reading

There are a number of people who helped me on my journey to publishing this book. I ran a crowdfunding campaign through a literary agency to help drum up enough attention to attract a publisher, and none of this would have been possible without the support of my early readers.

Specifically, I would like to thank the following Silver Sponsors: Richard Schaeffer, Judy Parada, Deborah Haynes Brannon, and Dr. Saam Zarrabi of Rodeo Dental & Orthodontics. I would also like to thank the following readers for paying just a little bit extra with their preorder to help me on my way: Sharon Allen, Allan Michael Aquino, Betzi Barden, Amanda Berendsen, India Braddock, Carol Brock, Tamra Bubke, John Burke, Cheryl Charlton, Beth Crosby, Tanvi Dhooria, Sandra Gibbons, Michael and Freda Haynes, Dane Miller, Dr. Cindy Nelson, Brian Price, John Reasner, Rachel Richardson, Patricia Ryan, Becky Schroeder, Robert Sieger, Edyta Skiba, Meghan Stetzik, Michael Taysom, Aishling Tews, Vi Quach-Vu, Audra West and Mick Wist.

Beyond that, I wish to thank the healers in my life. Without their help, I do not believe I would still be here: Dr. Cindy Nelson, Dr. Anne Coleman, Dr. Kenneth Brown, Dr. Richard Herrscher, Cheryl Leo, and Liz Mosesman.

A special note to Dr. Cindy Nelson: You’ve believed in me, you’ve helped me, you’ve encouraged me, you’ve healed me. I owe you so much gratitude for the impact you’ve had on my life. You mean more to me than words can express.

A special note to Dr. Anne Coleman: You’ve never stopped searching for answers. Your brilliance is a force to be reckoned with. What a gift you have! Thank you for all you do for people in this world, and for all you’ve done for me.

A special note to my husband, Jason: You are the light of my life. You are the best thing that has ever happened to me. I love you, I respect you, I adore you, and I’m blessed by you. I’m grateful for every day we have together. Thank you for supporting me in this journey, and for healing parts of my soul. I’m a lucky girl to have found a true partner in life, and thank you for loving my (our) kitties!

I started writing this book right after I fell off a health cliff, which lasted for more than four years and became one of the darkest periods of my rather traumatic life. I wrote it in spurts, in between varying levels of disability, in an effort to share lessons I thought I might be able to pass on to others. This was my fifth attempt at writing a book in more than a decade, but I knew it was the one I was finally meant to share.

When I was a schoolteacher for a brief period around age thirty, I found my favorite part of the job was relating to my students and sharing in their life struggles. Anything they’d experienced, I’d probably experienced too. And it was in this shared knowing that I felt the most like myself and like I was living an authentic life. I was able to use my hardships and trauma to help others, and I got my first glimpse of meaning for my existence when, previously, there had seemed to be none.

Many of my early writings were emotional vomits penned from a spiral of negativity and pain. This book was created in a different spirit—one of positivity, growth, and understanding. I wasn’t able to get there without first getting very sick, and I am grateful for my health challenges (with my hindsight goggles, of course!) because they finally helped me make that shift. I often talk about how we are all on a journey that sometimes doesn’t make sense until later, and this book finally gives some meaning to mine.

Thank you for your purchase, and I hope you enjoy my little take on life. These are my most personal stories and I tell them because I think others may see themselves in my experiences and perhaps will feel more empowered to embrace their life as it is—not as it could be, or as it might be. Today is all there is, and there is only one version of us out there. Embrace every day.

I feel like life is a series of moments, rather than one continuous stream of consciousness that snakes around boulders and over rocks, moving seamlessly down the way. Right now, my moment finds me sitting in the morning light with the sun streaming through my window. It hits the top of my dark wooden desk and reflects brightly toward me in a way that causes me to squint. Everything is quiet except for the occasional singing bird and the low whirr of cars that are speeding down a nearby highway.

I look up from my work to observe an older gentleman walking his dog under the naked winter trees outside my window. Behind me, I listen as my Maine Coon kitty darts around the apartment in his usual post-breakfast mania and my elderly white and orange one settles back down to sleep.

