Watching some of the “Pearl Jam: 20” documentary, I learned something I didn’t know about lead guitarist Mike McCready: Like me, he has Crohn’s Disease.
Mood music:
http://youtu.be/Phez1FvzGbY
Knowing what the disease does to you when you’re under attack, I’m impressed he’s been able to keep the kind of touring schedule Pearl Jam is known for.
How anyone can spend two hours a night on stage when they’re taking Prednisone is beyond me. I’ve done a lot with my life despite the disease, but I doubt I could have done that. Physically I could have. Not mentally, though. Whenever I’ve been on that drug my prevailing desire has been to tell the world to fuck off.
McCready performs an annual concert to benefit the Northwest chapter of the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of America and has been pretty outspoken about his bouts with the disease.
It’s another example of how no one with the disease has to settle for a lesser life.
McCready was reportedly diagnosed when he was 21. I was diagnosed when I was 8 and the worst of the attacks for me ended by the time I reached 17. I’ve been freakishly lucky, though the effects of the disease and the Prednisone use certainly contributed to the mental illness and addiction that has clung to me light a wet blanket in adulthood.
That’s life, though. The curve balls are hurled at us and we can duck, get hit or learn to catch them and make the best of it.
In my slow effort to reconcile with my mother, I made it easier for her to find this blog. Given the raw emotion to be found here, I was pretty sure it would be rough.
Mood music:
I suspect it hasn’t been easy for her to read through this thing. Not at all. But her initial comments suggest she’s really trying to get it and put it in the proper perspective.
Some of my memories are not as she remembered the sequence of events, but I knew that would be the case. As I try to point out regularly, this blog is based on my recollection of things. But my recollection is never going to be the same as how others saw it.
One of my favorite rock autobiographies is “The Dirt” from all four members of Motley Crue. What I love about it is that each member writes about the same events, and while they remember many details the same way, there are other events each band member remembers differently, especially when it comes to what they think was going on in their bandmates’ heads. By seeing the four different perspectives, events become a lot more real and ironclad.
That’s why I always encourage family members to chime in via the comments section. If they remember an event differently, the reader should know about it. Then we get closer to the truth.
I suspect my mother will focus more on the bad stuff in here than the good. It would be hard not to when you’re essentially reliving family history as remembered by the youngest child.
That has to be a mind-bender.
She commented this morning that while she doesn’t remember everything the same way, she understands (or at least accepts) my need to write it all down and share. She suggested that she just wants me to be well and focus on my family.
She also noted that the post I wrote about my brother’s death had a couple facts wrong. He didn’t walk to the ambulance as I remembered, and he died earlier than I thought. She said it as an FYI, not in an accusatory, bitter tone.
I don’t think she would have been able to see things this way even a couple years ago.
I’m still not sure how far I want to go with this. I’m still somewhat gun shy about getting too close again. That’s not her fault. It’s just that I have my OCD triggers, and I have to be mindful of them. I have to set clear boundaries. I’m still going to keep my distance. But I’m at least ready to talk.
I started to feel this way at my Cousin Andrew’s wedding in August. I saw a lot of family members I hadn’t seen for a very long time, and I was admittedly feeling somewhat lost.
I give my mother a lot of credit. Despite all the trouble between us, she gave me and Erin hugs and was very friendly. That couldn’t have been easy. My stepfather kept his distance, but given the tension in the air, who could really blame him?
My Aunt Robin didn’t say more than three words to me, but that’s ok. She hadn’t seen us in a very long time and that has to create some awkwardness. I watched her being a good, nurturing and loving aunt to several cousins, and that made me happy. It was really good talking to my Aunt Dee. The two of them look great. Aunt Robin has such a close resemblance to my late grandmother that I was taken aback at first. It goes to show that the dead live on in others. Also very comforting to see.
One of my cousins was there and it was the first time I had seen her in over 20 years. She’s not on speaking terms with much of the family. She didn’t remember me on sight, but last time we saw each other I was a skinny, long-haired metal head. Now I’m a husky, bald-headed metal head.
Since she’s a black sheep too, it’s rather ironic and funny that she didn’t recognize me. Or maybe it made perfect sense.
This family has been through the meat grinder. There has been a lot of mistrust and misunderstanding along the way. There’s been way too much sickness and death. We’re not special in that regard. Every family has a deep reservoir of drama.
