Enjoy... Slow down

What do you do after you meet Gluten Free Girl and the Chef? You go home, you make your great-great-grandmother's gingerbread gluten free for the first time ever (next batch: more molasses, more teff flour), and you start a blog. Logical, yes?

In my eighth grade yearbook, on the page where we listed what we wanted to do someday, I said, "write a novel." Twenty-three odd years later, not too surprising, I have not accomplished this.

But I did used to write. It fired me, it fed me, and it made me feel like my presence mattered. It was a way to make sense of the world and myself and to find some clarity when all seemed mud.

For some reason, when I moved westward I left my spark behind. I left my pen to paper, my finger to keyboard, behind. I abandoned much of myself over these many years here in the west. Now, on the verge of making a significant commitment to living "in the West" it feels time to be ME in every way.

One powerful thing I have begun to discover about myself and my world is that yes everything can change. I was unhealthy and often in pain - I made the change to decide that this was not tolerable, sought help, found out I have Celiac disease, changed my diet and changed my life entirely. I feel good for the first time in a decade. I decided that I was tired of feeling broken - sad, depressed, resigned to life being bad. With help I changed the way my mind accepts my life; it understands now as do I that this is not really living life. Time to change perspective, attitude, outlook, and energy. I felt lost and hollow without horses in my life. By embracing change and saying, this is not how my life will continue, this way of depriving myself of my greatest job in life has been whacked out of its rut and it will not go back.

These are small things. Change is small. That is the biggest discovery, I think. Changing your life happens by changing what you have to drink at breakfast. It is tiny steps along the way that feel better, feel more authentic, feel more "me" and right.

We'll see where this goes. This post is hardly the standard of writing I aspire to - but it's also the first thing I've written other than a note to friends in almost a decade, so I'll let it stand as the honest first, scared effort at 10pm after Shauna told me to write. Thanks for that - I will.