Icing on the Cake

"You don't buy a cake to look at it. You buy it to eat it. So of course I want to have my cake and eat it too, you dumbass." - me

OMG! I can't believe that I have written since last year! (lol, lame I know). But seriously, it has been almost a month since I last posted...so sorry about that, the holidays sort of ransacked me and I didn't have five minutes to breathe. But, as of today, back to work, "back to life, back to reality."

If you've kept up with my blog since its inception you are well aware that 2010 was a very challenging, insightful, scary, exciting and pretty amazing year for me. From new jobs to new medicine and from old fears to reviving dead dreams. I have been on an emotional, physical and spiritual roller coaster that I could not have made it off of without my loved ones and of course God.

In 2011 I am looking forward to fun and hopefully more pleasant adventures, but to be honest I wouldn't replace anything that I went through. It all taught me many valuable lessons that I will take with me for the rest of my life. I learned that life balance is more important that money or "stuff." I realized that I can still do what I love without risking a healthy lifestyle. I learned that family comes first and that the mind is more powerful than most of us realize.

In 2011 I resolve to:

1. Become a healthier and better cook.

2. Not take myself so seriously.

3. Do more to get published.

4. Love my husband more and more.

5. Not be disappointed about things that are beyond my control.

In 2007, right before my official diagnoses, a young high school girl came up to me after a poetry reading I read at at the Holocaust Museum and said the following: "Wow, you were amazing. When I grow up I want to do that. I want to do what you just did." In that moment, as I remember it now, I believe that I said to myself that my life was complete. I had done more in those 3min on stage than I ever intended to. I had accomplished more in one evening than some will in a lifetime. It is perhaps then, that life, the greater good or just fate blessed me (and yes I mean blessed) with "the sclero."

You see, this very evening I realized that this illness has allowed me to see and enjoy the simpler things of life that so many of us take for granted. On that chilly night in February of 2007, I changed a life forever with my words, my greater purpose was fulfilled. And so, God, in all his wisdom is now allowing me to sit back, relax, and enjoy what I had been missing all along. Lightening on a rainy day in January, a juicy mango in June, birds flying above still waters, my own body waking up every day, miraculously. Since that moment (ironically at the Holocaust Museum), everything that I have had the priveledge (yes I mean that) of experiencing has just been icing on the (cup)cake.

Be still, be well.

Jas