It’s just another moment in my life and it will be gone as quickly as it came. I’ll get up from my work soon and move on to the next moment in my day, and whether or not this hour of my life registers in my brain for the remainder of my time on earth is hard to say (although documenting it like this sure helps things along in that department). The fact is, we simply can’t store all of our moments in easily accessible parts of our brains; this is why we have pictures and journals and people to remind us of what happened and when.

When I was in college, early in the fall semester of my freshman year, I remember lying on my bed alone one afternoon and losing myself in thought and observation as I looked out the open window just above me. The air was still warm from summer, and a faint, humid breeze whispered past my skin. I remember my reclusive roommate was out somewhere doing something or other (probably trying to avoid me) and my suitemates were roaming the campus or in their room studying quietly (I wasn’t sure which). But there I was, stretched on top of the covers of my neatly made bed, staring up and out through the old window. It had panes that were crisscrossed by white wooden lines that were also speckled with peeling paint from decades long gone. I looked across the street at the neighboring dorm building, and then I looked upward at the flawlessly blue sky. And I decided to capture that moment in time, consciously, and to hold on to it forever.

I did this by saying to myself, as I surveyed every inch of my dorm room, something like:

Elizabeth, remember this moment. You’re young and you’re in your first year of college. This moment is here now and pretty soon it won’t be. And before you know it, it’ll be so far away, you’ll wonder what happened to the time. But as you get older, you can always think to yourself, “I remember lying on that bed and capturing that one moment when I was nineteen years old … and holding on to it, always.”

It was as if I were imprinting the words onto my soul that were necessary to immortalize that snapshot in time.

The funny thing is, it worked. That was twenty years ago and I still remember it in vivid detail like it was yesterday. I still remember the small room with the white walls and the tiny pedestal sink wedged between a pair of modest armoires and a bathroom door. I still remember the piece of gray carpet we’d picked up as a remnant from a local carpet store, and that we’d carted across town in one hundred-degree temperatures to use as a rug. I still remember my humble desk and chair, where I’d study and write my research papers, and where I’d use my bulky laptop to chat with my friend on this new thing called “America Online” (now known as “AOL”). I also still remember the long, rectangular, black and white TV with the tiny, six-inch screen and the travel handle, which I kept on the edge of the desk to watch at night sometimes, its long antenna reaching halfway to the ceiling and its dials letting me tune in to VHF or UHF.

Mostly, I still remember how it felt to be young and like the world was opening to me in a big horizon, like everything was brand new, like I was finally free, and like I had an entire life stretching beyond that dorm room, that window, that age of nineteen.

I must have been wise beyond my years because I somehow recognized that this moment, like all the others, would soon merge into all the rest. I also understood that I had the power to capture it and hold on to it if I so chose, simply by focusing intently and allowing everything to settle into a permanent place in my mind.

There have been many moments in my life between that one and now. But how many of them do I—or do we, in each of our unique lives—really remember? We always remember the important ones, like the day our cat died or the time we moved into an apartment with our new fiancé. We also remember those that weren’t life-changing but were still special in some way, like the time we walked around the neighborhood with our best friend, drinking from a bottle of champagne we’d wrapped in a brown paper bag. But then we remember other seemingly insignificant moments, like the time a cashier at the grocery store was particularly chipper, or the time we were driving down the service road and saw a hawk sitting on the street sign.

I think most of our moments get stuck somewhere inside of us, even though there are millions upon millions of them that we experience in our lifetimes. Because often they can be coaxed out with a photograph, or with a reminder from someone else, or with a journal entry. Or, these days, they’re beaten out of us by those “Memories” pop-ups on our social media feeds, which seem so often to be composed of things we’d like to forget.

As I’ve grown older, every time I’ve faced a difficult moment—a medical procedure, a job interview, a confrontation with someone I care about—I’ve tried to remind myself that it’s just another moment in my life. “A blip on the radar,” as one of my aunts once told me during a particularly difficult time in my life. “It’ll come and go just like all the rest.”

I sometimes ask myself questions too. Things like: Have I allowed myself to lose too much energy because of anticipation or regret? Or, Have I given more weight to this moment than is appropriate?

I also sometimes wonder if maybe we should let all of our moments stand as equals, rather than rating them or giving certain ones more weight than others. This doesn’t make a lot of sense when we think about joyous moments, because those seem to be automatically elevated in our consciousness. They’re part of the good stuff of life. But maybe it does make sense for the moments we perceive more negatively. So maybe it’s okay if we don’t dwell on what went wrong and instead move toward whatever the next moment may be. And maybe it’s okay if we decide to redirect our anxiety about something into a more positive activity we can do to get our minds off things, like taking a walk or baking some bread.

