Interlude - Thank You

Earlier I rushed an update for my re-booting blog post overwhelmed by the amount of comments, obvious increase on traffic and I have to admit a bit panicked (as in: "OMG, holy cow, OMG, holy flying potato of Antioch, how in the heck did I reach 4,000 views?" hyperventilating sort of way). Hehehe.

 

You see overnight that post went pretty much as public as it could when lovely geeky blogger Jen shared it on Epbot.

Jen herself was the inspiration for me to write it all down, in kind I sent her a note along with the original post and apparently it moved her enough to share it with the masses of awesome Epbot readers.

I have received an insane out pour of support from so many people, it has been both wonderful and scary. I am shy by nature, I tend to try and keep my own issues to myself, when I have a problem I try my best to solve it on my own and only resort to asking for help when all avenues had been exhausted. This can be good and bad at the same time. In an effort to move forward and make things right for myself I decided to take a very uncharacteristic step and put myself out there.

I understand that putting things on a blog is the equivalent of hammering a manifesto to the public square wall and let people interpret it in whatever way they want: "What?! She says she hates oranges!" "Oranges? She hates PEARS!" "No, she meant pineapples! I grow pineapples! I am personally hurt by this!" "Pears, oranges AND pineapples? She hates all fruit!" (hehehe... disclaimer: I love fruit, really I do, I might not be a big fan of pineapple, but I do adore it cooked, I know, I am weird).

As an artist I am used to having my pieces critiqued and interpreted in ways I never thought or sometimes never intended, so I knew what I was getting into. I just never expected over 5,000 people would be interested on anything I had to say... no, really, who knew, right?

Some might see my entry as a tirade against doctors, nurses, the state of the healthcare establishment *people, please put the pitchforks and torches down, slowly, slowly, ok good, now, who wants a cookie?* (not really the case, as I have pointed out on my update I truly believe there are awesome doctors and nurses and I have met many, I just happened to have very rotten luck with a batch when I won the genetically screwed lottery, all in all, I think I used a bunch of my allotted bad luck at once). Others might see it as encouragement to share their own stories to help them heal themselves or as a cautionary tale that will help them voice their concerns to their doctors and nurses when they need help instead of shrinking back and not saying something at all (an actually nice side-effect). But in reality all it ever truly was is a cathartic piece pulled from strands of memories I had tried to bury and forget. Something I had kept inside my memories on the smallest little container I could imagine, out of shame, out of pain, because it is really a bummer of a story and didn't want to make people sad and ultimately because I feared I would be pitied, yelled at, told again I was being a cry-baby or worse if I dared talk about it.

Turns out that posting this has really helped me, even before all of you guys were so incredibly kind, I could already feel a small change in the way I was handling it all. The heaviness is still there nestled within my chest, but thanks to everybody's incredibly wonderful and encouraging comments, I now feel super charged and encouraged to keep this project going, after all that was what I set out to do and what I want this blog to accomplish. Nothing more, nothing less. I can't thank you all enough for that.

That being said and pre-empting the internet insanity that might or might not rain upon me (I have seen the internet grow since the early days of dial-up, so I know how out of control things can get), all I can truly say in closing is:

Things happened, things were wrong, things were right, and now I am still alive, I have a good life, I have an incredible husband as my partner, an incredible family (hi mom! Hi bro! Hi dad! Hi cousins, aunts, uncles, etc!), amazing friends, and I am a pretty happy-go-lucky type of person that tries her hardest to make it through life by being kind, silly and doing my very best. I might not be all the way OK, but we are working towards a nice quirky/fun/sweet version of a "normal" (if normal even exists, am I right?). I believe with all my heart we will eventually get there. We will have bad times along the way, but hopefully the good will manage to out-do it an we'll end up coming up ahead. It is sure going to be fun and find out.

 

To all my new readers, welcome, you are now officially on the "Let's get this girl drawing... OR ELSE!" cheering squad (Hopefully it is a: OR ELSE... we will let her play with a box full of kittens/baby otters, etc, just saying, that would be nice ;-D).

With some work my drawings can only get better and I can continue to deliver at least something amusing each day.

And once again, from the bottom of my heart: Thank you.

Now back to our previously scheduled programming... which means I better start drawing.