That was the flavor of ice cream I had tonight. I thought it was a fitting title.

I’m not really exhausted by my kids, just exhausted. I got up at 4:15 yesterday morning to work and then finally fell asleep this morning after 12:45 am. It’s a blessing having a mind filled with ideas and a curse that I can’t write them down fast enough.

So today, I’m tired. But…silver lining always right?

• I didn’t hear one commercial on the radio today and I knew the words to every song. It was just one of those good radio days…I jammed out every time I got in to my car.

• I made some major progress on a project I am working on. However, I had to become aware of some old nasty roadblocks I threw up for myself when something out of my control came up today. I recognized them, thanked them for the lesson and told them not to let the door hit ’em in the ass on the way out.

• In the past couple of days I have received compliments about how “trim” I’ve gotten. (It helps that I’m real tan.) They’re right about 8 weeks (whoever they are):

Since we’re here, this brings up a good point. I know I haven’t listed my weight on here for a while (for inquiring minds: 201.1 this morning) and there’s good reason. This is going to be hard to swallow for me because I can hardly believe the words that are about to be typed…weight loss is not my top priority.

If you knew what went through my head on a daily basis for the past twenty years concerning my physical appearance, you’d have a hard time believing that. I did…I do.

I thought my weight defined me. I thought I wasn’t worthy of friendships because of my size. I thought I wasn’t worthy of success because of my body shape. I punished myself every single day.

Someone close to me joked yesterday that she didn’t think she had done anything for 64 days straight except read my blog. I chuckled because I think that’s true of a lot of us. It’s hard to stick to something for two months/eight weeks/60 days, however you choose to look at it.

But I can assure you, I beat myself up every day about my weight for the past 7,300+ days. I never missed an appointment with Dr. Putyourselfdown.

So, while my health is still my number one priority and I am still stepping on the scale everyday, I am paying way more attention to how I feel, how my clothes fit and how far I can fold over my thighs in pigeon pose; the yoga pose I love to hate.

I know, that’s boring.

This week has sort of been a blur. I don’t know if it’s coming off vacation or the weather or what. But, my whole family is tired. And I am starting to have to calculate what day I am on. Never thought I’d say that.

It’s true we have a lot of irons in the fire right now. Just a whole bunch of projects coming together including our flower farming season is just about to explode with seed starting, field clean up, planting, etc.

This is about the time of year I go bat shit crazy. I’ve been cooped up in this house too long; all my cleaning and organizing efforts have waned, I start looking for new challenges and bite off way more than I can chew.

But, it’s just how I roll and the older I get the more a-okay with it I am. It keeps me out of trouble…and this year A LOT less trouble.

We had the time to go to a good ‘ole Wisconsin fish fry with friends tonight. And while normally I would not care that I have to work in the morning, or that I have plans to go to yoga, we’d go play Euchre and drink beer until midnight. Things are different now though.

Now, I’m not saying that will never happen ever again, just not tonight. I’m tired, I know I have to work tomorrow and I need to go to yoga. I knew all of this before too, I just didn’t care. I care more now and I’m enjoying all these little wins.

I put this out there to the social media world today, but in case you missed it I had a pretty big win today. First, even though I said I didn’t care about the scale the other day, it has read 197.5 for the past two days. (I care again) AND, I fit in to a shirt that has never looked or felt good on me, even when I bought it. Am I the only one with shit in their closet that doesn’t fit…with tags still on it? It’s okay if you do…I do too.

The other cool thing about this were the sweetest people handing out complements about my shirt today because they saw the ridiculous selfie I posted. While I said thank you to those that said, “nice shirt” with a wink and a smile, I’m not sure they will know how grateful I am they took the time and energy to voice the compliment. They didn’t have to. It means a lot when people notice and acknowledge efforts.

Plus, it makes me practice my intention of accepting compliments more gracefully. A work in progress for sure.

Here’s the kicker though…I came home to a letter in the mail, sealed with a golden unicorn. The card I pulled out read, “You Are Bat Shit Crazy. Yes, that’s a compliment.” Of course the card is perfect in every way but especially because it came from my hero in Oregon. A great way to top off the day.