I don’t think the wedding did much to change the family dynamics. The people who are not on speaking terms need a lot more than a family wedding to resolve the overwhelming tangle of misfiring wires.
But everyone getting along in the same space showed that despite everything, despite the divisions, everyone still fundamentally loves each other. That’s important, because as one of the refrains in the second reading of the wedding ceremony made plain, you can have everything in the world. But if you don’t have love, you have nothing.
I’ve had a lot of love and blessings in my life in the last few years. I’ve come far in overcoming addictions and mental illness. Even the family discord has served a purpose.
My Uncle Bobby, the last of the siblings that included my grandmother, took me aside at one point and said life is too short to hate.
He is absolutely right.
But hate has nothing to do with it.
Mistrust, hurt feelings and deep disagreements over right and wrong? Absolutely. But not hate.
I still love everyone, and I forgave my mother a long time ago.
So why, you’re probably wondering, can’t we just let the past lie in its grave and move on? Because relationships are deeply complex things, and it is never that simple or easy.
But I let Ma find this blog, and believe me: That was a big fucking step.
I hope it leads to something better.
Michael, left, me and Wendi, sometime in the early 1970s. The family has been through the wringer over the years.
A friend asked me about good Crohn’s causes she could donate to because a friend of her daughter is gravely ill from the disease. I shared my thoughts, but wanted to reach out directly to the person suffering.
Mood music:
I hear you are really going through the meat grinder right now and that you face life-threatening surgery. I’ve been there, so this is my attempt to give you some peace of mind.
I experienced all the things you are now — the massive loss of blood, the knifing pain in the gut, sleepless nights in the bathroom, and more blood. But looking back, I must say that in the long run it’s been more damaging to my mental health than my physical health.
It screwed up my brain and pushed me toward an adulthood of addictions and other hangups. I had a couple transfusions in the late 1970s. This left me scared to death in the 1980s and 1990s about AIDS, because many people got it from tainted blood transfusions. Fortunately, I’ve been tested many times for it and that didn’t happen. I was lucky.
A couple times, I’ve been told, the doctor’s came close to removing the colon. Too much of it was under siege and they didn’t know where to start in terms of targeting it. But it never came to that.
The pain was pretty intense. I really don’t know how my parents were able to get through it. I think it would cause me more anguish to see one of my kids suffer than to go through it myself. That had to hurt. Especially since they lost another child along the way. It also couldn’t have helped that I would be in the hospital for six-week stretches in 1978, 1979, 1980 and 1981.
As you have probably discovered by now, the most popular drug to treat it is Prednisone, which comes with a long list of side effects. In fact, the drug screwed with me much more than anything else. More on that in another post I wrote called “The Bad Pill Kept Me from the Good Pill.”
But I’m here to tell you there’s no need to write yourself off as doomed. There’s the spiritual argument for this, where you put all your trust in God. I’m a true believer and subscriber of that argument. I also know that in your darkest moment, there are always people to help you through it.
A lot of people helped me survive a childhood of brutal Crohn’s Disease: My parents, great doctors, school friends who helped me catch up with my schoolwork and rooted for me whenever I got out of the hospital, and a great therapist who helped me sort through the mental byproducts of illness.
I think you’re going to get through the current attack and that you will be able to move on to a better life. Again, I lean on my personal experience.
I’m probably one of the luckiest Crohn’s patients on Earth. The last bad flare up was in 1986 and I haven’t had once since. I still go through frequent periods of inflammation, but nothing that requires drugs or hospital stays. The colon is checked out every other year to make sure the layers of scar tissue don’t run wild and morph into cancer.
Had the doctors removed the colon when I was a kid, I think things still would have worked out. I would have learned to live with it. Whatever you have in front of you, I think you can make the best of it and push through.
Two years ago today, in a moment of Christmas-induced depression, I started this blog. I meant for it to be a place where I could go and spill out the insanity in my head so I could carry on with life.
In short order, it snowballed into much more than that.
Mood music:
http://youtu.be/IKpEoRlcHfA
About a year into my recovery from serious mental illness and addiction — the most uncool, unglamorous addiction at that — I started thinking about sharing where I’ve been. My reasoning was simple: I’d listened to a lot of people toss around the OCD acronym to describe everything from being a type A personality to just being stressed. I also saw a lot of people who were traveling the road I’d been down and were hiding their true nature from the world for fear of a backlash at work and in social circles.
