Wow – I actually got some sleep last night

Well, that was unexpected. I counted up how much sleep I got last night, and it was 9.5 hours. Amazing. After getting 4.5 hours the night before, and 5.75 hours the night before that… This is pretty cool.

Actually feeling like I got some sleep – which isn’t the same as being fully rested (I’m not)… it’s something I could get used to.

I keep thinking / talking about sleep, because it’s so vital – especially for those of us with TBI/concussion issues. A tired brain is an agitated brain. And being agitated on top of all the COVID stuff is just not good.

I suspect that a lot of the issues people have been having around the pandemic and the lockdowns and everything have been exacerbated by underlying physiology. Mentally, we can understand that we need to play it safe. But physically, we get tired – so tired – and for a lot of us, that means our brains stop working the way we need them to.

And when our brains stop working the way we need (and expect), then we can get into a “crisis of self-hood” as I think of it. When we don’t have the same kinds of reactions we expect to have, we can lose touch with our Sense-Of-Self, and that adds to our stress.

It’s not just TBI that scrambles that. It’s hardships that exacerbate our TBI issues. And when you’ve been in recovery for an extended period of time, it can be easy, so easy, to lose touch with the fact that yeah, you’re still impacted. And yeah, your brain still struggles. And yeah, it affects everything in life.

Which is why getting some sleep thrills me so much. Because it means my brain and body actually have a chance to recover and get back to some baseline of at least some competency. And after weeks and weeks and months and months of doing without a level of competency I used to be at before this pandemic hit… well, that’s pretty cool.

Wow. Amazing.

 

The really stupid thing that got me back on this blog…

Last week, I was on a call with a life coach who was pitching their neuro-based approach to peak performance. They’re a trained neuropsychologist, and they had a handful of ways to “hack” the brain so you can basically flip the switch on your success. Super-charge it. Turn it on in ways that we usually instinctively turn it off.

Okay, great. I’m always up for ways to do that. I’ve been doing it, myself, for years, using neuropsychological principles.

But a couple things jumped out at me during that call, that seemed really really stupid. And I don’t mean “stupid” in a way that belittles people with cognitive difficulties. I mean it in the way that professionally trained people who should know better are leading people down a path that goes directly against what they should know, due to their professional training.

Before I go on, let me say that one of the things that discouraged me from keeping up this blog has been all the professional input about concussions, over the past several years, that has not helped. There’s a whole “concussion industry” that’s giving people really mixed messages – from people who have never sustained mTBIs or other sorts of brain injuries (that they’re admitting, anyway). And it’s made it all the harder to have a conversation about what mTBI is, how it affects you, and what you can actually do about it. I mean… I just don’t know where to start.

More on that later. Let’s get back to the professional stupidity.

Okay, so I was on this call, and the neuropsych was telling people that we can turn our lives around by breaking mental barriers. Find something that you’re afraid to do, and do it over and over and over again, using “exposure therapy”. Address your core beliefs about who you are and what you think you can do. Overcome those beliefs by not telling yourself over and over that you can’t do something. Use visualizations to “pre-wire” your system for success. And get comfortable with uncertainty.

All sorts of alarms went off with me on this, especially because the person talking admitted to having been very close with someone who had sustained a TBI years before they met them, and they had ignored the warning signs of suicidal thoughts… they’d even encouraged them to just take some anti-depressant meds — the very same meds which will set off someone with a history of TBI. Long story short, just after they told their friend to take some meds, that friend killed themself. Traumatic, to be sure.

And just as traumatic was the idea that someone who was trained as a neuropsychologist was telling someone to do something (take meds) that even I, from passing conversations with a neuropsych, know can be hugely problematic for a brain injury survivor.

Not only that, but this person was positioning themself as an expert in brain topics, immediately after revealing this massive “tell” about just how clueless they were/are.

Um. Okay.

