My Resolution Is More Badass Than Your Resolution: A Truth

Happy New Year to all! I don't want you to get excited but this is definitely the most important thing I've ever posted on here so, you know, read it. Thank you. I love you. Thank you for your support over these continued years.

--

My Resolution Is More Badass Than Your Resolution: A Truth

For the first time in my life, I am going to truly, fully and wholly dedicate this year, 2014, to achieving better health. 

This is a plan, a hope and a dream. I intend to completely overhaul every single aspect of who I am, physically and emotionally, in order to achieve health and peace.

I am not ashamed to admit that this absolutely fucking terrifying.

2013 was a terrible year for my physical and emotional health. I know that I am not being overly dramatic when I say that if I continue to let things go the way they've gone, I will not live past 30.

Because I've been ill since I was a baby, disease is a part of my identity. I can't imagine who I would be without it sickness hovering over my life. I am who I am both because and in spite of it.

There is a large part of me that doubts that I can ever truly get better. This doubt has stewed for years. This doubt has been confirmed by many doctors, including the government's own physicians, who deemed me sick enough to receive Social Security disability at 27 years old.

I am tired of hopelesslness.

I have never been ready before. And I am ready now. I just know it. I feel it. This urgency. This desire to live. A desire that was not there before.

Undertaking this journey means making incredible and scary life changes, from dietary to spiritual to the physical. 

For starters, it involves slowly changing my diet from picking at chicken tenders and Froot Loops to eating a diet full of leafy vegetables and wholesome foods. Anyone who knows me is likely laughing right now and it's true I am eating an old Kit-Kat while I write this.

But just as I can assure you that there will be days when I cheat, I can make the promise that I will no longer buy candy. I will no longer eat a donut just because it's there. Sugar is evil and I am one hundred percent addicted to it. But my diabetes is beginning to affect my body in serious and damaging ways, and so I must part with sugar, EVEN THOUGH IT'S DELICIOUS. (I willl miss you, cotton candy. See you at the fair, which will be a cheat day.)

Although so many of you have prayed for me (and I thank you!), I have doubted prayer and positivity for years. But now I will attempt to embrace them. I am not going to run toward any one belief with open arms, but my eyes and ears will be open as I consider the things I've dismissed many times.

And although I'm bummed my diet will have me crying over cookie commercials, I'm excited, because this journey will bring me around the world as I seek out ancient medicine and wellness techniques. 

The first week of March will be spent at a healing and yoga retreat at an ashram in the Caribbean. I would've laughed this idea off a year ago, but I am ready now. It doesn't hurt that it's in the Bahamas. I'll be sleeping in a hut on the beach and eating vegetarian meals three times a day while doing yoga and practicing ayurvedic medicine.

In May, I am going to Vietnam with my cancer friends at First Descents. Here I'lll challenege myself phsyically, by LITERALLY BIKING AROUND THE COUNTRY. On a bike without a motor. Our destination will find us building houses for poor familiies. This is a fundraising trip and you can help (please help!) me raise money here: Dotcom Goes To Vietnam

I plan on trying local medicine and learning about cures in Asia; hopefully I will make it to Cambodia while I'm there. I'm not sure what the second half of 2014 holds, but I'm excited for these opportunities. I am less excited about all the kale.

Of course, I am afraid that I will fail, and that I will still be sick, and that it will be my fault. But I must remember that if I don't try, if I don't seek out what I need to seek out, I will die young. Now I could die young having tried all the cures in the world. I don't think that I'm going to write CURED at the top of this page a year from now. I know people who have tried everything to stay alive and failed. But I haven't ever tried for longer than a month. So this is why it is time. Time to try.

I can guarantee mistakes and the occasional donut along the way. I can guarantee I will doubt myself and others.

But I don't have the luxury of youth like my peers do. I have to find a way to get better, I have to commit, and it has to start now.

I owe to my family. I owe to my niece. I owe it to my friends. But most of all, I owe it to myself.

Thank you all for your support. You can bet your ass I'll be writing about it along the way.

Here's to 2014 and the possibility of wonder and joy. 

(Please help me achieve this goal. Thank you. Link is here.)

THANK YOU ALL.

(Bitch, you about to be changed.)