At some point, that bullshit became unacceptable to me.
I started getting sick of hiding. I decided the only way to beat my demons at their sick little game was to push them out into the light, so everyone could see how ugly they were and how bad they smelled. That would make them weaker, and me stronger. And so that’s how this started out, as a stigma-busting exercise.
Then, something happened. A lot of you started writing to me about your own struggles and asking questions about how I deal with specific challenges life hurls at me. The readership has steadily increased.
Truth be told, life with THE OCD DIARIES hasn’t been what I’d call pure bliss. There are many mornings where I’d rather be doing other things, but the blog calls to me. A new thought pops into my head and has to come out. It can also be tough on my wife, because sometimes she only learns about what’s going on in my head from what’s in the blog. I don’t mean to do that. It’s just that I often can’t form my thoughts clearly in discussion. I come here to do it, and when I’m done the whole world sees it.
More than once I’ve asked Erin if I should kill this blog. Despite the discomfort it can cause her at times, she always argues against shutting it down. It’s too important to my own recovery process, and others stand to learn from it or at least relate to it.
And so I push forward.
One difference: I run almost ever post I write by her before posting it. I’ve shelved several posts at her recommendation, and it’s probably for the best. Restraint has never been one of my strengths.
This blog has helped me repair relationships that were strained or broken. It has also damaged some friendships. When you write all your feelings down without a filter, you’re inevitably going to make someone angry.
One dear friend suggested I push buttons for a good story and don’t know how to let sleeping dogs lie. She’s right about the sleeping dogs part, but I don’t agree with the first suggestion. I am certainly a button pusher. But I don’t push to generate a good story. I don’t set out to do that, at least.
Life happens and I write about how I feel about it, and how I try to apply the lessons I’ve learned. It’s never my way or the highway. If you read this blog as an instruction manual for life, you’re doing it wrong. What works for me isn’t necessarily going to fit your own needs.
Over time, the subject matter of this blog has broadened. It started out primarily as a blog about OCD and addiction. Then it expanded to include my love of music and my commentary on current events as they relate to our mental state.
I recently rewrote the “about” section of the blog to better explain the whole package. Reiterating it is a pretty good way to end this entry. You can see it here.
She said that she would never have sent such a bad report card to her adult child. I think she was also upset at the suggestion that my parents weren’t paying adequate attention to me back then.
I don’t mind, though. In fact, I’m happy to have that old report card. It put things in perspective for me. It was a snapshot of a difficult time. I used to get angry when thinking about those days. I had a lot of hate in my soul over it.
I don’t feel that way anymore. I think everyone did the best they could with the tools they had back then. The problem was that the tools weren’t that great.
But everything turned out fine.
Below is the original post. Have a look and tell me if you would be upset if such a report card were sent to you.
And to my friend: I appreciate your reaction to the original post very much. Yours is a friendship I treasure, and I don’t want you to worry about this one. Hence the sequel post.
My mother found my fourth-grade report card the other day and mailed it to me. On the surface it shows a chronic C student who doesn’t give a damn about anything.
But when I read between the lines I can see exactly where my 10-year-old head was at.
If you look at it on the surface, you see a straight-C student who occasionally sinks to a D in social studies and math. On the back of the report card are comments each quarter from my teacher, describing me as a kid who puts no effort into anything.
My first thought on reading it was that this teacher didn’t like me, and that the feeling was mutual. In reality, I don’t think she disliked me. I think she saw a kid adrift and was trying to scare my parents into a more rigorous study routine at home.
Unfortunately for her and me, she wasn’t the type of teacher who was going to get through to me. She took the academics very seriously, but did little to appeal to the more creative side of me. Teachers before and after her would have a lot more success in that regard. She didn’t get me and I didn’t get her. A troubled kid needs nurturing personalities to intervene.
Even as an adult who has enjoyed a fair amount of career success it’s the same:The more nurturing bosses get more out of me. The ones who shove a 13-point plan in my face and tell me to do it get nothing but trouble. Luckily for me, I’ve only had a couple bosses like that along the way.
I have been both types of boss myself, and I’ve found that most people do better with supervisors who are nurturing souls.
My parents divorced in the summer of 1980 and it was not a civilized, amicable process. The yelling and instability sent me on to such soothing pursuits as lighting things on fire and shoving the garden hose into an air vent on the side of the house.