As I move further along in my life, I see that so many moments are lost forever because I didn’t record them. And in one sense, this is totally okay and probably the way life was meant to be. But in another, I wish I could remember more of them—if only to validate that I was here at all, because so much of my life is lived inside the walls of my home with only one other human and two cats as a witness.

And yet in a third sense, there are those memories (painful things, life errors, losses, embarrassments) I want to bury and never see again. I try to run away from those moments, but of course they stick the hardest, even though I don’t write them down or capture them in a photograph.

Maybe the selective memory is just part of the deal. Part of life. The good with the bad, the strong memories with those that have been forgotten. All of it making up the fabric of time that we experience in blips while we’re on this earth to do something more.

There’s a song by Loverboy that talks about how we all work for the weekend. And isn’t that the truth? We spend our lives working and then reward ourselves with tiny bits of quiet: weekends, vacations, sleeping in (on occasion). We’ll rest when we’re dead … or when we retire, we think. (Although many of us don’t have the luxury of that dream anymore.)

I remember very clearly the moment I realized I’d fallen into this expected and pre-scripted rhythm of adulthood. I was at my then mother-in-law’s house on a Friday night, already changed out of my work clothes and leaning back in a beat-up chair. I’d just finished my first week at my first full-time corporate job at the tender age of twenty-three. I was paid, although not all that much, to get dressed in a skirt and pantyhose and then be held against my will in a cubicle for eight hours a day as a temp worker. That evening was my first-ever weekend’s respite. I sat in that beat-up chair in that beat-up house in quiet observation, listening to the sounds of traffic outside, watching the light in the window turn golden orange, and analyzing my current situation.

I was tired in a way I hadn’t experienced before— that was the first thing I noticed. My brother-in-law was playing a video game while my mother-in-law pulled dinner together in the next room—that was the second thing. Everyone seemed rather subdued and weary while all of this was happening—that was the third thing. And the fourth thing I noticed was a sort of collective sigh in the air as all of humanity was transitioning into the weekend, looking forward to the brief bit of time they could control.

This is what people do, I remember thinking to myself rather resolutely. We work all week long and then we just have the weekends. That’s how it’s going to be now. I’m doing what everyone else does.

My feelings about this were mixed at this early time in my life. I felt dismayed by the realization that I was now past the age where I could take a 2:00 p.m. class or sleep in on Fridays, but I was also rather stoic (and a little proud); I had finally joined the ranks of real adulthood after working so hard in college.

Now that I’m many more years into my journey, I can say that I’ve had periods of frustration about being so busy on a day-to-day basis, so strapped for time, so overextended and unable to meet all my obligations or do all my chores—or have any time to myself. This was especially true when I was a mother to a young child and working a full-time office job. I felt so isolated in my struggles because I had nobody to commiserate with, but these days I see how many other people go through these work-life balance difficulties too.

And I ask myself, how often do we feel this way and actually decide to do something about it? How often do we examine even the smallest ways in which we can take control of our spinning lives?

I asked myself these questions in my early thirties when I left my corporate job to try to forge my way as an independent. But my new career path opened up a whole other can of worms around financial security, stability, and a different form of exhaustion. So now I’m asking myself those same questions again as I try to merge two worlds— the world where I have a steady job and a steady paycheck, and the world where I really need some flexibility so I can have more time to take care of myself.

I think for some of us, the answer to regaining control is: I’m never going to do anything about my job situation (or, I can’t). For others, the answer is: sometimes I try to do something to improve my work-life balance. And still for others, the answer is: I’ll do something about it when I have a mental breakdown and finally call in sick, then schedule a vacation. I know it’s easy to get pulled back into the machine but I have to wonder, why do we live our lives this way, a solid wall of work with no quiet time in between?

As we all navigate survival in this world, which means having to work one or even two jobs, most of us try desperately to maintain some sort of balance between generating income and living life. One thing I’ve learned is if you think you can use your weekends as your sole method to recoup, you likely are mistaken.

