk across the stage.

It's a strange place to be in in my life, this place between finishing and graduating. I will walk across the stage and get my hood along with all my other January cohort, but also with those who have spent the last few days giving their presentations, just now finishing. They are excited and on the thesis euphoria, the way I was in what seems like so long ago. I, on the other hand, have long ago come down off that mountain high.

A few months ago a prospective student emailed me, asking about the program at Pacific, about the teaching and the students, and, finally the money question: "What do people from Pacific do when they graduate?"

I told her the truth: Anything they want to do. Everything, really. Some go on to write novels and travel on book tours. Some go on to work on literary magazines. Some actually start their own lit mags. Some publish stories and poems, some go on to get PhDs, and some go back to their jobs as computer programmers and teachers and retail clerks.

I don't know what I thought I would do. Slip back into my pre-school life, I suppose. Go back to writing the way I had been before. Finish the novel. Submit some of the stories from my thesis. Blog more, catch up on publishing news. Just... the same stuff.

Instead, I slid back a decade, to those years before blogging and writing, when life was consumed by being a mother and wondering how we'd make ends meet. I did laundry by the ton, scoured the bathrooms, cleaned the floors, filled the pantry with food, cooked new recipes, went on field trips with my fourth grader, watched TV and made crafts with the kids, took them on hikes through our county parks, explored our woods, took the dog to the river every day to swim. I fill my days with full-time motherhood.

And a few hours a day I pour over employment options. The kind that comes with a paycheck. With student loans looming and the government sequestration and cuts affecting our family, I need an income a little better than the floundering writing world provides.

It is, in equal parts, invigorating and soul-sucking.

I am exhausted by not writing, by the lack of sense of purpose that comes from putting words on a page. It breaks my heart to not be able to write: to stare at the page and wonder if the story in my head will be worthy of the education, will do justice to my advisors, will provide an income. To have those worries and stresses freeze the words before I can put them on the page.  It breaks my heart to worry that time spent writing is time wasted, time I should spend doing something more practical.

I miss most the community. I'm afraid that if I say, "I'm not going to write now. Now I'm going to tutor college students and edit other people's novels," that I am letting down a host of people who believed I could write. I worry what I will do with this blog. I worry about how I will tell everyone who knows me as a writer, who views me through that lens that says, "She is part of my writing circle." If I have spent not just the past two years but the past seven years of my life identifying as a writer, will people know I am still the same person if I don't focus on writing now?

A friend was joking with me about the coming graduation speech. "I hope," she said, "they do not go on and on again about how important and in demand a degree in humanities is. I hate the way they always say CEOs have realized people with good communications skills are more valuable than any other degree." She's right. Maybe companies with good paying jobs do want someone who can communicate well, but they still want that business degree, or math, or engineering, or graphic design, or heck, even a degree in library sciences. I have yet to see a job description pleading for someone who can pen a novel.

One of my advisors warned about the post-MFA funk. I laughed at him. I said, "Why would there be a funk? I still am reading and writing. I am still in constant contact with my friends from Pacific. I still get to email you. All I'm missing now is the stress of deadlines."

But it's not the same. And he knew that. And while maybe not everyone goes through this, not everyone who graduates finds themselves adrift in a sea of indecision and lostness, I, despite my best intentions, find myself lost and without direction.

And somehow, this is okay.

I am redefining my life, and that's always okay. I will always be a writer, but that itself isn't what defines me. I am a mom. A wife. A child of God. This is what more defines me than anything else. Where writing fits in is maybe still left to be seen.

And while some might wonder if a writing degree then was worth the money, I still say yes. A resounding, reverberating, screaming yes. Because this two years was more than just writing. It fundamentally changed who I am, who I know I can be. It gave me experiences and friendships I could never have otherwise had. These things are priceless. 