Oh…AND Miles won $150 in pull tabs at the fish fry. Maybe that was the cherry on top. It’s a toss up.

I think I’ll go to bed while I’m ahead.

I better not be getting sick.

I went to yoga this morning and could hardly stand to be in child’s pose my body hurt so bad. I just couldn’t explain it, I didn’t overdo it physically this week, ate pretty good and I was most certainly not hungover.

I felt fine otherwise, except that I was (and am) super tired. I could have crawled in to bed at about 4:30 this afternoon and slept like a babe. Which is why I am writing this early…I plan to be in bed pretty darn soon.

I did want to just quickly talk about how touched and absolutely so grateful for someone who reached out to me privately in the past couple of days.

I go back and forth with this whole thing, like: is this too much information? Should I be writing to an audience? Does anyone even care? Do I even care if anyone cares? Yada yada yada.

After I have one of these episodes, I always come back to my original intention; this is a personal blog. If you don’t like it, don’t read it. I actually have it written on my white board in my attic. Keeps me grounded.

Well, in any case, it’s always somewhat bewildering when someone out of the blue makes a comment about it. Of course, there are my fans…and by fans I mean the ones I force to read it, like my family and my husband, but then there is this whole other pocket of people that I would have never imagined read it, or care.

But, I received the sweetest heartfelt message from someone I admire. Someone who has inspired me. It’s hard to wrap my head around that.

I know I have said this before (although it could have been 40 days ago, I have no idea) but the things I am writing about, and admitting to, I considered my biggest failures in life.

I thought these struggles were exclusive to me. Why couldn’t I just have one? And why couldn’t I just eat healthy? And why couldn’t I just get out of bed? And why did I have to yell at my kids? And why did everyone else seem so put together? Why was I the only one?

Who knew my struggles, and by merely voicing them, would turn out to be the source of my greatest joy and accomplishment?

By nature I like helping people and I like to feel useful (I mean who doesn’t?) and even though writing has allowed me a way just to get this shit out of my head, the opportunity of helping just one person has made all the vulnerability worth it.

If you’ve been following along now for a while, you know that I have changed the format of this blog like 92 times. It’s evolved, as have I, from a destination to a never-ending journey.

There won’t be a pot of gold at the end of this 90 days. Or 180 days or 40 more years. I am still going to be the same person, maybe with different hobbies and habits, but just plain ‘ole me. I’ll still be wearing yoga pants with every outfit, struggling like hell not to bite my fingernails again, stripping my bra off the minute I walk in my door and eating Pirate’s Booty every chance I get.

And if I’m sick tomorrow, I’m gonna be pissed.

I cry a lot.

Not necessarily because I am sad, mostly just emotional. It can be out of frustration, fear, joy, sadness, gratefulness; whatever the occasion calls for. If you need a crier, I’m your gal.

I have definitely been accused of being “too sensitive or emotional” or taking things “too personally”. I used to find these things faults, mainly because when the comments were directed at me, it was in a negative way.

But what are our lives if not personal? We have emotions and when they get to the top of our cup, sometimes they spill over in the form of tears. What’s so wrong with that? The alternative is to shove those feelings back, way deep down so when they are forced to come out when it’s way more destructive than a few little tears.

When you read it that way, which one sounds real stupid?

Crying basically comes down to vulnerability. A tear, or a full-on ugly cry, may represent weakness to the masses, or maybe even to a few of your loved ones, but it’s just honesty and authenticity.

While at work today, I ran in to a friend (of a friend of a friend of a friend…you get the idea) that cried. She was so frustrated about a chronic issue, she couldn’t hold it in (you don’t know this person, so don’t go trying to guess) and I just couldn’t let her cry alone.

I could see in her eyes and in her trembling body that she had been trying to be “strong” for so very long. In my eyes, this woman is a total beast; as a physical specimen, mother, professional, friend, wife, etc. And this is just the very little I know about her.

It looked like it just got to be too much.

I felt her pain and even though it was probably real awkward, I walked around the desk and made her give me a hug. I know what it’s like to be in chronic pain and how debilitating it can be to feel like you have no control over your body.