And then they proceed to talk about how doing things like facing your fears, visualizing, and self-talk will get you on the right track and turn your life around.

Well, okay, so for a lot of people it will do that. But for someone with underlying physiological neurological issues (e.g., someone whose wiring has been rearranged by concussion/traumatic brain injury), those things will only go so far.

It would have been much more helpful, if they’d called out the fact that people with organic/physiological brain issues operate by different rules. And we have to live by those rules, day after day, if we’re going to be able to do things like visualize and self-talk our way to success.

Things like:

• Get enough sleep
• Drink enough water / stay hydrated
• Get regular exercise
• Find ways to calm down the over-active and easily amped-up system
• Keep your blood sugar steady by eating decent meals regularly (and stay away from junk food)
• Have a daily routine that reinforces your understanding of who you are and what you can reasonably expect of yourself, day after day.

If we TBI survivors don’t take care of the basics — food, water, sleep, routine — nothing else is worth much. At all.

And my heart aches for all the people (like me) out there who are being told, each and every day, that their failures are due to bad messages they’re giving themselves, or letting their fear run their lives. I think it was such a waste for the neuropsych’s friend to lose their life (in part) because of the terrible advice that they should have known better than to give. I also get so sick and tired of people lecturing me/us about how we just need to get our attitudes aligned with the right sort of mentality, and then our lives will dramatically change for the better. Never mind the underlying issues with fatigue and irritability and not knowing what the h*ll to expect from ourselves and our systems, from moment to moment, because our brain injury has turned us into someone we don’t recognize anymore. We’re being blamed for results that stem directly from our organic/physiological situation, without anyone even admitting that getting your wires crossed by a car accident, a fall, an assault, or a tackle gone wrong, can and does have an effect on your brain’s function.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I do believe that pretty much all of us spend way too much time being afraid and telling ourselves the wrong things about ourselves and our chances. We don’t do enough of the kinds of things that can and will make us successful.  And we generally don’t have the right mentality that sets us up for success.

But none of those performance-enhancement approaches are going to get much traction, if we don’t address the physical facts of our neurological situation. Failure is not all in our minds. It’s also in our brains. And until we learn to support / heal our brains and do the things we need to do — regularly, routinely, predictably — all the self-talk in the world isn’t going to be much help. At all.

Until we get ourselves on a good schedule – and stay there – eat the right foods (for us), drink enough water, exercise on a regular basis, and get decent amounts of sleep on a regular basis… Until we develop a new Sense Of Self that tells us who we are and what we can expect from ourselves… Until we redefine ourselves in ways that are solid and predictable… those mentality tactics are just going to be all in someone’s mind.

And the fact that a neuropsychologist was spouting all this stuff without prefacing their talk with a disclaimer… well, that just pisses me off. If they’d said something like, “What I’m about to share is intended for people without underlying neurological issues, some of which may have been sustained a long time ago, but are still having an impact in you life”, it would have set much better with me.

But they didn’t. So, there we are.

Oh, well. It’s a beautiful Sunday, and I have another 24 hours till I have to be ON for work again. So, I might as well enjoy myself. This isn’t the first time this sort of professional stupidity took the steering wheel. And it certainly won’t be the last.

Life goes on.

So, onward.

I’ve missed this

I have to say, I have missed this blog. I’ve been so busy, over the past year or so that I just haven’t done this justice. Or maybe it just felt like I was repeating myself and I was boring my own self.

That’s been known to happen 😏

But things have both leveled out and become chaotically familiar. And I’m not as scattered as I was before. So, it’s time to go a bit deeper with certain parts of my life and really find out what’s there. We don’t have enough depth, in my opinion, so rather than complaining, I’m going to do something about it.

One of the things I need to do is get $$$ support for this blog. I’ve been wanting to do it for years, but I’m feeling even more impetus to do it now. I’ve experienced a pretty amazing recovery from a long series of mild TBIs and I feel this intense drive to pass on what I’ve learned.

