coffeebarconfessions

As far as weeks go, last week was overwhelmingly stressful. This Monday I woke up feeling like a crackhead who hadn't slept. Being the extreme creature of habit I am, this means I buried my nose in writing my book all day, and ignored the totality of my responsibilities. It's just so much easier to bypass reality if I'm not actively thinking about it! By the time I checked off every excuse in the book it was 2AM, and I still had to do the dishes, pack my husbands lunch, take the dogs out, brush my teeth and straighten up the house. I also hadn't showered, juiced in 3 days, or done yoga for 5. Sigh. Where did all my progress go? I finally drag my sorry self off the sofa to do the dishes, but I'm feeling so terrible at this point I couldn't even stand up. Like "had to sit on the floor so I didn't pass out" can't stand up. As I sat on the kitchen floor feeling like the walls of sickness were closing back in on me, panic kicked in. An overwhelming

I just found out a girl I went to high-school with passed away from a horrendous battle with leukemia. She wasn't someone I reconnected with in recent years, so I had absolutely no idea what her life turned out like. To say I am taking this news hard is an understatement. All I can picture when I think of her is the wild, boy-crazy party girl we all were, back in the day. When things were simple, the blemishes of life's trials not visible to the naked eye, nothing but a future to sail off into. Did anyone get what we thought we would? I know my friend sure didn't. And while I've spent the better part of nine years sick, almost died a couple of times, and devoted far too much energy to stewing in epic amounts of bitterness and anger at the unfairness of it all, finding out my friend lost her life put my experience in blaring perspective. It could have been any of us, how were we to know? This journey called life, it's no joke. No guarantees, nothing promised. As much

No form of acceptance, positive thinking, self pep-talks or mind over matter triumphs all problems. For as much as those things are critical to surviving the ups and downs of any person's life, so is recognizing when the breaking point is about to snap. Sometimes life is just hard, a situation difficult, reality bites or everything so screwed up it's impossible to keep going. That can be the hardest what is is to accept of all. About a year after I got sick I recklessly flew past that breaking point on roller skates like a bat out of hell. Eight years later I now realize I simply didn't know what else to do. I only related to the world in one way, and that way was broken. Instead of believing I could find another way, I broke too. Finding compassion for that girl who had so much loss, devastation, heartache and grief ahead of her is hard. I really wanna reach back in time and smack her silly. I want to scream at the top of my lungs to get it together, take the horrible illn

My husband gets a fair amount of vacation time. Not as much as schoolteachers, say, but four weeks is far more than most in corporate America are blessed with. Sadly this year we haven't had a penny to spare for travel, so save for a few whirlwind road-trips to L.A. to see my family, we've "stay-cationed," not vacationed. It's been a telling experience, to say the least. The first week he took off in January sucked. We both got a horrible, terrible, no good, very bad flu and spent nine whole days hacking up a lung and watching Law & Order re-runs. Yeah, it sucked.  The second week he took in April was dedicated to getting our taxes done. That one was pretty bad, too. See, I was supposed to have done something throughout the year to keep our paperwork organized, not wait until early April to start on twelve months of record keeping. Realistically, my basic level of functioning at that time was so low I was barely getting the bills paid and dogs fed on a regula

One would think I entirely discarded my resolve, to stop reacting to every little problem with epic magnitude. They might even say I forgot each inch of progress I've made over the last few months. It's what I would say, were I able to observe my behavior objectively, and free of the entanglement of the first-person experience. Because no matter what cliche phrases, to pep myself out of misery, my lips mumbled, none of it mattered more than the despair radiating from my heart. The certain knowledge in my head promised me my mere existence was nothing more than a giant mistake and responsible for not only my own misery, but the heartache and opportunity lost of everyone else I know, too. Imagine the size of that ego! After flipping out on myself, getting into a big fight with my husband, feeling so guilty about the whole thing I wailed and cried with the fervor of La Llarona, and ultimately realizing all this drama was completely self-indulgent and pointless, but still finding m

Right as I feel like I am beginning to get a handle on my life, a distracting old friend decides to come visit. She doesn't show her pesky face nearly as much as she used to, but no sooner do I start to feel the peace of progress moving my life forward, before I am staring my inner rebel square in the eye. A restlessness stirs within me. The need to not be "perfect" becomes overwhelmingly compelling. It isn't long before the compulsion to break rules, especially those of my own design, consumes me.  I've been really good for a while now, mindful of my bad habits and the havoc they wreak. Quite frankly I am basking in the afterglow of a fundamental shift in the way I look at the world. I feel freedom in ways I haven't felt in years, if ever. My ability to accept my given circumstances, and seek ways to change what doesn't work by changing me, not my unchangeable circumstances, is revolutionizing the quality of my life. Until tonight. We danced a lively litt

Summer is finally over and I am starting to walk my dogs again. Except they forgot how to walk, at least with manners. Has it really been that long, since I wasn't so absorbed with myself and my own problems, that such regression was able to occur? Porkie exuberantly gallops as she yanks against the leash like a bucking bronco. Yorkie thinks we can stop for 30 second intervals every 50 steps so he can sniff and pee, and still keep our target heart rate in the cardio range. It's not their fault, though. The only one I have to blame is myself. If blaming did any good. Reality doesn't change if I blame, though, so I've kinda stopped doing it. I can go all Opus Dei on myself, like the albino in The Da Vinci Code , and it still won't change the fact that when I walk my dogs tomorrow Porkie will gallop against the leash and Yorkie will lag behind. It's been two and a half months since I declared myself utterly unable to keep living life like I was. I quieted everythin

Ahhhh Halloween. I suppose I could just say Snickers, Reese's Pieces, Butterfinger, Hershey's, Kit Kat, or Twix to convey the same meaning. It's all the same poor quality, trans-fat laden crap bursting with refined sugar and negative nutritional value. Did that stop me from eating my way through far more than my fair share? Noooooo. But as I gobbled up all this chocolate I started feeling really bad. It's been a while since I had more than a few squares of not-very-sweet dark chocolate at a time. In fact, since I started juicing a few months back, my diet has improved exponentially. I don't think I realized it until I sat feeling like a sausage about to burst from its casing as I continued to shove chocolate down my throat. I mean I couldn't stop. It was pathetic, the more I ate the more I wanted and the worse I felt, so the more I wanted so the more I ate!  As intense food cravings consumed me I realized something else was going on here. Something that explaine