I couldn’t help but visualize the frustration overflowing from her cup. I think about how hard it must have been for her. How weak she must have felt because of the bullshit we put around this thing called “sensitive”.

But, in my eyes, it just made her human. And her humanity made her my hero. She was already sort of my hero, but she just donned her red cape today.

I catch myself often saying to my kids, “that’s nothing to cry about” or “stop crying”. What am I teaching them? That it’s better to push it down than let a natural, bodily function go?

Isn’t that like holding in a fart? The end result is basically the same…a lot of pain followed by a major explosion in a very inopportune place.

Think about that the next time you decide to hold a good cry in.

“I don’t understand you. And why aren’t you understanding me?”

This was the gist of the conversation that started out my morning. My husband and I have been working very hard on our communication skills but we had a momentary lapse of concentration today.

It went a little something like this…you tell me if it sounds familiar:

I texted him something that I thought was good news.
He texted back a joke.
I did not think it was funny and actually thought it was in poor taste. I text back something snotty.
He texts back question marks.
I again text back something passive aggressive.
He calls.
We argue.
I hang up.
He calls back.
He hangs up.
I call him.
We start over.
All is right in the world again.

Man that looks dumb. But, for better or worse, this is our blissful life.

After the five minute exchange of ridiculousness, I thought to myself how misconstrued things can get in the throngs of stress.

Both of us have had a stretch of about 10 pretty stressful days. Not chronic stress, just the kind that your body makes you pay attention to. And this is new for me. I just went about my days paying little or no attention to how I dealt with stress or if I even had it at all. I just thought the irritability, sensitivity and overall bitchiness was part of who I was.

And while this current stress is a little self-inflicted mixed with a little faith leaping, it still comes with it’s share of unsightly reactions. The difference is this time I am hyper-aware. It’s sort of like watching a murder mystery unfold and realizing you knew who the guilty party was all along.

I know now that all of these negative reactions to things (stress) come from fear. That’s it. Fear.

I could talk for days about what I was/am afraid of, but ultimately, I cannot control whatever is going to happen anyway, so fuck it. And worrying about what might happen in a minute or a month or a year steals the joy from right this moment.

And since I’m feeling pretty damn good right now, I think I’ll stay here for a while.

I like learning new things. Not in the way that you planners might like it.

More like, “Squirrel?” or “that’s shiny…what is it?”

I tend to fall in to a rabbit hole of information that just keeps going and going and going. One article leads to another and another and pretty soon I am three hours in to something that looks totally different than when it started. While this may be an inconvenient way to go about learning something new, it’s my way.

I also think I can and should do everything and until very recently, I hung on to tasks I suck at rather than delegate them to people who enjoy them. This is a very unusual feeling for me but it’s called surrendering and so far I kinda like it.

It frees up space in my brain for other, more creative things to happen. But mostly, I have realized I’m not lazy if I don’t complete every little fricking detail of a project.

First off, those are totally not my jam: details. I skim almost everything I read (until I figure out that I probably missed what I was looking for to begin with), I rarely check dates and times and rely on copying and pasting way too much. While details are not my highest ranked skill, I have many friends and co-workers that love that shit.

I have done some digging here. It’s not sensible to think I can do it all and do it all well. Actually it’s quite arrogant. To think I have all the strengths is absurd. Yes, I will admit, I have some talent in certain facets of my life, but man, my weaknesses are plenty.

Here’s the thing though, for all my weaknesses another human was placed directly in my life to fill those exact voids. If I listed out all of my weaknesses on a legal pad, I could probably name a person I know (and adore) next to each one in which it would be their number one strength. Life is pretty rad like that…if you look.

And here’s the other thing (remember, I love me some things), our strengths and weaknesses evolve. What once was a challenge may not be anymore and therefore kind of boring. And what once came easy may have evolved in a direction in which we need to learn something new to tackle it again.

I have a to-do list about a mile long right now and as I look at it, I know there are some things on there that I just will not do well. I want to, but I won’t. I’ll bang my head against the wall for hours trying to learn it only to fuck it up enough so that I have to either start over or spend more money to have someone else unfuck it. How do I know this? I have 20 years of proof.