It’s worked for me. I need to help others, as well.

And I need to do it on a much larger scale than I have been. So, I’m going to put some thought into how to do that.

If you have any suggestions, let me know.

And that’s all for now.

Getting my balance back — and getting to a stopping place

Well, that was exciting… The summer (thank heavens) is over, and now I can get my life back.

I don’t do well in the summertime. It’s a shame, because everybody else seems to have such a great time with it, running around, doing so much, getting suntans and extra exercise.

I, on the other hand, am not a fan. There are too many hours of sunlight in the day. And the days are hot… wet… uncomfortable in general. I’m sensitive to light and smells and noise, and summertime is full of all of the above. Not much fun.

I also have trouble sleeping in the heat. Keeping the A/C on in my bedroom (and all through the house, for that matter) is a constant source of stress with the noise. When I’m tired, I’m more sensitive to sound, so a moderately noisy air conditioner sounds like a massive fan in an airplane hangar. And that doesn’t help me sleep.

If I can’t sleep, I become more irritable. Volatile. Raging. It’s a problem. I’m not proud of how I’ve gone off the rails a few times, this summer. Between the work stress and summer stress… it’s not good.

I’ve been keeping really busy with work at my day job (sad face) and my own projects (happy face). It’s taken my mind off many of my troubles, but it’s also tired me out. Again, the fatigue business. And that leads to me drinking too much coffee… which leads to more headaches, difficulty sleeping… the same old vicious self-perpetuating cycle.

But now summer is over. Thank Heavens. And I can settle in for the next three months of enjoyment. I love fall. I love winter. I love spring. And now I get to take a break from summer.

I’m also giving myself a break from some of the Massive Undertakings I launched over the summertime. I came up with some pretty awesome plans that I’m convinced could be Very Big Indeed. The thing is, I really don’t have the capacity to follow through on all of them. I really bit off more than I can chew, so to speak, and that’s been dragging me down. I need to pick and choose what I’ll work on… and let the other stuff go.

But it’s all for the best, because as I narrow down my activities (e.g., writing and creating great content that I can license to others, versus running an entire company based on my ideas), I am operating from an understanding how a larger company would — and could — use my content to build their business.

I’m learning about the larger context for my writing, and that’s good. It’s very good indeed.

So, yes, sometimes I need to stop, in order to go. And learning to recognize my limitations and accommodate them is the first step towards being able to make some real progress.

It’s all a process.

Onward…!

The one sure way I can tell I’m not feeling well, physically

Exercise turns on my brain – in more ways than one. So does this blog.

I tend to have a hard time figuring out when I’m not doing well, physically speaking. When I’m in pain, or when I’m not getting my exercise, or I’m generally not feeling great in my body.

I can get so wrapped up in my life — like for the past three weekends, when I had so much to do, and work was full of pressure — that I don’t get regular exercise, and the pain starts to bother me… including headaches. But I’m so busy, I don’t notice. It’s all I can do, to keep up.

Of course, eventually, I don’t keep up. I get bogged down. My head doesn’t work right. My thoughts are scattered and unreliable, and I stop using my adaptations to make sure I’m okay.

The one sure way I can tell when I’m headed off the rails, is when I don’t blog here. It doesn’t take me long to write a post. It takes 10-20 minutes to put something together. And I have more than that much free time, each morning, the way I’ve structured my days. If I can’t spare 10-20 minutes to write something here, then my life has really taken a turn for the worse, and I need to get myself back on track.

That means… exercise. Like I did this morning. I had an extra-long bike ride, then I did an extra set of lifts with my little weights. And while I was doing that, I thought about how I can get more weight lifting (with machines) in my life. There are some great gyms at the different buildings of my work campus, and one of them has a pool. So, I need to avail myself of the resources and take steps. Because I’m gaining weight, losing muscle tone, and my thinking has not been as sharp as I’d like it to be.