Many of us pack our weekends so full of activity, they mirror our work weeks and are a poor excuse for a respite. I do think some of us are better at these things than others, though. People who are single and childless (like I was for a long time) are pros at winding down on the weekends because they often are forced to do so. There are no responsibilities pulling at them, nobody else is in the room, nothing is burned into their schedule. Sometimes they fill this time with unhealthy habits such as sleeping too much, consuming excess amounts of wine (guilty), or going out to nightclubs to let their troubles blend away into the smoke (also guilty). But that’s a story for another day.

For the most part, I would say single people and those without kids are more likely to do a better job at taking regular “vacations” from the treadmill of life than the rest of us. They have more time to sit quietly with themselves. They also have more time to pursue hobbies that are of interest and that ignite passions within.

But you may be reading this thinking, I’m single and the last thing I want to be is single. I hate being single. I’m lonely, I’m unfulfilled, I’m isolated. And I get that. I do. Because I’ve been there … and it was probably the most depressing time in my life. But if we can get past the feelings of loneliness and transform them into action of some kind—i.e., joining a cooking class or going salsa dancing—then we can find our much-needed vacation moments, even when we feel like the sadness of our lonely lives is constantly draping itself over everything we look at.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more in tune with how important it is to take time to get quiet or immerse myself in something I love. I try to make it a regular part of my day, even if it’s just during the fifteen minutes I soak in the bath. When humans are going going going, we’ve got to hit the brakes sometimes and stop for real. And we can’t do that just once a year at a fancy tropical resort or by taking a staycation down the street.

All of this is evidenced by how we react when we finally schedule that vacation. Don’t we feel awesome? The anticipation, the actual time off, all of it. Once we finally decide to stop thinking about working or obligations or whatever we should be doing instead, we really relax into the positive emotions. The people who never disconnect—even on vacation—have even bigger problems. They don’t get to experience the pounding waves inside themselves calming to stillness. Or the dark, tumbling clouds of work and stress and obligations fading away as they reconnect to that part of their personality that appeared more often before they were an adult and had so much weight on their shoulders. Before they no longer had time to imagine and dream and wonder anymore.

The secret is that it doesn’t take a vacation to summon those feelings of freedom and happiness. I feel the same way when I spend ten minutes playing with my silly Maine Coon rescue cat, uninterrupted, just focusing on how he leaps through the air after a brown straw mouse. I feel it when I force myself to sit on my meditation cushion in the mornings, after my thoughts finally stop turning over, and I begin coasting in the quiet. It’s almost like I’m sitting on a beach.

I also feel it when I watch an old movie on Turner Classic Movies, with Fred Astaire or Bette Davis, or perhaps one of my favorite duos, Myrna Loy and William Powell. It’s fun to imagine myself in a different time, far removed from the stressful life I’ve actually lived (and, admittedly, oftentimes still live). When else? When I read a good book, when I take a walk in nature, or when I spend time with a friend who means a lot to me. I think as human beings, we need as much of this sort of time in our lives as we can shove in. Because the underlying “thing” that is us (our soul, our spirit, whatever) was born in those sorts of moments. Those quiet moments. Those moments of joy.

The nature of our minds is to roll at 100 miles-per-hour all the time. If a quiet moment arises, our minds will find something to fill it with. This is what evolution (media, technology, fast cars, busy cities) is training us to do. So the first step to finding more joy in your life is making sure you schedule down time. Take some time every day to stop, even if it’s just for five minutes. Maybe you’ll find that those five minutes can turn into ten, which maybe could turn into thirty … on a good day.

The second step is filling those moments with activities that nourish your soul, which may require putting down the smartphone or forcing yourself to sit and look at the trees sway. Really think about what you enjoy, or even what you don’t want to do at all during that time (because it stresses you out), and then do (or don’t do) that. Try it. You can pick something one day and then try something different the next.

The third step is not losing track of this practice. Because it’s easy to get sucked into the swirl when you’re stuck in traffic, when you’ve got to shuffle your kids to the third of five practices, when you’ve got dinner to make, or when you have a husband to love. Or, conversely, when you feel like you need to wallow in your loneliness, or fill up the quiet in your room (or in your head) with more activity, or swallow some alcohol to numb everything out.