The moral of this story is to take your list, surrender your control and ask for some fricking help already. And if it’s something you think I can help you with…you know I’m your yes girl.

I’ve got two weeks to go on this thing. It’s hard to believe actually.

Even harder to believe that the past few days have been the hardest. I am finding myself thinking about sipping wine on a patio or having a cold beer after a day in my gardens. It’s sort of annoying actually.

I mean, I’m still pluggin’ away. I haven’t cheated…even though I really wanted a Bloody Mary with my bff on her birthday today. But, seven hours later I am thankful I didn’t. I accomplished a ton today and I just know had I started with the bloody at noon, it would have been a long day of nothingness. And an even longer day tomorrow.

Instead, I enjoyed a basketball banquet with some pretty cool parents (and very obnoxious 4th grade boys) and did a little planning with a side of dreaming with my husband. I have a busy work day tomorrow and I won’t have any problem making it through successfully.

And, last night I made it through a third card club sober; laughing harder than I had at the last one, which I thought would be hard to beat. My cheeks still hurt.

So, here’s the million dollar question: do I stay the course or do I test my faith on Day 91? And by testing my faith, I mean trusting that I won’t feel like a total failure if I have a drink or two.

Yes, I know, I need to give myself a break, but this is the shit running through my head for better or worse. I am scared that if I give myself an inch, I’ll take the whole mile.

However, I still have time and I am going to choose to enjoy these moments rather than get stuck in being fearful of something I don’t even know will happen. And if it does happen, how do I know it will be bad?

I don’t.

I think I’ve had this title before, but I’ve written almost 78 articles, I’m bound to have some repeats.

The past two days came with a few healthy doses of perspective and a spoonful of my own medicine.

I love to preach. I tell a mean story about how I have had all of these revelations and I have learned so much about myself and blah blah blah. While that is true and I am fascinated by the fruits of my labor (not just not drinking, all the woo woo shit I do on the daily), it’s not quite that dramatic.

I am still the same girl I was 78 days or 7.8 months ago. It doesn’t matter that I’ve lost almost 20 lbs or that I have quit biting my fingernails. I really did think those two things were going to make my life better, but it’s still me. And my life is better, but not because some-thing is different.

It’s because my perspective is different.

I have mostly been a glass half-full kind of gal. I like to think of this world as all sunshine and rainbows and puppies tiptoeing through the tulips. And, mostly my world is. But, that’s because I have discovered the holy grail of happiness…wait for it…

Choice.

It’s a choice everyday to find the good in things, even the things that we would normally say “no thank you” to. I have faith that the Universe, or God or whatever you like to call it, is on my side and has a plan. If it’s meant to be, it will be. If it’s not, something better, cooler and more amazing will come along. I have proof of this on so many levels over the past eight months you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.

Some people are not going to like to hear this explanation. And I get it. I was totally there. And it’s okay to stay there for a while, but I just chose not to live there. I choose certain things throughout my day now that gives me the results I want;

• I don’t watch the news anymore because it fills my head with negative images that (mostly) I can do nothing about

• I go to yoga even when I don’t want to because I know I will feel better after and self-care is my number one priority

• When I’m tired, I rest and I don’t feel guilty about it. All those little, unimportant, low-priority things will be waiting for me when I decide, if ever, to tackle them

• I gave up on hating myself. Cold turkey. I put myself in my loved ones’ shoes and looked the fuck around. The reasons for which I was so hard on myself didn’t hold a candle to all the reasons they love me.

• I made a new mantra: Receive & Release. I receive all the good things this world has to offer me and I release all the overwhelm and fear out in to the world. (I can’t help but picture the scene from The Green Mile when all those gray bugs come out of John Coffey’s mouth in to Wild Bill. Gross but it’s sort of therapeutic.)

These articles/posts/entries never turn out the way I think they are going to. I sit down most nights (I know I’ve been slacking) thinking I know what I’ll write about and then it turns in to scenes from The Green Mile.