If I can manage to blog here regularly, it means my executive function is firing on all cylinders. It means I have enough energy to get into my day. It means I’m being pro-active and taking initiative in my life. It means I have left myself some wiggle room to do what needs to be done, and that’s exactly what I need to in my daily life.

I’ve been letting myself get too tired, lately. Work has been very, very busy, and also stressful. Long hours, especially every other weekend when we have software releases and I need to work overnight hours. This weekend is one of those times, and after starting work at 8:00 a.m. yesterday, I was till 4:00 a.m. this morning, working on problems that other people caused.

I’m not in a position to change jobs, right now, so I just have to tough it out… or look for another position at the company, so I don’t have to get dragged through the horror of outside interviews and having to prove myself all over again. Toughing it out and managing things as they are is actually more appealing to me than switching positions, at this point. I like most of the people I work with. Some of them make me crazy, but most of them I love… and they love me. So, there’s that.

Can’t put a price on love, you know?

Anyway, I’m a little delirious after getting only 4 hours of sleep last night (and I need to check in later today to see how things are going with work). I just need to get back in tune with myself and get myself back on track about my physical health and my mental state — support the body, and the brain will follow suit, is what I say. That’s always been the case with my TBI-addled brain. Not until I got into regular exercise and focused on taking care of my body, did my brain start to cooperate… and heal.

Until then, all bets were off. And I was miserable.

So, it’s better if I get my act together and get my exercise back on track. And keep blogging here. Each and every day. Or at least as often as I can manage.

Concussion / mild TBI recovery is not only possible, but highly likely. As many people need to know this as I can tell in one lifetime.

ONward.

UPward.

Unless we understand #TBI / #Concussion, we can’t really treat it

I’ve been more absent from this blog, this month, than I’d intended. Life… you know? It’s been very busy at work, and things are shifting with my role. I’ve had some additional training and workshops, and I’m still trying to figure out where I fit in.

Fortunately, I have help. There are a lot of folks at work who are eager to step in and pull people up to the level they need to be at. I’m not the only one who’s having some challenges navigating the new organizational structure, but fortunately, the expectation is that each and every one of us is going to have challenges and struggle somewhat.

So, that’s helpful, overall.

Getting support at work frees me up to get back to my mission: To write about long-term recovery from concussion / mild traumatic brain injury, and show that it is possible to restore your life after you’ve sustained a brain injury. There is a real dearth of information about this out in the world, and I’m (still) on a mission to do something about that.

I realize that all my … “gyrations” at work have distracted me from this mission. It’s been siphoning off all my energy and distracting me, which is the opposite of what I want and need. So, I’m settling down in my job, chilling out, and looking to my long-term future… 10… 15… 20… 30 years in the future.

And that frees me up to concentrate on the here-and-now with greater focus. It lets me get back to my mission.

The other day, while researching a post, I came across this article:

New Advice to Move More After a Concussion

When young athletes sustain concussions, they are typically told to rest until all symptoms disappear. That means no physical activity, reading, screen time or friends, and little light exposure, for multiple days and, in severe cases, weeks.

Restricting all forms of activity after a concussion is known as “cocooning.” But now new guidelines, written by an international panel of concussion experts and published this month in The British Journal of Sports Medicine, question that practice. Instead of cocooning, the new guidelines suggest that most young athletes should be encouraged to start being physically active within a day or two after the injury.

“The brain benefits from movement and exercise, including after a concussion,” says Dr. John Leddy, a professor of orthopedics at the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at the University at Buffalo, and one of the co-authors of the new guidelines.

And it makes sense to me. Because when you think about concussion / TBI in terms of what it is (an injury that disrupts connections and releases a bunch of “gunk” into the brain that shouldn’t be there), and you think about the brain in terms of what it does (processes information based on connections and makes new connections where none existed before), and you think about how the body works (moves all of that information through  – mentally and physically), then cocooning probably isn’t the thing to do for long periods of time.