So this week I will graduate. I will fly to Oregon, I will hug my friends. I will don the cap and gown, walk across the stage in heels I bought eight months ago just for this event. I will bend at the knees so they can put the hood over my head. I will get pictures of me in the trappings of graduation. I will toast with champagne. I will know that I most certainly will write in the future, but maybe not in the ways I thought I would. Or maybe in the ways I hoped. I will know that who I am is much more important than what I do, and this two years has helped make me who I am.

The Muse is Not My Mascot

I saw this on Pinterest the other day. Putting aside that the nerves in my teeth tingle at the lack of apostrophes, it made me stop and think for a few minutes.

I read this on the internet all the time. That inspiration and passion for writing a story is more important than anything else.

Let's define "Inspired," shall we?   
       Verb : aroused, animated, or imbued with the spirit to do something, by or as if by supernatural or divine influence

You know what I hate about this? That the need for inspiration as a writer (or as any artist) is really out of our hands. We can only do it so long as the muse is whispering in our ear. When the muse stops, so does the ability to create anything worthwhile. 

I will also add, although this isn't in the definition, that there seems to be an understood element of ease in being inspired. Like the muse is speaking the story and all you have to do is keep up with it.

There are certainly writers who can sit down with a story burning their brains and pound it out in a few weeks. It seems like some people are only hindered by how fast their fingers can fly on the keyboard. I hear this, anyway.

Which makes me wonder what is wrong with me. Writing sometimes feels less like inspiration than constipation. Yes, I just said that. Because isn't that true? It's not that there isn't a story inside me. I have a dozen of them. I can sit at the keyboard and know EXACTLY where the story is going, what the character is going to do. And yet... I just can't get it out. It's like I have some writing dysplasia.

And sometimes I have NO IDEA where a story is going. I'll finish one chapter and think, "Now how the heck am I going to write myself out of that corner?"

If I ever finish this novel, it's not going to have anything to do with inspiration. It's going to be plain, hard, hair-pulling, scream-inducing effort that gets me there.

Which is why, when I found this quote almost immediately after, I had to chuckle.

I wonder why artists - writers and song writers and painters, etc - have this requirement or inspiration thrust upon them. An accountant doesn't have to be "inspired" to fill out tax forms that maximize a person's return. A lawyer doesn't have to be "inspired" to come up with a legal strategy that either convicts or exonerates a defendant. A construction crew doesn't have to be "inspired" to fill a pot hole or build a house. A gardener does not have to be "inspired" to layout a beautiful landscape. An ad agency does not have to be "inspired" to come up with a great marketing ploy. A designer doesn't have to be "inspired" to decorate a room. What they do need is a lot of knowledge and an ability to mold that knowledge into the situation at hand. And work.

Just once, I'd like someone to say hard work, just a lot of hard work, is all it takes.

And for the sake of the keyboard, I'll leave the glitter for the tooth fairy.

It's Friday; It's a Good Thing!

I used to do this thing every Friday where I listed things I was grateful for, or "good things" in my life. I loved doing that. Then I went back to school and couldn't think of anything.

Just kidding.

I just stopped writing on the blog almost entirely, so the Friday posts just sort of died off.

But now they're back. Because what is a more awesome way to end a week and begin a weekend than remembering the good things in life?

So here it goes.

1. Sun and warm weather. This stinkin' March has been SO COLD!! Below freezing, snow on ground over spring break kind of cold. And frankly I've grown a bit weary of it. So this week, when the sun came out and suddenly it was warm enough to walk around in short sleeves and I could feel my fingertips again and type without bundling up under a comfortable, I felt the angels singing.

2. Longs walks in our woods. We are so blessed to live on five acres of woods that back up to more woods. This week, the weather was nice enough to take the dog on a few very long walks through those woods. The best part for him was no leash - just running like a maddog - and a river at the end that he could swim in until he had a heart attack. Bliss.

3. Benadryl. The leaves are coming out. The allergies are in full roar mode. I've taken about every allergy medicine on the market and the only thing that works is Benadryl. Okay, so it leaves me feeling like I've just stepped off a Twirl-And-Whirl, and like I must sleep or I might DIE... but my nose clears up and my eyes stop itching, and sometimes, I am just so grateful for that.