I was also sick most of the time with Crohn’s Disease. If you look at my attendance record, there’s a 20-plus day absence in the fourth quarter. That was for one of my extended hospital stays. I missed the class picture shoot that spring, which is probably for the best. I wasn’t a pleasant site.
Erin was pained to look at my report card. She never got grades so consistently bad. She felt sympathy for the teacher, who was obviously trying to get my parents’ attention. But in the raw wake of divorce and the illnesses me and my older brother suffered from, they obviously were distracted. I don’t blame them.
I suppose I should have felt sad looking at the report card, but I don’t. I see it for what it was — a snapshot of a difficult period of time. I survived it, and turned into an excellent student once I had a couple years of college under my belt. I would argue that despite it all, I turned out just fine.
What makes me even happier is that at least to date, my children do well academically. Duncan has some ADHD-related challenges, but his grades are mostly good and he has a heart I didn’t have at that age. That heart will take him far.
Sean is currently the same age I was when I brought home that report card. He’s razor-sharp academically, though like me at that age, he often rushes through his homework, the most notable evidence being his sloppy penmanship. We can work with that.
I’d like to think that their better academic luck reflects that we’re giving them a good home life — better than mine was, at least.
To me, the big lesson is that when a kid brings home a bad report card, it’s not enough to just look at the grades and brand the student a success or failure based on the letters and numbers alone.
There’s always a story behind the grades, and taking the time to know the story is key to helping that child going forward.
My mother found my fourth-grade report card the other day and mailed it to me. On the surface it shows a chronic C student who doesn’t give a damn about anything.
But when I read between the lines I can see exactly where my 10-year-old head was at.
If you look at it on the surface, you see a straight-C student who occasionally sinks to a D in social studies and math. On the back of the report card are comments each quarter from my teacher, describing me as a kid who puts no effort into anything.
My first thought on reading it was that this teacher didn’t like me, and that the feeling was mutual. In reality, I don’t think she disliked me. I think she saw a kid adrift and was trying to scare my parents into a more rigorous study routine at home.
Unfortunately for her and me, she wasn’t the type of teacher who was going to get through to me. She took the academics very seriously, but did little to appeal to the more creative side of me. Teachers before and after her would have a lot more success in that regard. She didn’t get me and I didn’t get her. A troubled kid needs nurturing personalities to intervene.
Even as an adult who has enjoyed a fair amount of career success it’s the same:The more nurturing bosses get more out of me. The ones who shove a 13-point plan in my face and tell me to do it get nothing but trouble. Luckily for me, I’ve only had a couple bosses like that along the way.
I have been both types of boss myself, and I’ve found that most people do better with supervisors who are nurturing souls.
My parents divorced in the summer of 1980 and it was not a civilized, amicable process. The yelling and instability sent me on to such soothing pursuits as lighting things on fire and shoving the garden hose into an air vent on the side of the house.
I was also sick most of the time with Crohn’s Disease. If you look at my attendance record, there’s a 20-plus day absence in the fourth quarter. That was for one of my extended hospital stays. I missed the class picture shoot that spring, which is probably for the best. I wasn’t a pleasant site.
Erin was pained to look at my report card. She never got grades so consistently bad. She felt sympathy for the teacher, who was obviously trying to get my parents’ attention. But in the raw wake of divorce and the illnesses me and my older brother suffered from, they obviously were distracted. I don’t blame them.
I suppose I should have felt sad looking at the report card, but I don’t. I see it for what it was — a snapshot of a difficult period of time. I survived it, and turned into an excellent student once I had a couple years of college under my belt. I would argue that despite it all, I turned out just fine.
What makes me even happier is that at least to date, my children do well academically. Duncan has some ADHD-related challenges, but his grades are mostly good and he has a heart I didn’t have at that age. That heart will take him far.
Sean is currently the same age I was when I brought home that report card. He’s razor-sharp academically, though like me at that age, he often rushes through his homework, the most notable evidence being his sloppy penmanship. We can work with that.
I’d like to think that their better academic luck reflects that we’re giving them a good home life — better than mine was, at least.
To me, the big lesson is that when a kid brings home a bad report card, it’s not enough to just look at the grades and brand the student a success or failure based on the letters and numbers alone.
There’s always a story behind the grades, and taking the time to know the story is key to helping that child going forward.
