A Life Of Gymspiration

It has finally come to say goodbye to 2014. Or in my case it's more like a "Good riddance. Don't let the door hit you on the way out!" 2014 has been the hardest year of my 30 years of life. Even the year my dad was going through chemo didn't seem this bad. Maybe because that was one thing where as this year has been one thing after another. Still.... it hasn't been all bad. So let's take a little journey through 2014. JANUARY The year started off with me being SURE it was going to be a great one... By the end of the month, I lost a friend in the same week that I saw a friend and his wife deal with the death of their little girl. I had to work the day my friend died and thank goodness for Casey who let me just sit in my office and cry while he led youth group until I was ready to do our balloon release. These kids are so great and let me grieve and just do whatever I needed to do. They joined me for the balloo

It's my second year of doing Elf4Health! I just love the 4 weeks of this program. So many great challenges, so many uplifting people and this year I have made some pretty awesome new elf friends. Social media is such a great thing! If you remember, last year for the "Share your expertise" challenge, I wrote a blog about teaching, getting healthy, believing in yourself, going to the gym, surviving and thriving, and pretzels and hip hop . Almost the entire time I've been doing this challenge I've thought about what I should write about since I covered so much last year. And then I thought how my life has changed in the last year. I'm in such a different place this year so here we go.... Elf 4 Health's Share Your Expertise: Depression Edition For those of you just joining, 2014 has been awful (to say the least) for me. I started off the year dealing with the death of a friend and it really was just one bad thing after another. In June, my grandpa died and

I hope you all had a lovely Thanksgiving. My life had gotten so busy that Thanksgiving kind of sneaked up on me. And the week before it I realized this was the first of the firsts. The first big holiday without Grandpa. And I started to panic. The last 5 years or so we have been spending Thanksgiving with my grandparents. Prior to that we always spent it with my dad's side of the family and a lot of the time, my grandparents would come join us. I'm CONSTANTLY looking into the past. I discovered that AOL doesn't delete any e-mail, so rather than working one day, I started going through old e-mails from my Grandpa.   It's weird how just the mundane things that you don't even realize are traditions become the things that you really miss and wish you could do again.  The Friday before Thanksgiving I came down with the stomach flu and called in sick to work for the 2nd time in my life. I actually was still going to try to go to work until I vomited my br

Happy Veteran's Day. A little background. For years (we think about 30 or so?) my grandpa has helped with the Veteran's Day Service at the Veterans Home in Florence. My family has always gone to it, though I could never take time off work to go. :( This year I decided I needed to take time off to be with my family and go to the service. A few weeks ago my Aunt Laura called me and told me that she had contacted the Veteran's Home and asked if someone from the family could step in for my grandpa and that she wanted to ask me to do it. I thought about it and decided to do it. So my task was this: To write and give the invocation, help read names of the veterans who had passed in the last year, and also write and give the benediction. I was nervous but hoped my grandpa would help guide me. I had kind of formed a few things in my head, but hadn't really written it and decided the perfect place to do that would be my grandpa's desk (where I am sitting now actually).

I thought I was making good progress and then this week happened. My last counseling session, we talked about how social I'd been (which wasn't very). I kind of quit reaching out to people for a little bit. Part of that is probably because it was no longer my "homework". So when she asked I had said that I hadn't been very social, but I had a very social weekend coming up that would make up for that. Even in my counseling session I'd said I was a little nervous for the weekend and thought I might be trying to do too much. That should have been my first clue. Friday evening, I drove down to Denver for a friend's birthday party. We had a good time laughing and what-not. Still, my social anxiety seemed to be acting up a little bit. I <3 him I only stayed a few hours because I had to get back home and get to bed since I was running the Homecoming 5k in the morning. The race started at 8, and I set my alarm for 7... which may not have been enough

I haven't blogged in a while.  I decided to go on meds. I started the Celexa at a very low dosage (10 mg) and felt a little better, though I was experiencing some pretty intense headaches. Around the same time, I also cut my hours a little bit at work which seemed to help. The mornings have been the hardest part for me. I went back to my doctor to evalaute the meds and we ended up changing to Zoloft and increased the dosage a little. I've only been on them for a few days but I haven't experienced any headaches or any other wacky side effects so that's good. I've been starting to function better too, for the most part. I'm trying to be social as much as I can as well as honor what my body needs to get through this. What that means is that some Saturdays I spend all day in bed. It's not something I like to do, but I guess it's what I need. That's what I'm most looking forward to getting through. I want my energy back. I try really hard to focus o