Life Always Offers Me a Second Chance

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. I haven’t touched the blog in a few days once again. It’s getting old. I often do want to write, but don’t know what about except how shitty things are here at the care home and how I still haven’t got a moving date. Endless venting about the care home isn’t going to please my readers though, so I usually end up trashing those posts. After all, even though I originally intended this blog to be for me to write from the heart, I do care about my readership.

I do still read blogs, albeit not as much as I used to. Today, I came across an inspirational one-liner by Tanya: life always offers you a second chance. It is called tomorrow.

This definitely speaks to me. Of course, it isn’t always true, in that eventually we’ll all die and not have a second chance. However, until that point comes around, we can always create a better rest of our life. It doesn’t even have to be tomorrow, if that just leads to procrastination. It can also be a minute from now.

I employ this logic when it comes to my disordered eating and other unhealthy coping mechanisms. I see each day – or if needed, each moment – as its own opportunity for growth. For this reason, I don’t count the days I’m free from self-harm, in the sense that I’ll have to “start over” when I’ve had a slip up. I don’t do “cheat days” either. Not that I’m on a diet, but even when I did follow a stricter food plan than I currently do, I didn’t consider a day ruined when I had binged. Interestingly, I did at one point struggle with letting go of my 300-odd day streak of reaching my movement goal on my Apple Watch. However, I am happy to report it doesn’t start over when it comes to calculating when I’ve reached 365 days of completing my movement goal (I think it’s going to be this Thursday or Friday).

In a sense, the idea that life will always give me a second chance tomorrow, might be an excuse to laze around. However, that’s not the point. The point of this idea probably is that there’s no use in dwelling on my past mistakes, because as long as I live, there’s time to set them straight.

Mentors and Role Models

Posted on by Astrid

Today’s topic for Throwback Thursday is mentors and role models. Of course, last week, I already shared about my high school tutor, who was a mentor when I was a teen. Today, I’m going to share about other role models.

One of my first role models was my paternal grandmother. She was a fiercely independent, self-determined woman. In 1973, a year after women were legally equal to men here in the Netherlands, she divorced my grandpa. She went to college to become a social worker, eventually becoming the head of social work at the psychiatric institution in her area. In the mid-1990s, in her early 70s, she founded a senior citizens’ living complex, where she lived for nearly 20 years until she needed to go into a care home. She died in 2018 at the age of 94.

One clear memory I have of my grandmother that has stuck with me throughout life and which perhaps unintentionally inspired me, is her comment about her work as a social worker with troubled young people. She told me that, when some young people don’t want to go home to their parents, she had to sometimes honor the teens’ wishes rather than the parents’. Even though I was 19 when first going against my parents’ wishes, and their wish wasn’t for me to live with them, the point was that my opinion mattered even if I was “crazy”.

Later, when I was a teen and young adult, I sought out role models who shared some of my experiences. One of my first role models in this category was someone I met through an E-mail list for my eye condition. She was in her early thirties when we first met online and I was seventeen. Besides blindness, we had some other experiences in common. We eagerly read each other’s online diaries back in the day. She is still a Facebook friend of mine, but, because she has moved on to become more or less successful at life and work and I haven’t, we don’t share the same life experiences anymore.

Some people I considered inspiring, I never even talked to, such as Cal Montgomery, a disability activist whose article, “Critic of the Dawn”, I first read in like 2006.

Currently, indeed, what I look for in an inspiring person or role model is shared experience. That being the case, I consider many of the people I’m on E-mail lists or in Facebook groups with to be inspiring. Then though, our interactions are more based on equality, where any of us can be the inspiration for the others.

I don’t think that I quite have what it takes to be a mentor myself. Though I can provide people with inspiration and information, I don’t really have my life together enough to be a role model. This saddens me, thinking about the fact that I’m older now than the woman I met at seventeen was when we first met.

What do you look for in a role model?

Five Favorite Feelings #5Things

Posted on by Astrid

Okay, this is going to be a quick post. I want to write, but honestly have little idea what about. For this reason, I am taking up DrTanya on her #5Things Challenge. This week, the topic is favorite feelings. Here goes.

1. Delight. When I find myself in a happy flow, I can truly be delighted at things I do. I love this feeling of high energy combined with joy.

2. Inspiration. I truly love it when new ideas keep flowing. Currently, this is not the case, as you might guess from my needing to go with a meme for a blog post. That is, in the writing department, I’m not too inspired. In the crafting area, I definitely am.

3. Gratitude. It’s so great to be able to feel thankful at every possible opportunity. It is also a feeling I find is relatively possible to cultivate. In addition, I truly appreciate it when others show gratitude towards me.

4. Satisfaction. When I’m satisfied with something I’ve accomplished, it truly makes me feel great. Unfortunately, I’m a bit of a perfectionist, so I am not easily satisfied with myself.

5. Active acceptance. This means accepting a situation as it currently is, but being open to the possibility of being able to change it. It is walking a fine line between resignation and resistance. This is probably the hardest attitude to achieve for me, but I’m working on it.

What are your favorite feelings?

#IWSG: Ready, Set, Write?

Posted on by Astrid

It’s once again time for the Insecure Writer’s Support Group (#IWSG) day. I don’t really feel like checking in on it, but this at least is a monthly reminder to keep at least somewhat focused on my writing endeavors.

This past month was a mixed one when it came to my creativity. Early in the month, I was really inspired and really felt like writing fiction and poetry again rather than just blog posts. I did write one poem and read a ton of them, but my ideas for fiction never made it into actual stories.

I got ahold of a few interesting books on writing. One of them is called Ready, Set, Write and it inspired the title of this post.

Inspired by the advice in this book and others in the Adventures in Writing series, I started stream of consciousness writing in an app called Drafts. Several blog posts and the one poem I wrote this past month, were originally drafted in this app.

Still, I’m not sure I’m ready to actually devote much of my time to writing. It’s a great hobby, but like with everything, I don’t have the patience to practise and want to be at least somewhat proficient at it pretty soon. That’s probably why I keep disappointing myself.

On to the optional question of the month. This month’s question is whether you’ve ever been inspired to write a story based on a piece of art. I have not, as I am very artistically ignorant. I tried to blame it on my blindness, but then I realized there are other works of art besides paintings.

I did however very often base my stories on the fiction I read. This sometimes led to plagiarism. My best story yet, which should’ve become a young adult novel but never got finished, was inspired by a book about a teen whose mother had multiple sclerosis. It followed the same subject but its plot was very different.

How about you? Do you base your writing on works of art?