Any spiritual practice requires some form of quiet. Whether it’s meditation, prayer, asana, mantras, or listening to a sermon. And this personal time is where we go to reconnect with the meaning of life, isn’t it? To find solace, to find a connection, to figure out why we are here at all.

Let’s not save our time off just for weekends. Let’s not save it just for when we feel like our other obligations will allow us a pass. Let’s schedule it in, like lunch. Like coffee. Like that doughnut you love to eat on Friday mornings … which, to be honest, can be a vacation in and of itself if it means that much to you.

When we’re young (and even sometimes when we’re not so young) we think we’re invincible. We skip sleep, we work ourselves into exhaustion, we do for our kids until we can’t do for ourselves. Sometimes we drown our sorrows in alcohol, or by staying out at clubs until 2:00 a.m., or by running from place to place so that we don’t have to sit alone at home with our thoughts.

One evening when I was twenty-five years old, my then husband went out to study with some friends. He was in college after having returned from Iraq and using the GI Bill to try to do something with his life. I was holding down the fort by being the breadwinner, taking care of his seven-year-old son, and being the wife and mom and housekeeper and cook. You know, all that stuff. And that night he just didn’t come home.

I’d tried to call him over the course of a couple of hours, but his phone gradually went from no answer to no ringing at all. I drove out in the darkness to search for him with my sleeping stepson in tow. Ultimately, I found neither his car nor his body and I came home in tears. When he finally materialized in the early morning hours, he unceremoniously told me that he’d been with someone else and didn’t want to be married to me anymore. He grabbed a change of clothes, left to stay in a hotel, and I cried my eyes out on the floor of my closet until the sun started to rise. In a single evening, I’d witnessed the end of a nearly nine-year relationship for reasons I still don’t understand.

In the months afterward, I floated untethered because I was alone for the first time in my adult life. I had no sense of who I was or what my new life was supposed to be. I was twenty-six years old and struggling to cope, so one day I decided to pick up my first beer. You know, to do that super unhealthy coping thing adults like to do all the time. Alcohol was a prime (and legal) choice. Eventually I moved on to wine and later to vodka, because these didn’t turn my stomach like the beer did and worked much better anyway.

I began running too. Not literally running, but I was never in one place for very long because I simply couldn’t bear to be. And as the next few years rolled by, I found that my need to run, to drown feelings, to flee … it stayed with me. Eventually I popped open a bottle of wine and drank a glass or two every night. I took dance classes after work so I wouldn’t have to go home. I spent my weekends in clubs, ordering rum and Cokes and chasing them down with a Smirnoff Ice or two. Then I’d kiss random people in dark corners in an attempt to dull the loneliness, before stumbling out the door and making my way home in the wee hours.

I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat. I felt like I walked through my days in a dream state, sometimes not even really feeling human. I’d lost three clothing sizes and people started telling me I looked sick. But what they didn’t know was that every time I tried to eat, the nausea overwhelmed me to a point where starvation was more pleasant. So I started buying milkshakes and French fries just to get some calories into my body.

I remember very clearly thinking to myself, I’m going to get sick. As the months and years marched on, my thoughts got more specific. I hope I don’t get cancer. I was young (late twenties), still very naïve, and yet I knew I was draining the life from my body. I knew I was going to break but I just didn’t know when. So I crossed my fingers and kept going, doing the very best I could.

But the problem is, stress is cumulative. Life is cumulative. You can’t keep taking away from the balance and then expecting to come out okay on the other side. The people who believe you can are the people who turn into the sad stories of life. The ones who have regrets, the ones who wish they’d done things differently, the ones whose world comes crashing down when their bodies finally decide to give out.

I coasted along for about nine years after that, coming down with quite a few colds and several bouts of pneumonia, but never (thank goodness) being diagnosed with anything scarier than that. I began to think that maybe I had an extra tough body, that maybe it could take much more than I had given it credit for. I’m sure a lot of us think we can handle much more than we actually can.

But what I learned is that we’re okay until we’re not. People do not suddenly have heart attacks, or suddenly get cancer, or suddenly have an autoimmune disease. They may appear as sudden occurrences, but in reality, those health issues have been gaining momentum—unchecked—for a long period of time. Then they manifest when life has gone past a point of no return. And it may be your fault (i.e., you’re a workaholic-alcoholic who doesn’t sleep) or it may just be the way things are (you have crappy genes or are simply unlucky).