4. Cherry Blossoms. I love going into DC to take pictures every year, but the pictures can't even begin to show how ethereal and magical it feels to be under their canopy. They are like truffula trees mixed with cotton candy mixed with pink air. They are so fragile. They last only a few days, and a mild wind and showers can blow them all away.The best part - everyone in DC to see the blossoms is under their spell. Everyone is kind. Everyone is polite. Everyone is happy. It's very weird. But in a really, really good way.

5. Possibilities. I have several short stories out to lit mags. I have several applications out to jobs. I have a house-builder who is creating workable plans to expand the living space over our garage so our three kids don't have to share a bathroom and my husband and I can have a closet bigger than a telephone booth. None of this may work out. But for now, they are all possible. I love that.

6. Coffee. Cliche, I know. But I'm just so darn thankful for it. Without it I would not be the charmer I am at 6 am.

7. My son's science teacher. Who is the source of much education and entertainment at our dinner table conversations. And also, the source of many "EWWWWW!"s. And some great YouTube animal videos.

8. My Nook HD. I can now read in bed without the light on. Which allows my husband to sleep. And me to keep reading. Which keeps me up too late. Which makes me need lots of coffee in the morning. Which brings me back around to #6. Don't you like things that are circularly good??

9. Uniball Signo Pens, micro fine tipped. Sometimes I make lists just so I can use one.

10. Doctor Who. My kids and I discovered this series a few months ago on Netflix, and are now cramming them in anywhere we can get them. We are somewhere in season four, I think, and we are all obsessed about different aspects of it. I look forward to the next episode like I look forward to coffee in the morning. More even. If there's anything more fun that loving something, it's your kids loving it along with you.

So I leave off this weekend with this video, which is from I don't know where. Looks like some kind of British Saturday Night Live skit. They are people from Doctor Who in it, but you don't have to even watch Doctor Who to think it's funny.

Have a great Friday, and if you're feeling inspired, share what you are thankful for in the comments!

Changing the World (a comma at a time)

You know what comes after grad school? Grad school loans.


You know what doesn't pay off grad school loans? Writing.

This is true. I didn't graduate with my finished novel, like I'd planned, and while I am so, so happy with the choice I made to work on short stories, it means my loans are going to come due before my book is ready to go out into the world. And now, it's time to put that MFA to work somewhere.

I've been looking at tutoring jobs online. It's a flexible job that allows me to be home for my kids, to choose hours around my own schedule, that allows me the time to still write (unlike teaching, which has all those planning and grading hours not factored in). It doesn't pay great, but it works perfectly for what I need right now.

So this weekend I set out to apply to a few places, and one of them had subject tests as the first part of the application process. I get it. They want to make sure I can actually teach the subject - especially on the fly when a kid, who is paying by the hour, logs in and needs an answer right away.

Then I started thinking about that. Kids, in middle and high school, possibly college, logging in and asking me about stuff I don't know. It's been a decade and a half since I taught middle school, and even then I was sometimes only a step ahead of the kids in the curriculum. If they ask about literature, what if I haven't read the book? No one can possibly read all the books that all the schools in the country are teaching. What if there's some part of speech I've never heard of? What if they need help writing an essay and I don't really know how to write an essay? What if I've been just winging it all these years on a little bit of talent and a lot of gracious teachers?

I had myself so worried I couldn't pass that I avoided that website for a few days before finally taking a deep breath and sitting down to do it.

You can only fail once. I figured if I failed, at least I'd know what the test was like, I could study and retake it.

I chose to start with the middle and high school English. The website said the time limit on the test was one hour. The put a ticking clock in the corner of the screen. You could miss two questions. Go.

I took a breath, looked at the test.... and realized I knew it all. It was grammar, punctuation, diagramming, literary devices... all the things I love. I mean, as I went through the test, I was madly in love with it all. I felt warm fuzzies when it asked me to tell where parts of a sentence would fall on a sentence diagram. When it asked me to finish the analogies, I almost hugged the computer. The questions where you had to identify which sentence was punctuated correctly (and there were semi-colons!!) I nearly did a jig. I love this stuff.

