Wow, first day of the new year. And what a great day it was! I didn’t leave M and M’s condo for the entire day. It was fantastic! We played Monopoly and laughed our asses off with the other A playing catchphrase. I can’t remember the last time I laughed that much at one time. We made this great salmon we bought at Costco a couple days ago for dinner. All in all, I can’t imagine a better way to start the new year than laughing and enjoying a relaxing day with great friends.

I started this blog for a very specific reason. I needed to get in the habit of writing. Especially writing on a daily basis without judgment on my part. When I sit down to write, which is generally the last thing I do before I go to bed, I don’t proof read or labor over sentences, word choices, or any of the things that used to trip me up in the past. I sit down, I write and then I’m done with it. It’s great. It’s also helped me get much better at verbalizing how I feel about things and provided a clarity I needed regarding the past and the future. Without making a point of writing every day I wouldn’t have that clarity. Things would still be swirling around inside my head without an agenda or a structured way to express them and move on. I’ve been doing this for 4 months now and the benefits I’ve gotten from it are really more than I’d hoped for. There are a lot of memories I’ve gone into and a lot of soul searching I’ve been able to do because of this writing experiment. I haven’t held back much, but there are still some things I’ve not touched on. Mostly things related to the heights of my addiction or past mental health concerns. I’m hoping to get them addressed in a more concrete way over the next month or two. It really shouldn’t take longer than that as long as I stay focused and dig a little deeper, so to speak. So that’s going to be the focus. I’m hoping by the end of February (and my 31st birthday) to have addressed all I wanted to address and start looking at the next steps.

The major reason I started writing so much is because I really would like to pursue a career writing in some capacity. Honestly, my ultimate goal is to write a book. I haven’t thought too much about the outline of it at this point, but that’s probably something I should start doing. I’ve had some thoughts swirling around in my head lately regarding it all, so here goes: I’d like to blend past experiences with my current reality – basically a what it was like versus what it’s like now type of thing. I don’t want to run through the past in a chronological way, but rather use stories from the past followed with an accurate picture of life today. Not necessarily every story from the past, but ones that are relevant. I have a memoir of sorts pictured in my head, but a very uplifting, inspirational story. A story about surviving and overcoming obstacles in life. The one obstacle I keep thinking about, which is maybe not even an obstacle, is that I’d like to feel more settled in my current situation. Especially in regards to a job or what I’m doing. I really think the trip to Norway and/or Thailand would really give me the perspective I need for that. I definitely feel like I could use a different lens with which to go through all of this – or a higher reality to compare the past to. I’m sure that will fall into place over the coming months. One other idea with how I could structure it that just popped into my head would be to have chapters, or sections of the book, that are feelings or levels of helplessness/hopelessness. I’m not sure exactly how I’d do it, but I could label a section something like “We’ll get through this, just like we always have” and then use different stories related to different struggles, eg bipolar, disordered eating, addiction to go through that. Hmm, I’ll have to mull that over. Oh, I also want it to be funny. I haven’t put much humor into my writing on this blog because that’s not what I wanted out of it. I wanted something serious, but when i actually get down to writing this book I want my whole personality to shine through and that will have to include humor since it’s such an integral part of who I am.

Gratitude List:
Laughing my ass off while playing games.
Spending all day inside.
Going to bed with no alarm clocks set.