The last 24 hours have been frustrating for me on a physical level. I thought I was building up my steam to chug along like I didn't have major surgery a month ago, but I have been taken down a notch.

You see, I have existing problems with a spine that just wasn't made right. Through physical therapy, I was given core exercises to take more of the basic balancing duties away from my back (which is sorely lacking). I knew, given the type of surgery I had and my reluctance to use my abdominal muscles for much of anything, there was a decent chance that my original pains would all resurface when my constant tummy vigilance failed.

Fortunately, I only work in the mornings on Fridays, so I was able to come home and take the good stuff in my pain-killer arsenal. Unfortunately, I didn't get ahead of the pain early enough, and I couldn't find relief. I was absolutely exhausted (in no small part due to the narcotics and muscle relaxers) and fell asleep on the couch.

Even though my mind was all fuzzy and drooly, my nerves were still plenty riled up. I must have been writhing around quite a bit on the couch, trying in vain to find a comfortable way to rest my body. I woke up at 1:30 when I flung myself to the floor, taking one of the couch cushions (which are attached down with Velcro, by the way) with me. I wanted to give into tears with the aches I was feeling, but I was determined not to feel sorry for myself.

I'm not frustrated with the lumbosacral pain. I know that Nick is still angry with it, but I've come to a place of acceptance. To quote my mother, "It is what it is." It was almost five years ago exactly when they told me that I had Mom's genetic disorder and all it entailed. I think he still believes in a world where there is a definitive answer to everything.

What I am frustrated with is that through my thrashing, I managed to tear my incisions. When I noticed, I felt ill: I thought I was almost to the other side of this recovery. Nick had a 10 mile race today, and the start/finish was walking distance from our condo. It was in my plans to walk over to the park about an hour after the official start time to cheer my friends as they finished. I knew that those plans were scratched as soon as I spotted blood.

Everything seems to be closed back up today (thankfully), but I'm back to being afraid to move like I was in the early days after surgery…and now I'm afraid to sleep as well. So, yeah. Frustrated.

I am in the process of reviewing drafts that I have saved over the last few years. I saved the following draft on July 11, 2010. Now, a year later, I think it's about time to finish her up…but you'll notice that the beginning bits are a bit outdated now.

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(Written 7.11.10)

Forgive me for being a little wistful over the next few months. 2010 is shaping up to be a year where a lot of time and hard work is paying off, and I wouldn't really be me if I didn't give credence to the past while celebrating the present. On the way to work the other day, the DJs were discussing the had-I-known-then-what-I-know-now conundrum, and I haven't been able to get the topic off my mind.

In less than six months, I will marry Nick. I think back to myself seven years ago when I tried this the first time. There are a lot of things I liked about that Laura, mainly the innocence. She thought that she could have anything she wanted if she just wanted it badly enough. She had her whole life ahead of her, which translated roughly to an idea bordering on immortality.

She had never truly experienced death, save for elderly relatives who passed in her early youth and whom she never really knew to begin with. The idea that someone close to her could leave was so foreign that it hinged on ludicrous. She also believed that promises are always upheld, regardless of the source. I truly was a little Pollyanna, and nothing could ever go wrong if I just kept my spirits up and hoped for the very best.



That girl also had zero ability to cope with hardship, and lacked faith in her own strength. As has been documented throughout the archives of this blog, her world as she knew it did eventually crash. It was sudden and the wake was devastating. Like Pollyanna being told that she may never walk again, for the first time I couldn't find anything to be happy about. I too needed the love and support of the people in my life to climb my way back out.

Yes, I miss her innocence, but mostly I am sad that she had to find out the hard way that there isn't always an obvious silver lining, that you have to go looking for the good. I do not miss her fear that if everything wasn't always "just so" that something catastrophic would happen or that everyone would judge her incompetent at life. It's the coming of age that I suppose we all go through.

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(Written 7.10.11)

I became too wistful to publish this last year. My memory is fairly good, but I have a tendency to romanticize the past. When an alternate reality hued with rosier shades presents itself, melancholy is a foregone conclusion. 2010 did end up to be a year where a lot of my goals were realized…but at the time this was written, I was beat.

I have never known exhaustion so complete as I had during my last few months of school. A perfectionist in almost everything, I refused to accept anything other than an A. Those last few really difficult classes came with professors who were extremely stingy with their top marks. I wrote my heart out. I researched until my brain felt ready to burst. I raked my papers over coals in effort to see them through the eyes of an unsympathetic audience. I scribbled all over them with a red pen, rewrote awkward passages, and gave it everything I had.

Then it was over, and I graduated with top honors.

See, the innocent Laura of yore didn't have it in her to make the sacrifices it took to finish her degree. She did not value herself—neither her development nor her sense of accomplishment—enough to realize that finishing her degree was something she had to do because it was important to her. It really wasn't about anybody else…that's something I didn't understand before.

