Just Me

Recently, I celebrated being alcohol-free for 6 months. What is interesting is that the date – April 12th – was my dad’s heavenly birthday. He would have been 71. Also interesting is that it was alcohol that killed my father. He had a terrible drinking habit and it got out of hand during his last days. He was binge drinking a lot and on that night that he died, he had been drinking several beers until he ended up having what was probably his sixth and final heart attack. He had recently had heart surgery and while he was warned to cut back on alcohol, he didn’t listen. And in the end, his drinking is what killed him. That fact was not lost on me when I was in the hospital a little over 6 months ago and I was recovering from alcohol-induced pancreatitis. I was forced to take a good hard look at just how badly my desire to destroy myself had gotten. Up until then, I had lost my passion for life, and my desire to live. But when I was in that hospital, I made one decision: I want to live. ...

In my last blog post, I was talking about how I was going to apply for a job as an assistant to people with disabilities. The place I was going to apply for this job called such a person a “direct support professional,” or DSP for short. I applied for the job and was eventually hired. After some time spent training, I was able to actually do that kind of work. Since this was my first “real” job after years of odd jobs babysitting, petsitting, cleaning offices and houses and as a working writer who worked from home, I have since learned all of the real-world rules about having a real job and being a part of the working world. And despite being profoundly deaf (and without a hearing aid – my last hearing aid caused my ear to become infected and I was pretty much against getting a new one), I was still able to work this job. And that was great. Then my anxiety and panic attacks started up again – and this time, more frequently than they have in the past – but I have been figuring out ways...

A lot of people have often told me that I shouldn’t take my nocturnal dreams so seriously. “They’re just dreams,” they say. Or there’s the scientific explanation about why we have dreams or some other out-there theory. But I do pay attention to the dreams that I have. My dreams have inspired my writing for years. I have often gotten ideas for stories because of my dreams, or I’ll have a “dream story” and write the story exactly as I dreamed it. (Though there are times I’ll need to add details or something else to make the story work.) My dreams have also included lost loved ones, and often, when I have shared such dreams, sometimes someone says that maybe it was really a visitation by this person. Shortly after her death, my mom was in my dreams a lot. There was even one dream I had where she had a dog with her – a dog I never knew but who my cousin told me had belonged to both of my parents. My dad, grandmother, grandfather and another cousin have also been in my drea...

“Only in America do we spend one day of the year being grateful for what we have then going out the next day of that same year to buy more stuff.” This is something that I muttered to my son this morning as I was watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade on TV this morning. And while that comment made my son laugh, I couldn’t help but wonder at how true it is. Then again, the only shopping I am doing tomorrow is Christmas gifts for my kids. I won’t be buying them everything; just the expensive stuff (and hoping I can score good deals on them!). Then I started thinking about an article I read the other day about how that whole story of the first Thanksgiving being between the Pilgrims and Native Americans was a lie. Then about how there are so many people reminding us about how so many Native Americans were slaughtered and driven from their land after the arrival of the people on the Mayflower. (We get the same kind of lecture every Columbus Day!) Yes, the...

Today is the official one-month anniversary of when I stopped drinking alcohol. I have been officially alcohol-free for an entire month. Just a little over a month ago, on October 11, I was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance because I was having severe chest pains. My kids and I thought it was a heart attack, but it wasn’t a heart attack. It was pancreatitis. And it struck right after I finished drinking one beer. Just one! Up until then, I don’t think I’d ever heard of pancreatitis. Sure, maybe it was discussed during a Health class I took in college, but I don’t remember for sure. I didn’t know what pancreatitis was. I didn’t know I could get it. Hell, I didn’t think I’d get anything from drinking so much alcohol, since I’d already been drinking heavily up until then and the only thing I had suffered from were some really bad hangovers. I thought I was fine, but I wasn’t. I didn’t think I would get hit with anything serious because of my drinking, but I did. Sure, I knew that dri...