Thursday, January 3, 2008

New Year's Resolutions

I have been thinking a lot about my life and how to proceed with it. I know different people respond to pain differently, but I have reached the limits of my endurance. This year my insurance may be changing to a program that may help resolve some of the physical issues behind the pain but then again...maybe not. It has been a long haul and I am frankly exhausted! I am no slouch at pain management techniques, I have been using various ones with various levels of success for years and years, but with this new level of physical problems, it is like a wall I can not climb.

So, with that in mind, and with the fact that all my self-improvement attempts for the last 3 years have completely and utterly failed (3 years ago is when the new pain level began), I am going to give it another shot. I have a tendency to try to do too much, so this year I am going to go small.

1. Friends. I have completely isolated myself from everyone. In some cases this is a good thing. It is unrealistic to think that I can go places every week so I want to develop 5 online friendships. Each person will be emailed once a week. I am going to do something totally different for me and pick people I want to be in touch with, that do not enormously stress me out! I want to start fresh with these friendships, with the exception of one person with whom some of these things have previously been discussed - Hi, Amy! So, 1 identified, 4 to go...

2. Money. My significant other has gotten into a significant level of debt trying to help out while I have gone through the physical decline. Yes, I now get disability, but I didn't for several years and I have also had some physical problems in the past for which he has assumed financial responsibility. I have also made some bad financial decisions, some of them well-intentioned, like bailing other people out of financial jams or donating to organizations or trying to fund my own non-profit ventures. He has now wound up assuming a lot of these problems as well. Not a believer in bankruptcy, I've got to come up with some way of helping him out of debt. After that, the car needs to be replaced, and then we would like to live in a place we can stand. After that, we shouldn't have any other financial needs we can't handle. I thought I could look for things online he could do, like survey sites or paid-to-read e-mail. I'm open for suggestions here....

3. Pain. This is the major obstacle. If I can get the pain under control, then I could do crazy things like clean the house or even leave the house on my own reliably. I could read Braille (the pain in my hands interferes with this right now). I could exercise more (which I love). Hey, maybe I could even go back to work (which would be really really really great!). I'm going to try to more regularly attend the pain management group in my area, aka at least once a month, and look for some pain management groups online that might be helpful. I am going to up the physical therapy exercises I do at home as well as trying to lose some weight (I got big after I got in pain). If this insurance change works out I'll be at the doctor's a lot, which is fine and will hopefully get more information, medications, procedures, etc. to deal with the situation. If it doesn't, I will have to look for these myself. This is probably the thing I will write about least and work on most!

4. Online activism. Typically I like to do a blend of online and in-person activism but these days online would be the best choice until my physical situation is under control. I have to be strong enough to be able to do the online ones to. I'd love comments about what people care about and I'll post the sites I'm active on too...

2 comments:

Amy said...

Hey there, I didn't know you had started this! Cool! I'm sorry to hear things are still so hard. I will be thinking about ways I can help.

Do you have a Paypal account?

Beth Wilson said...

Hi there, I did this kind of on a spur of the momemt thing. There's lots of things I want to do for it, but the physical stuff knocked me out again till a little while ago. Paypal is robdoman@yahoo.com

I got your email, it was really cool. I will be responding soon!