Reminiscing the past is fine as long as you don't let it pull you in. I would have to sacrifice a lot to return to a different time. The tradeoff would never be worthwhile, not with any terms. I regret that I am entering the next decade more jaded than I entered the last, but that's life. Innocence is a gift, and it's special because it's not meant to last forever.

I still see the glass as half-full even though I know that it could very easily go the other way. I am still a Pollyanna, even though it irritates the pessimists. (Hi, Brenda! Hi, Michelle! Hi, Nick!) I am proud of this. Today, my optimism is the result of a choice. Yesterday, my optimism existed because I couldn't fathom anything going wrong.

Making the choice gives me more strength than an assumption never could. I still like thinking about what if…what if I knew then what I know now? Quite frankly, I would not have been able to handle it. Knowing more is the reward of time, and I'll accept my prize gratefully.

I have been home from the hospital for 10 whole days now—all the while looking for things to occupy my time. I've started a handful of posts, but they all get too serious and heavy, so I leave the drafts to think about later when I'm feeling light again. That's been my pattern for quite some time now. There's one out there from March titled Procrastination. I don't remember what it's about, and I always mean to click on it to figure out what I was trying to spit out…but inevitably I put it off for another time.

Self-fulfilling prophecy right there, my friends!

My blog turned seven years old last month. I've been more reluctant to publish in the last few years, but I love that my life has been chronicled from innocent goofiness, to loss, to illness, to aloofness. It's an eloquent sequence that I could not have captured in one place because I needed my voice to change in the process.

Of all the gems of wisdom my mother shared with me, one echoes in my head more than others: everybody has a story. I like thinking about the stories, thinking of myself in those stories, and examining how I would feel if they were my stories. Along the way, I landed in my own.

I started blogging to keep in touch with family. At the time, I had been living 1,200 miles from home. The early stuff is very rough, and I am embarrassed just reading those entries…but they were geared toward a specific audience who wanted to feel like they were part of my day-to-day life. It was an inane, one-sided conversation.

I also remember struggling with what I could write that wouldn't offend anybody ever. The heavy censorship I placed on myself crippled me for awhile. I got over that fear with time. I don't think I'm particularly offensive anyway, but I'm such a little goody two-shoes—seriously, it's sickening.

As I said, eventually I got over the fear of stating that I think low carb diets are ridiculous and that I didn't particularly care for meat. Sorry if you were offended. (Go ahead, roll your eyes.) I had just been through a major transformation while living so far away from my family, and diet and clean living was/is something of a major fascination for me. I lived and breathed macronutrients and micronutrients. I ate that stuff up—pun most certainly intended. I had a lot of silly opinions that were very important at the time.

The first year of blogging was a very manual process. The site was a simple, hard-coded, static page. At the end of every month, I would save the index file with a unique file name, then save the blank copy of the index file so I could start writing for the next month (that's back when I published something every single month—usually multiple times each month…total Bizzaro World, right?). Then I went in and edited the archive page to add the latest month. Wow, I am exhausted just typing all that out. I had a picture page then, too. I suppose it was my Facebook page before Facebook existed—I like taking pictures, but pictures aren't very important now that I'm living close to home again (so they're gone).

Ooh, but I got a new haircut and low lights yesterday! (Ignore the paleness. See first paragraph: had major surgery less than two weeks ago.)

In 2005, I had enough with all of the hard-coding and the blog was switched over to a software that would store all entries to a database for archival automatically. At the time, I was married to a PHP/MySQL programmer, and the decision to use an open source software was a no-brainer. I even had someone in my pocket to install Serendipity for me!

Blogging is so easy today. I think, when I am old and gray, I will say that one of the greatest developments that I have seen over the span of my lifetime was the explosion of social media. Once upon a time, a person actually had to buy a domain and know HTML at the very least. Now, sites offer blogging profiles as an assumed service free-of-charge. I am excited that so many more people have the opportunity to be heard. Guys, that's pretty damn cool.

I don't think I write to be heard…not at the forefront anyway. I write to salve hurts, to take a photograph with words, and to remember all the charming little moments of life that are so easily forgotten when things get rough. By the end of 2005, the tone of my writing changed.

But then, the tone of my life had changed as well. I bled across the keyboard of my laptop for most of 2006.

That's not to say that there were not happy moments (there were many). Quite simply, my life had new dimensions that I needed to explore. I was feeling more than I ever cared to, and I had to clean out my wounds before they would heal properly (they have).

And what's left of the rubble in that procrastination draft? I miss writing. I miss looking for the entertaining parts of my day that I can "embellish" into a feature-length story.

I say that I started this blog for family, but really I started it for my mother because she missed me terribly. For the longest time, she was my only reader. Then she found it humorous enough that she spread the word. I think that's been part of my hang up: who is left to read now that Mom is gone?

I am always surprised when someone comments on a post because I don't know why anyone would hang around here when I have been so inconsistent. I stopped looking at website traffic eons ago…but apparently some of you are still out there. Thank you for caring enough to share my life and stop by for a visit now and then. I think I've got more family out there than I realize.

One of these days, I really will take a look at that Procrastination draft. Maybe tomorrow. More to come…