I finished the entire test in about ten minutes. I went back over it to make sure I hadn't been tricked, and submitted it.

100%.

I decided to take the essay writing test.

100%.

I decided to take the college level writing tutor test. It was billed as a two hour test. Thanks to my recent experience with essay writing and MLA bibliographies and works citing... 20 minutes later - CHA-CHING. Another 100%.

And I realized how much I really love this stuff. This grammar and punctuation and writing organization. Not just because I understand it, but because I really, truly think this stuff is important. I really do think knowing how to write clearly and cleanly makes a difference. That a person that can use words and language well - not just to tell stories but to do anything - has the power to change the world.

Think about the great speeches in history that have swayed public opinion, caused people to rise up and revolt or rise up and come together. Think about the legal contracts and laws that govern your lives. Think about advertising and news, well-written ads and articles that have changed your mind or convinced you of something or opened your eyes to something you didn't know. Think about the poets and journalists and memoirists who have changed the way we see the world - have often changed the course of the world - because of the way they have written.

It was, for the first time in a long time, a realization that I do think what I do is important. That I'm passionate about it because it matters. It doesn't matter to the world in financial terms. Heaven knows even the tutoring websites are clamoring for (and pay more for) physics and calculus and accounting teachers, not English. But it matters equally as much in the scheme of humanity and politics and faith. Maybe more.

This is silly, I know. This whole post. This realization. Most of you probably already feel this way. But I live in a world - the outside DC, triple-income-family world - where people make a lot of money. They buy expensive houses and eat at expensive restaurants and take extravagant vacations. What I do will barely pay the student loans and put away money for my kids' colleges. Doing things like part-time tutoring and struggling with a novel are not real jobs.

I live in a place where there is a lot of pressure to be successful in a way that loving language will never make me. I've felt "less than" for this for a long time. I've felt weird for being passionate about things like proper punctuation and good grammar. It's something  people can laugh at, post memes about on facebook for you, but really is seen as mostly quirky.

But it's not, I've decided. It's more than a quirk. It's the way the world is changed, for the better or the worse. And isn't that something worth being passionate about?

A Little Conflict is Good

I  had an eighth grader write me last week and ask, "What is it publishers are looking for when you want to get published?" 

How can you narrow this down? They want good grammar and clean punctuation. They want correct spelling and Times New Roman and double spacing. They want a lack of -ly adverbs and purple prose. They want crisp dialogue. They want characters they don't mind hanging out with for a few hours. They want something they've never seen before. They want something that will sell.

All of this, of course. But maybe more than anything, I think they want conflict. They want something to happen.

"Ask yourself this," I wrote her back. "What is it your character really wants, more than anything? What is keeping him or her from getting that? What does he or she do to overcome those obstacles? If you can answer those questions, and your reader can, too, you've got yourself the start of a good story."

One thing that used to drive my last advisor up the wall was the way I ducked out of conflicts. Every time some big problem would bubble up between characters, one would leave the room. An argument would break out, they'd leave. A crisis would arise, they'd rush away from it.

"Stop it!" He told me more than once. "This is where it's just starting to get good!"

It was hard for me to write through those scenes, keep a character in the place where the heat was high, because I don't know how to do that myself. I am the one who ducks out of conflict. I avoid confrontations. I deflect conversations that start to get hot.

Over the past weeks my husband and I have been trying to figure out what to do about my graduation. I chose to go to a school all the way across the country. I chose to begin and end that school in January, meaning I finished up my thesis six full months before graduation ceremonies.

The plan was for our whole family to go out for graduation. This was the plan when I started - has always been the plan. I wanted my kids to see the reward for the last two years we ALL have sacrificed for. I wanted the family picture to hang on the wall. Graduation - the whole cap and gown and hooding and pomp and circumstance - is utterly important to me. I missed my college graduation when I got a job and moved cross country. I was not going to miss this one.