TBI is a tricky thing. It’s different for everyone, of course, and something that works for one person might not work for another. But we’re all walking around in human bodies, and those human bodies function pretty much the same way.

So, if we use the principles of how the body and brain work, and we understand the nature of concussion, and we understand the dynamics of the whole scenario, new treatment approaches become clearer.

It surprises me a little bit that it took till May, 2017, to figure out how to better treat concussions. Then again, until the past 10-15 years or so, people didn’t really take “mild” traumatic brain injury that seriously. Everybody just laughed it off like it was no big deal.

Then we started to realize that onetime football players were ending up in a bad way — worse than the general public. And football players and their families started going public about their struggles. And people started talking — out loud — about stuff that used to be a source of terrible shame and embarrassment. The kinds of stuff that “you just didn’t talk about”, back in the day.

A lot has changed, thanks to research and increased awareness.

And we’re making progress in many areas.

But still, it surprises me, how much we don’t know… how much we still overlook… and how many people continue to struggle, months and years after a concussion or mTBI.

I have my own struggles, sure. A lot of the problems I had haven’t gone away completely. But after all these years of actively working on solutions, I’m doing a whole lot better at managing them, and that’s made all the difference. Maybe it’s true that brain injury can never be reversed, but then, life can never be reversed, and if we treat concussion issues as just another aspect of life that needs to be taken seriously and managed appropriately, it is very possible to have a “regular” life afterwards.

Sure, you’ll have to change some things. You’ll have to adjust. But life is full of those kinds of requirements. We don’t get a “pass” when we get injured, and the world jumps in to protect us. We just get a different set of challenges and difficulties and benefits to work with.

That being said, mental rigidity is probably one of the biggest hurdles to TBI recovery. The very black-and-white thinking that takes over when your brain gets injured can cause the injury to become even worse. Because you’re locked in a straitjacket of limited thinking. Getting your mindset out of the box and trying different things, living differently, getting on with your life, and being mindful about stuff… that can help hugely. I know it helped me more than I can say.

So, there are just a few more days left in Brain Injury Awareness Month. I’ve fallen far short of my stated plan to focus on brain injury recovery for the duration. I had such great plans… But of course… life. And my limits.

Turns out, what I’m taking away from Brain Injury Awareness Month is a reminder of how — yet again — I need to adjust my commitments and expectations and go a bit easier on myself. The thing to remember is that life goes on. And while I didn’t live up to my own expectations, the world keeps turning, the sun rises and sets, it snows and the snow melts, and the songbirds return to my bird feeder.

For today, that’s enough. It’s more than enough.

Back in my own space again

Today I move at my own pace – blank slate

I’m back in my home office again.

It’s been months, since I was in here regularly. I had been working downstairs in the dining room, where I have better wireless connectivity and I can move around the downstairs without disturbing my spouse.

But nowadays, I really need to get back into my office. My study. My refuge. Everything in this room is here because I want it to be. I need it. I value it. That’s not to say I don’t want and value what’s downstairs. I do. It’s just not all mine, and it’s shared space with not only my spouse but anybody else who comes over to the house.

Granted, there are not that many people who come by, anymore. I can’t deal with having a lot of people in my home. Not anymore. We used to have company over a lot. But in the past several years, that’s faded away. I’m too tired, by the end of each week, to deal with people. And when I do have extra social activities on the weekend, it really takes a lot out of me. I hate that it does, and I do plenty to offset it — like working on my stamina and pacing myself better during the week — but it’s still an issue.

A tired brain is a cranky brain. And when my brain is cranky, it’s not much fun to be around.

Truly.

And too many other people have found out. I’ve gone ballistic on some folks whose only crime was being in my house when I was too tired to interact with them. They were friends, and they considered me a friend. But now they don’t talk to me. Oh, well. So it goes. At times, my life is easier without having a lot of regular friends in it, to tell the truth. Does that sound sad? It’s not. I need my peace and quiet. I need my rest. There’s only so much of other people I can take, even on my best days.

