That Was The June Of Our Miscontent

I'm looking at the calendar and realizing that June ends in 3 days. See, as a teacher, the summer is prime writing time for me, but the last two Junes have been weak entries for me. Last June I was in a funk of epic proportions because of school nonsense and, while I thought this year was going to be different, it wasn't. I did finish my rewrite and sent the second project off to my agent, but I've been stalled as far as new writing is concerned. There are some pretty legit reasons for that, I think. First was that the newest project I was planning wasn't working. (That's a whole other blog post though) But I think there was one thing that was really gumming me up.

I am obese. I have countless health issues directly related to my weight, the biggest looming for me is a severely arthritic hip that needs to be replaced because I'm damn near immobile. I've always been big. I've been 6'1" since about 6th grade and I have never weighed less than 220 pounds since middle school. My weight has always plagued me. I've yo-yoed for years and as of December 2011 I weighed nearly 360 pounds and decided to do something drastic. I opted for gastric sleeve surgery.

This wasn't an easy decision and after several starts and stops, I committed to it. The hardest thing to get over was that, in my mind, I viewed the surgery as "quitting" and not a smart health decision. But as my hip got worse and worse and other things began to compound health wise, I came to a tipping point. And it tipped sharply in one direction.

 It was a long process that took 6 months, which included losing weight ahead of time, seeing a therapist and attending group meetings. It's been weighing on me for months and when they scheduled me for June 25th it became very, very real to me. And that has caused a bit of a jam up in my head because I've had this all on my mind.

Today's the first day being home from the hospital and I'm a little sore, but feeling good. I think I've narrowed down a good project to move on to and I'm getting excited about it. I've got two solid months of writing ahead and if I've proved anything, I can produce when I'm motivated. And I'm motivated now.

Let's just say I'm headed down a new ROAD.