I’ve been asked over the past few days what I’ll do when this is over. Will I continue to write publicly? Will I drink? Will anything change? Of course, the answer is I don’t know…because I don’t. It’s not here yet.

I’ll know when I know.

I’ve sort of lost my mojo this week.

I can’t seem to find enough energy so that I don’t want to take a nap in the middle of the day or go to bed when it’s still light out.

I don’t have a dramatic explanation for this except that I am being forced to learn something new that does not cater to my strengths. It’s sort of cool because I am acquiring new skills, although I’m not sure when I’ll ever need them again.

I am pretty familiar with being physically tired, but being mentally drained is a whole ‘nother animal. I feel like I could sleep for days.

However, the very illuminating and enlightening thing about becoming aware of this is how much room I have created to even have the energy to tackle something like this in the first place. Sound sleep has become my new normal which for sure has been the secret to getting shit done I didn’t even know I had to do.

I think about all the time I always had that was wasted getting stuck in my own head about shit that didn’t need medication (remember that?). To be honest, I didn’t think I could do more than I was already doing.

Turns out, I can.

Funky day.

I sometimes struggle with how much to share on here for fear of judgement. I am human after all.

I struggled today. Not physically, just inside my head…and let’s be honest, that is really where all my struggles originate from. It was nice out today…like “have-a-cocktail-at-the-grain-bin” nice.

I got home from a long day of working on my computer to the sun shining on my face while I watched the dogs frolic in the yard. It’s basically my own little piece of heaven. And I thought to myself that it would be really nice if we grilled out and had a couple beers on the deck tonight.

And had it stopped there, it would have been fine.

Instead I went in to a three hour freak out session about how I was freaking out about it. It started pretty innocently; just that it crossed my mind that a cocktail would be nice but then escalated in to “I won’t be able to have only one or two and then I wouldn’t go to yoga and then I wouldn’t get anything done tomorrow and I would start this cycle all over again” and wah wah wah wah.

By the time Dale got home from work two hours later, I had worked myself up in to a full-on pity party. I could hardly get myself up to take our “spring stroll” around the gardens to look for signs of life. It’s like I had already had the drink, gotten drunk, went to bed, woke up with a hangover and felt guilty about it.

All I did was think about it for Christ’s sake.

I knew right then I had to make a decision, so I 5-4-3-2-1’d my ass and drove myself to yoga.

Even there I was still consumed by what might happen in 9 days. It’s the strangest thing to feel like there is a deadline and that I’ll be presented with this weird decision making process over a beer on the deck.

It’s exhausting.

And it’s fucking 9 days away.

Jesus H. Christ, get a grip Katy.

But, luckily, yoga did exactly what I needed it to do; cleared my head; a reset if you will.

Here’s the thing, I don’t know what 9 days from now will bring AND I have no reason to think that whatever it is will be bad. It might be totally easy and innocent and different. And if it isn’t, then I have all of these 90 days to look back on and decide if it’s important to me or not.

Duh.

But, here’s the other thing, this could be about ANYTHING. For me, I can get myself in to a frenzy about a lot of things; work, money, relationships, weight, parenting…basically life. And while this journey has allowed me to address my drinking specifically, it isn’t really about that at all.

It’s about the fear.

At the bottom of all of the shit we wade through on a daily basis, any negative feeling we have is ultimately about fear.

The fear of:
loss or the lack of security,
or failure,
or judgement,
or success,
or whatever your little heart desires.

I have found when I get in to these cyclones of despair, two things work: yoga and asking myself, “what’s the worst that could happen?” No decision I make is going to hurt anybody and no one will die if I fail at a task.

It’s been interesting to write about this, but also so therapeutic. There is a certain amount of fear that goes along with being so vulnerable. But it’s only the fear of judgement and while I love all of you, this is not about you. This is about me and my life and my story. And whether I write about it or not, it’s still floating around in my head to deal with.

I have felt so grateful for those of you that have reached out to me with your encouraging words and gestures. And because of you, I have to believe there are a few of you that don’t feel the need to connect but have found something here to relate to.

If you’ve stuck with me all these weeks, thank you.

If it weren’t for you, I’d have been slamming margaritas at the grain bin tonight.

For real.