That being said, I’d been able to work downstairs in the dining room, because we rarely use the room for eating, except when we have company.  We use it to store things — boxes we haven’t decided what to do with, yet, as well as other packing materials. Papers and mail that isn’t time-sensitive and just needs a place to “sit” till I figure out what to do with them all. Books. Books. More books. Things we’ve moved from other rooms, to make space for our everyday lives. And there’s room for me to set up a workspace at the dining room, which is exactly what I’d done over the winter. The dining room is warmer than my study in the fall and winter, in any case, so that’s part of why I moved my “operations” there.

But not having my own space has gotten to me. I need to close a door behind me and settle into my own frame of mind — the mentality that sets in when I’m in my own space. I have my books around me, my music, my artwork, my papers. It’s all here. All my fascinations from over the years. And all my neurology info. Especially my neuro info.

So, now I’ve moved back into my study, and I’m looking out the window at the bird feeder and the falling snow. We got more snow last night, and now the wind is up, so it’s cascading off the trees, so it looks like we’re having a blizzard. We’re not. That’s just the overnight snow being tossed by the breeze. But it looks pretty intense at times.

It’s Sunday. That’s good. I have a whole day to pretty much do as I please, and that’s a welcome change. It’s not that I’m going to indulge myself… it’s that I have a lot that I want to do, and not having other responsibilities driven by others’ needs is making it possible for me to make some headway.

Write some blog posts. Read some papers. Get the word out about brain injury recovery being both possible and probable. I’m on a mission. And having my own workspace makes it easier for me to focus on that.

So, yes. Onward.

Well, that was interesting… good times, bad times, good lessons

This is the story of my last three days. Snowstorm. Trees down. Wires down. Not much going on, other than winter. Storms. Electricity out. No heat, no running water, no television, not much connection with the rest of the world.

Living on battery power, using the mobile phone to contact the rest of the world. Staying close to the fireplace, keeping the fire going all night long, finding different ways to get meals and keep occupied. Waiting for the power to be restored. Hearing one thing, then another, then another.

Waiting, just waiting. Watching the snow fall. Moving it off the driveway. Off the roof. Off the back deck and stairs. Lots of snow. Half a meter’s worth. 18″ worth. Heavy, thick, packed snow.

And now I feel it. In my back, my legs, my arms, my shoulders. Bruises all over my legs, where I slammed against the snowblower. Cold. It was cold. And the all-over ache that comes after hours and hours of being tensed against the cold. Countless trips up and down the stairs to get more wood for the fire.

All in all, it wasn’t terrible, being out of power for two days. Longer than that, and it would have been a problem. We would have gone to a hotel, because my spouse can’t afford to get sick, and they’re more susceptible to cold than I am. We came this close to going to a hotel, then decided against it — the place we called said there were a lot of families checking in, because they lost power, too. And having a lot of kids running and screaming (’cause that’s what kids do, when they’re cooped up, let’s face it)… well, that wasn’t the most restful option.

Better to stay in our own space and try our best to stay warm and dry. Wait it out. Gather around the fire. Rest. Wrap ourselves in blankets and relax. Wait it out. Just wait.

And we did. Power was restored 3 hours sooner than they said it would be, and that was fine. In the bargain, I scored some major points at work for continuing on through with my work, despite having no electricity or heat or running water. I managed to logon to my work by connecting through my phone and then sitting in my running car to keep the power going to it, so I could complete some must-do tasks.

And now I have a reputation for being that much more of a can-do person, with total commitment to getting the job done. So, something useful came of it. Which is fine.