Me? I suddenly was not okay. Like—wham!—not okay.

It started with surgery to remove fibroids that had suddenly blown up to grapefruit size (I believe the death of my cat sent my health over the edge). A week later, my surgeon sent me to the ER and we found out my gallbladder had decided it was done playing. I had another major surgery less than six weeks after that. I thought I’d finally be done and on my way, but as I said earlier, stress is cumulative. The body piles emotions and stress on top of emotions and other stress. Injury on top of injury. These two events ended up being the start of my chronic illness journey; a journey I’m still surprised to be on considering I was never predisposed to illness on the whole. But it’s also a journey that makes perfect sense considering all the stress, heartache, abuse, and other issues I’d dealt with before age thirty. By that point, I’d been through a tough childhood, financial difficulties, a war, infidelity, divorce, long-term unemployment, and the loss of a child.

I’ve spent a lot of time since those surgeries thinking about how you don’t see illness coming … and yet you do. About how even though you know you’re putting unreasonable amounts of stress on your body, you either can’t change it or you don’t want to. Maybe your destructive behavior soothes you in the moment (denial is a great coping mechanism). Maybe it quells something else you don’t want to face, like a fear of death or a fear of failure. Maybe you pop a bottle of wine every night or eat a big brownie because you’re searching for something you don’t feel inside, or maybe you’re trying to dull something you do feel. Maybe you can’t relax on vacation and instead answer your emails because you just can’t be alone with yourself, even when there’s a beautiful vista ahead or you get the opportunity to spend extra time with your spouse. In all of this, you still believe you’ll be fine because nothing has happened yet.

We must realize that our bodies are not indestructible machines, and we should live every day with an awareness of how we are living that day. Ask yourself: am I adding to my life’s balance or taking something away? Have I rested today? Have I done something that makes me happy? Have I practiced good self-care by eating nutritious food and taking a walk in the breeze? Or am I falling face-first into bed at midnight, a ragged mess, after a stressful day at work that I doused in two margaritas at happy hour?

Being healthy is a blessing and not a given. Ultimately, it’s temporary too. We’re all going to die. And we die because our bodies decide they’re tired of chugging along, or because something on the other side of the sky has decided our time here is up. Making the best of your life is much easier when you have your health. You can still have a meaningful, wonderful life if you struggle with illness, but why choose a path toward illness when you still have quite a bit of power to choose a path toward health?

We all have a choice. I’ve been working for several years now on finding my way to remission after all of the running in my twenties. I’ve learned that it’s much easier to stay in a healthy place than to try to crawl your way back when you’ve lost your way. Luckily for me, it doesn’t seem to be too late just yet. Although it really almost was.

Listen to your body, take care of yourself, and don’t wait until it’s too late.

Finding a calling or purpose (or in some circles “dharma”) is a struggle many of us wrestle with on a daily basis. It’s certainly been something I’ve actively fretted over for a large part of my adult life.

I first knew there was a serious problem when I hit my junior year of college. I ran out of general education classes, hadn’t selected a major (and didn’t have any inclination toward one), so I took an entire semester of random courses simply to try to figure it out. I enrolled in art history, sociology, technical theatre, environmental science, and a career planning class. Each of these subjects was interesting, but “interesting” does not a major make.

The career planning class was the one I put a lot of energy into, because it was supposed to help me find some sense of direction. I remember slogging through test after test to try to create labels for my personality and inclinations. We took the MAPP test, which was probably one of the most insightful assessments, as well as a number of other personality and aptitude tests. Then we spent the remainder of our class time talking through the results and about different career paths. I remember feeling like I still had no sense of direction despite all of that chatter and analysis. In fact, I’ll never forget the day one of my tests said that my number one career path was as a mortician. I was horrified that something about my answers matched me up to a career working with the dead. Clearly these tests couldn’t tell me the things I really needed to know.

I ended up becoming an English major in the eleventh hour, and I had some very logical reasons for doing so that had nothing to do with hopes and dreams. First, I liked reading stories and learning about people. Second, I figured I would much rather read stories than textbooks if I were going to have to do so for a few years. And third, my eleventh grade English teacher had told me I was a strong writer, so I figured I’d go where my talent supposedly was. The decision felt good and I never regretted it, so for that moment in time I felt like I was going in the right direction.