My Passion...

I truly believe that if one pursues one's passion in life, things come together in a way that is simple, mindful and beautiful. Does that sound like a cliche? Think on it. If you truly believe in something, you are at your most natural and most efficient. Ideas come and make sense and maybe even make an impact. In life that is what everyone tries to make happen -- some do, others don't want to and many others try.

Lately I am getting the feeling of life going by me and that I am not keeping up. Now it is Christmas and I spent the morning in my robe! Tomorrow is another day but I want to change it from being just "another" tomorrow. I have a list of things I would like to complete -- just in time for New Year's resolutions! I have been working on a book FOREVER. It is mostly written, well about 100 pages and I just need to complete the rest. This is the interesting part but I seem to be stuck just living life. When you have MS, just living life is a full time occupation!

My book will have a different tone than everything else I've seen on MS. I just finished reading a New York Times review of the book Brain on Fire. I am carefully trying to understand what the reviewer thought of the book. Ultimately I realized that it is all about your story. But there is that part about not getting too caught up in misery, sorrow or even narcissism. So one has to carefully construct the story without making the audience slog through all your baggage. Difficult to say the least. So ultimately I have to tell my story honestly and be mindful about my MS and non MS audience.

You know what the hardest part of pursuing my passion for writing this book is? Just getting started where I left off. After about a week I've nailed it down pretty well. It is not that I am lazy or unchallenged, it is that I need to pull out the same discipline that I've used at other times in my life and just WRITE! It helps to have that goal in my mind too. A finished book with my story for so many to see and so many to possibly help understand this insidious debacle called MS.

My book consists of three parts: I. Life before MS (yes there was a life before), II. life during diagnosis and III. life after MS (yes, there is such a thing). I am stuck on part III. And this is the most marvelous part! I might be a little hesitant to write about this part because maybe I never thought it would ever come. I tell my audience how I got here through long labyrinths and tunnels. Anyone can do this, all it takes is a bit of direction or in my case just knowing what to do. People, especially young people might want to know how to live a relatively normal life because I didn't have anyone to tell me it was possible. In the process I lived through damage caused by the condition simply because I didn't know any better. In other words, how to live more healthfully, looking into research that was never reported to us instead of looking for the answer in a pill. Well, I better get to the book, time is wasting.

But as they say, better late than never!