So it goes. I handled this storm considerably better than I handled others in the past. I kept my cool. I kept focused. I wasn’t a total jerk to my spouse. And I came out of it ahead of the game. I’m wiped out and would love to sleep for 12 hours, but I’m also keenly aware of how much good it did me to really move. And not spend all my time in front of a computer, like I’ve been doing for the last however many years.

It was good to have the enforced break. Away from the constant hum of machines, away from the low-level buzz of non-stop electricity. Listening to the wind. Getting out in the snow. Just living a very basic life, and being profoundly grateful for everything I have.

Now it’s time to go get some supper. The refrigerator isn’t smelling all that great. It stayed cold, but not cold enough. So, off I go to replenish it. And get something really good for dinner tonight. Something filling, substantial… and hot.

Just as it should be.

Onward.

Changing plans and shifting priorities

I love my routines. They’ve saved my s$$ over the past 12 years. They helped me retrain my body and brain to be a heck of a lot more functional than they were in 2006. And when it comes to TBI recover, routine and repetition are my friends.

Seriously, they’re like the secret weapon against the disruptions of TBI. Just figuring out how to do things exactly the same way, over and over, till that way become ingrained and you don’t have to think about it anymore… it’s magic. And it does so much to rebuild and solidify the new connections that replace the ones that got frayed and pulled to pieces in the brain injury itself.

Every now and then, it’s good to change things up, though.

That’s where I am, now. I’ve done a lot of hard thinking, over the past weeks and months, and I realize I need to have a different focus in my daily life. I need to spend a lot less time focusing on my career and professional prospects, and spend a lot more time focusing on my health and quality of life.

I’m not gonna lie — I really had to double down on my work situations, over the past years. I was in a downward spiral of sorts, in one overly challenging job after another, working in very hostile conditions that eroded my physical and mental health. And the past 3-1/2 years have also been a real challenge, in some ways. The thing that’s made it the most challenging is that I got caught up in ideas about advancing, getting promoted, moving up in the world. And that sucked me into a vortex of caring about what other people thought of me, what other people said about me, what other people did to me at work.

And that wasn’t a good use of time. Because here I am, years later, no further along on my professional path (even set back, compared to where I was before), and just looking back at a whole lot of frustration and dead-ends.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m highly ambitious. I’m driven. That’s for sure. But at some point, being ambitious according to someone else’s rules is just a bad idea for me. I need to be ambitious according to my own rules. I need to drive towards things that matter to me — having decent relationships with people, doing my best work, learning and growing as I go — rather than getting caught up in other people’s power games.

Somehow, those games never work out in my favor. I just get played.

So, I’m pretty much over that. Time to focus on other priorities. Time to funnel my energy into things that are going to build me up, not tear me down, and pay off in the short- and long-term, when it comes to just doing a decent job.

Heck, I’m not even sure I want to get promoted, anyway, considering the kinds of people who are climbing to the top, these days. It seems like a much better use of my time to focus on my mental and physical health… learning interesting things and applying them to my life… sharing what I know…. and just having the best life possible. So long as I make enough money to support myself and I have the time and opportunity to do something truly useful with my life, that’s what matters.

And that’s where my head is at today.

Ha… we’ll see how I’m feeling tomorrow… or next week… 😉

Movement is not optional – it’s gotta happen

My left shoulder is still killing me. But I know how to fix it — for the near future and in the coming weeks and months:

Movement. Keeping mobile. Not letting myself sit still for hours and hours, like I have been for the past several weeks.

Or maybe it’s been months. I’ve had a lot going on, lately, and 90% of it has been in front of a computer. Yes, I’ve gotten a lot done, but it’s come at a price.

So, it’s time to change that up. Move my entire body (not just my hands). Get up and walk around the room, while I’m on the phone. Get my morning exercise AND build in additional movement (especially weight-bearing movement) throughout the day. Don’t just sit still for hours on end. That’s kicking my butt.

I’ve got a plan. Now, I’m going to get up and walk around a bit.

Because that’s gonna keep me knit together in one piece.

Onward.