But finances are tight, and five airline tickets and hotel rooms are not cheap. In the last few months we decided the kids wouldn't go. It would be just me and the husband. Until we started crunching numbers for that.

He keeps bringing up the topic. Do I need to go? Does he need to go? As important as it is, is it worth the thousands of dollars it might cost to fly out and stay for a few days for a simple 30-minute ceremony and dinner after? When we begin to get down and dirty about the details, there is always something else for me to do rather than hash it out. The dog needs walking. The kids need putting to bed. I need to get dinner going, or the dishes done, or a phone call made. We can recheck airline prices tomorrow; they might go down. I'll call around for cheaper hotels tomorrow.

I don't want to answer this, because the answer is yes. It is that important to me. And how can I say it is important enough to spend money we don't have?

And the answer is also, I don't know. Because many of my friends won't be there, having already graduated last June, or having new jobs now that won't allow the time off. What if not even my husband is there; is it still worth walking across the stage? What if we spend the money only for me to feel more lonely being there than not being there?

Last night, we sat down, the dog out and the kids in bed, the dishes done. I forced myself to stay in the moment, the way I now make my characters stay in theirs. Talk it out. Address the problems.

I wish I could say we came to a good solution, but this story isn't finished yet. We came to the decision that we had a little more time before needing to make the decision. I'll hunt down more information. We'll crunch numbers some more. We'll go through this all again.

What I've learned is that conflict may make a story more interesting, but I'd take some easy answers in my life a little more often. And I'm okay with happy endings.

Something is Better than Nothing

This saying has been floating around Pinterest a lot lately, and every time I see it, I stop and think how true it is. And how I am often the one on the couch I need to lap.

Since the surgery, I've been necessarily couch-bound, and I'm so out of shape and tired of being that way. Honestly, with the last two-year-pressure-cooker of school, I've been out of a consistent work-out routine for a while. And I can feel it.

So the doctor okayed me to start walking. Nothing strenuous, but just walking.

I had no idea it would be so exhausting to just walk. And I am a walker. I am a fast walker - all the time. I probably walk faster than most people I know. And when I went to the mall last week to pick something up, people were passing me. PASSING ME!! I don't remember that ever happening!!

So now I am bound and determined to get back in shape, even if it is just a little at a time. Which it has to be.

There's no Biggest Loser 10-hour workout marathon for me. I can walk. A little. First up and down stairs, and then the mall. Now I'm walking outside. Each day a little farther than the last, with no expectations other than to make it. One step at a time.

Today I walked 2.6 miles up and down our very hilly neighborhood. I am equally thrilled with this progress as I am frustrated with how hard I breathe and how slowly I go. But I am doing it, and I keep reminding myself this. I am lapping the person I was on the couch last week.

It's true about writing, too. My writing muscles got weak over the last two months, and while I'd love to jump back into writing 1500 words or more a day, diving into a novel full force, I'm finding myself a bit winded with the process. But I'm letting that be okay.

I'm writing some flash fiction, which I've never done and which I'm finding fun, and satisfying. I've started a novel I'm pecking at slowly, trying to get it right rather than charging ahead into a messy vomiting of words.

Some days I get hardly anything written. But I write something. Every day. Because something, I remind myself, is better than nothing.

Some people will say this is setting my standards too low, but I'm not one of them. I know I will get back to that place - both in exercise and in writing - when I'll be charging ahead full steam. But if I expect that now, I'm just setting myself to fail.

And I want to tell you, whatever you are challenged with in life - you don't have to do it all right now. Do something. Anything. Even if it's just a little bit. Because a little is more than something, and life isn't a race against that guy running down the beach in the picture at the top of this post. You aren't racing him, or anyone else. You are besting yourself, the person who isn't doing what you think you should be, or doing enough. Doing something, anything more than what you are doing, is better than nothing.

Just a step. And then another. You're really your own competition.