In all my efforts to get sane a few years ago, I did a lot of stupid things. I’m sharing it with you here so you don’t make the same mistakes:
Mood music:
http://youtu.be/l4Xx_vjGnlo
–Don’t try to control your compulsive binge eating problem by fasting. You won’t make it through the morning, and then you’ll binge like you’ve never binged before.
–Don’t mix alcohol with pills that have the strength of four Advil tablets in an effort to kill your emotional pain as well as your physical pain. That sort of thing might kill you.
–Don’t hate the people in your life for the bad things they’ve done. Remember that they’re fucked up like you and that hating them will never make the pain go away. In fact, it’ll just make it worse.
–Avoid the late-night infomercials. Those things were designed for suckers, especially suckers who can’t sleep because they’re so overcome with fear and anxiety that they see knife-wielding ghosts around every corner. You might find yourself falling for it and spending stupid sums of money on fraudulent bullshit like this.
–Don’t spend every waking hour worrying about and rushing toward the future. You will miss all the beauty in the present that way, and that’s a damn shame.
—Don’t bitch about your job. You’ll just annoy people. Change yourself and your attitude first. Then, if you still don’t like the job, work on finding a new one and keep doing your best at the current job in the meantime.
—Don’t whine about how tough everything is. Life is supposed to be tough at times, and wallowing in it keeps you from moving on to the good stuff. To put it another way, stop seeing yourself as a victim.
People occasionally ask me why this blog covers so much dark ground. Let’s see if I can explain:
My life has been much like any typical run. We all go through our sad and tragic episodes, with a lot of good times and beautiful experiences mixed in. There are happy moments and terrible moments. Some get swallowed up by the darkness and descend into a life of crime, addiction and death. Others find a way out of the darkness and learn to find joy in all the things they were once too blind to notice.
Mood music:
I write a lot about my darker episodes because there has always been a light at the end of the tunnel. I’ve learned to look at adversity as an opportunity to always get somewhere better. I also believe in the saying: “When you find yourself in hell, the only way out of it is through it.”
I write a lot about my addictive behavior so you can understand just how joyful it is when you find recovery.
I write a lot about what I went through at the hands of OCD, fear and anxiety because I found a way through the worst of it and believe I need to share where I’ve been so those who are in their own personal hell can see the way to some peace.
As awesome as my life is today, I still find myself veering into episodes of darkness. I’m not a special case. We all go through that sort of thing. This blog being part diary, I need to write down the bad as well as the good because by documenting it I can put things in perspective and push myself out of the painful periods.
I always try to end a darker post on a positive note. If you skim, you’ll miss it.
I’ve been through some rough patches lately and it has shown through here. But I never stay in the rough patch for long, because I keep moving and learning. Many of you help me do it, and I’m grateful.
I try to be like Leo, the chief of staff in the TV series The West Wing. The character was a raging alcoholic and pill popper who got through it and kept living a life of public service. This clip pretty much sums up the purpose of this blog:
I don’t know my way out of every dark situation, but by sharing stories of the struggles that ended well, I’m hopefully helping a few of you.
If someone offers me a drink and I tell them I’m sober, they accept it and that’s that. If I’m offered food that doesn’t fit my recovery program for compulsive binge eating, I can’t say it that way without getting odd stares.
This is something all compulsive binge eaters deal with in society — a big, ugly lack of understanding that destructive addictive behavior takes on many forms, and that food can be as destructive to the abuser as cocaine.
Mood music:
http://youtu.be/8YNfvl_qhVE
I’ve tried hard to raise awareness in this blog, but even regular readers don’t seem to get it when we’re together in a room and there’s a bunch of food I’m not touching. No flour? No sugar? That’s crazy. One friend suggested it was heavy handed of me to compare my experiences to the kind of hell a runaway alcoholic deals with.
With anxiety and depression I certainly understand, but when I think serious addictions I was thinking some sort of drug abuse – in fact heroin is what popped into my head. Alcohol also a possibility… but binge eating? Come on man. Everyone has a hard time knowing when to say when to junk food, Shit, I gotta throw it in the trash sometimes so I don’t eat it all.
For those who haven’t dealt with food as an addictive substance, his skepticism is understandable.
The second I tell someone I can’t eat what they offer me, the common question is if I am lactose or gluten intolerant. When I say no, the stares get more uncomfortable.
