Mind over Body... I'm Working On It.

As a little girl, I always LOVED reading my friends' journals and diaries. I never read them without permission, of course, but when they would say "Hey, I just wrote something in my diary and you should totally know about it!" I felt like I was gaining access to a special place that most people didn't have the opportunity to see. Reading people's journals is the equivalent of reading their minds *after* they have the initial thoughts. It's really quite fantastic.

I feel the same way about blogging. When I get to read people's blogs, I get insight into their minds, the way they think, the psychology behind their personalities.

One of the many things I love about having my own blog is I feel as though I can sit here and talk about absolutely anything under the sun, in any way I feel, and there is no pressure to conjure fake emotions for readers. I'm not getting paid for it (wouldn't that be great?!) and there's no deadline. It's like a free for all for my thoughts.

That being said, my blog has had some pretty obvious shifts lately. I feel a little as though I owe *some* explanation.

This started as a TTC blog where I could document what I thought would be a month or two of trying, 9 months of the PERFECT pregnancy with no problems or morning sickness what-so-ever (har har), the totally painless birth of our PERFECT child that would only put me in labor for the bare minimum time, and then the PERFECT life that would ensue afterwards. You know exactly what I'm talking about: the husband and I could still go out whenever we wanted to, still have awesome loud sex without worrying about traumatizing a child, go on vacations at the drop of a dime, still get to bed at a decent hour, still have our social life... still remain sane in the face of a screaming infant with a diaper full of something that smells like sewage and concentrated evil.

Things didn't work out that way.

A little over 15 months later, I am sitting here telling you that I have not yet had that perfect pregnancy. I haven't had any pregnancy at all.

I blogged about it for a long time... for my standards anyways. I'm somewhat scattered and to have an actual topic for more than a few months is pretty impressive.

I got to the point where I was so freaking stressed out about charting for ovulation, I would FREAK OUT if I had any spotting if I hadn't already ovulated, I was getting upset with my husband for trying to console me, I was sighing every ten minutes and feeling like crap about myself constantly. If I were to be completely honest, I would say that I was being a negative, miserable bitch.

I am a control freak, and getting pregnant is one of the many things in life that, no matter how many times I shake my fist towards the sky, I just can't control.

Mind over body has always been a thought-process that I believed in 100%. I still believe in it, but I know that I can't control certain things that go on inside my body. If I'm going to get sick, I'm going to get sick. If I'm going to get my period, I can't stop it from coming. You get my point. I believe that we have control over our minds and that AFFECTS our bodies. I don't believe that, through our minds, we can make ourselves fly and defy laws of science and other things in that genre.

To make this novel of an explanation into a short story, suffice it to say that I got very sick of myself. I actually disliked ME. That's a shitty feeling, by the way. Do you like yourself? If you don't, get some help. Not liking yourself is awful... because you can't just stop hanging out with you. And, if you can stop hanging out with yourself, then get some help... because you've probably got Dissociative Identity Disorder :P.

One morning, after sighing for the eighth time in an hour and feeling absolutely miserable because I felt fat and disgusting and looked like shit, I realized that I was slowly killing myself and that I was almost dead. Not physically... but the me that everyone knew and loved from years ago was laying on her death bed, ready to bite the bullet.

I wanted to get her back.

I started by Googling "Positive Thinking" and went on to read a few books. I learned about positive affirmations, I started a scrapbook of places that I wanted to see with my husband, I came up with a surified way to pay off our debt and stuck with it. I started changing myself. I'm STILL working on it, but I feel so much better.

Instead of focusing on the things that I CAN'T change, I began to do the opposite. I have been focusing on everything that I CAN change. My weight, my debt, my thoughts and the way I treat people... those are the things that I have power over in my life. And those are the things that I've been focusing on.

Do I still want a baby?

Hell yes.

Am I going to stress about it any more?

Hell no.

I'm sure that I will have TTC posts in the future, and I hope they are positive ones that make people smile for me and not cry for me.

In the meantime, the longer it takes me to get pregnant the more time I have to pay off debt, get in shape, get healthier, and have a healthier mindset.

One of the most exciting things that I am focusing on is my dancing career. I was well on my way to being a full time belly dancer (teaching and performing) when I moved up to North Carolina and got stretch marks... I would love to be dancing full time at this point next year.

I hope that gives some insight as to why I've been blogging solely about my weight loss journey for the last few weeks. I'm working on some new ideas for this blog that will make it a bit more interesting... but I just can't focus on what I can't control and what makes me feel miserable any more. At least not for a while, not until I get my emotions on a better frequency.