But here’s something I think is important for binge eaters in recovery: It’s unfair to get angry with people for failing to understand the connection between addiction and eating habits. We can’t expect everyone to magically understand. So my advice is that when asked, we just tell the person we have an allergy and walk away.
It’s not a lie. What is an allergy, after all? It’s the body’s inability to process certain substances. For a binge hound like me, I can’t process flour and sugar items because the switch in my brain that goes off when the proper intake is achieved doesn’t work. The more I have the more I crave, and I fill myself with it until I’m on the floor unable to get up.
Even the AA Big Book describes alcoholism as an allergy. It’s right at the beginning of the book in a chapter called “The Doctor’s Opinion,” in which Dr. William D. Silkworth writes:
We believe, and so suggested a few years ago, that the action of alcohol on these chronic alcoholics is a manifestation of an allergy; that the phenomenon of craving is limited to this class and never occurs in the average temperate drinker. These allergic types can never safely use alcohol in any form at all; and once having formed the habit and found they cannot break it, once having lost their self-confidence, their reliance upon things human, their problems pile up on them and become astonishingly difficult to solve.
For others, the same problems are not the result of a dependence on alcohol, but of any number of things like gambling, pain medication, spending, sex and, in my case, binge eating.
I’m getting better at resisting the urge to explain it to people. I just got back from a conference in New York where the question of why I didn’t eat certain things came up a few times. I just said I have an allergy and the discussion was over.
Some people get depressed on their birthday. Not me. The fact that I turn 41 today is a freak of nature. But a year into my forties, I know I have more cleaning up to do.
Mood music:
Item: When I was sick with the Crohn’s Disease as a kid, I lost a lot of blood and developed several side ailments. I’m told by my parents that the doctor’s were going to remove the colon more than once. It didn’t happen. They tell me I was closing in on death more than once. I doubt it was ever that serious. Either way, here I am.
Item: When the OCD was burning out of control, I often felt I’d die young. I was never suicidal, but I had a fatalistic view of things. I just assumed I wasn’t long for this world and I didn’t care. I certainly did a lot to slowly help the dying process along. That’s what addicts do. We feed the addiction compulsively knowing full well what the consequences will be.
When I was a prisoner to fear and anxiety, I really didn’t want to live long. I isolated myself. Fortunately, I never had the guts to do anything about it. And like I said, suicide was never an option.
I spent much of my 30s on the couch with a shattered back, and escaped with the TV. I was breathing, but I was also as good as dead some of the time.
I’ve watched others go before me at a young age. Michael. Sean. Even Peter. Lose the young people in your life often enough and you’ll start assuming you’re next.
When you live for yourself and don’t put faith in God, you’re not really living. When it’s all about you, there no room to let all the other life in. So the soul shrivels and hardens. I’ve been there.
I also had a strange fear of current events and was convinced at one point that the world would burn in a nuclear holocaust before I hit 30. That hasn’t happened yet.
So here I am at 41, and it’s almost comical that I’m still here.
I’m more grateful than you could imagine for the turn of events my life has taken in the last six years.
I notice them now, and I am Blessed far beyond what I probably deserve.
I have a career that I love.
I have the best wife on Earth and two boys that teach me something new every day.
I have many, many friends who have helped me along in more ways than they’ll ever know.
I have my 12-Step program and I’m not giving in to the worst of my addictions.
Most importantly, I have God in my life. When you put your faith in Him, there’s a lot less to be afraid of. Aging is one of the first things you stop worrying about.
So here I am at 41. feeling a lot better about myself than I did at 31. In fact, 31 was one of the low points.
But I’d be in denial if I told you everything was perfect beyond perfect. I wouldn’t tell you that anyway, because I’ve always thought that perfection was a bullshit concept. That makes it all the more ironic and comical that OCD would be the life-long thorn in my side.
I just recently quit smoking, and I’m still missing the hell out of that vice. I haven’t gone on a food binge in nearly three years, but there are still days where I’m not sure I’ve made the best choices; those days where my skin feels just a little too loose and flabby.
I still go to my meetings, but there are many days where I’d rather do anything but go to a meeting. I go because I have to, but I don’t always want to.
And while I have God in my life, I still manage to be an asshole to Him a lot of the time.
At 41, I’m still very much the work in progress. The scars are merely the scaffolding and newly inserted steel beams propping me up.
I don’t know what comes next, but I have much less fear about the unknown.
