For the last two years I have been a member of Ancestry.com, having built an extensive family tree on both sides of my family.  Since then, I have also become a member on 23andMe, and through both of these sites I have used DNA kits to help narrow down both genetic risk factors and my DNA ancestry.

If you are interested in my poetry books or in need of freelance writing assistance, please contact me!  I would be delighted to discuss!

Email: WrittenByDesign01@gmail.com

So, right about this time last year, I reflected on my three year Fitbitversary.  This weekend marked my fourth year as a Fitbit user.  Let me wow you with some stats (I love statistics!):

In those four years I have walked/run/jogged:

• 18.8 MILLION steps!
• which equates to 7,957 miles
• climbed 5,323 floors

As many of you know, I lost my dad during Christmastime of 2016 after a long and difficult illness.  This will be my second Father\’s Day without him.

What surprises me most is how very unsorry I feel for myself at this time.  Instead, I feel very blessed that I was so lucky to have such a wonderful dad and for so long.  For the first thirty-three years of my life, I had an unwavering champion, a source of unconditional love, and a perfect match for my temper and wits.

No matter how prepared you are, you\’re never ready to lose a parent.  My siblings and I discovered this, and as lucky as we have felt to have had him for as long as we did, you cannot help but have that bereft, childish feeling at the loss of such a strong figure in your life, even as an adult.

Most of you did not know my dad personally, but it\’s possible that you have seen him.  You may have seen him in my mom\’s tender, enthusiastic stories of their life together.  You may have seen him in my brother\’s smile or laughter.  You may have caught of a glimpse of him in my oldest sister\’s sense of humor.  You may have gotten to know him through my youngest sister\’s compassionate spirit.  In all of my siblings, you can see his remarkable generosity, his passion for life, and his gift for making people feel welcome.

In the weeks after my dad\’s death, I was afraid that for the rest of my life I would be overwhelmed by the shock and grief of watching someone\’s life slip away.  Far from that, instead I have been overwhelmed by the memory of life and love that he left behind him.  Every time I think of my dad, it is with a smile, and a remembrance of all that he was and how great a legacy he left behind him.

If my dad could see our family now, he would tell my siblings how proud he is of all they have achieved in their lives in the year and a half that has passed.  Not only for how much they have achieved, but for how well they have achieved it.  In one of his last conversations with me, he noted that we would do just fine without him – not a self-pitying note, but one of pride, knowing he had invested his best in us.  And so he did…and those investments continue to reap their reward daily in our lives.

So, to all of the great dads out there today, Happy Father\’s Day.  May the legacy of love you leave behind be as vibrant as that of my dad\’s.

As a student from elementary school up through to high school, I was mostly an A student (with a few fairly egregious exceptions).  As an undergraduate student, I had almost exclusively As, and as a graduate student, I have had all As.  I have a fairly exemplary record as an employee.  In many areas of my life, from my health quotient to my credit score, I am doing pretty well.

Throughout my life I have had the opportunity to deal with numerous people who chalk all of this up to luck.  I have had friends and coworkers alike tell me that \”these things just come more easily to you.\”  I do not think people realize when they say that how belittling and insulting it is.

I worked with a woman not that long ago who used this as an excuse all the time for why I was getting my work done and she was not.  I was newer in my role, had less tools at my disposal, but at the end of the day I was succeeding and she was not. \”This comes more easily to you,\” she would say.  She did not take into account that I spent the majority of my day in my chair, actually doing my work, whereas she was wandering around, socializing, always talking about her work but never doing any.

It is true that I have had some great blessings in my life that have contributed to my ability to be successful.  My parents were loving and supportive of me, though they never did my work for me.  They told me I could achieve anything, but they set an expectation of me that I do it myself.  I do believe some skills in life are inherent to our nature, and I am naturally an intelligent, driven, determined person, and I thank God for giving me those qualities.

But at the same time, I have limitations as well.  I have mild dyslexia, and as a result, I am a slow reader.  As a child, I limited my reading to what was required.  I have had bad knees since I was a kid, having had a tumor on my left knee that was removed when I was 18, but my knees were bad prior to and have been worse since.  I have two conditions – hypothyroidism and PCOS – that contribute to hormonal imbalances that make maintaining my weight and health more difficult.

When people say things to me like \”it comes more easily to you\” what they are failing to see is the effort behind the things I do.  I have had other women I know with PCOS and hypothyroidism (a surprising number of them) express to me how lucky I am that I have been able to manage my weight.  What they fail to see is that I get between 100-120 minutes of activity each day.  Is that easy?  Is that not an exhausting sacrifice that I make in order to invest in my own health?  Is it not everyone else who is so lucky that they spend those 100-120 minute in idle time while I am sweating?

I make the same argument about my grades or my work evaluations.  The hours that I have spent going above and beyond, taking on additional work, putting myself out to help someone else, and the additional hours it takes me to read through the materials that others skim much faster than I do…is this easy?  I cannot remember the last time I skated by, doing the bare minimum, procrastinating or letting deadlines slide.

This is a problem I have seen for others as well, my sister being one of them.  She is also a high achiever, and a fit person despite having PCOS.  She also finished her master\’s degree with honors and is widely celebrated by her team at work.  Not because she is lucky, or because things come easier to her, but because she is committed to her health and to her work.  It is insulting to me to think anyone could assume she achieves all of this through luck.

People who say that are blinded by their own insecurity, unwilling to acknowledge that some people persevere beyond what is comfortable, and sometimes beyond was it even reasonable, in order to achieve their goals.  It is easier for them to believe their own circumstances are a lack of luck, rather than a lack of effort.

\”Luck is a dividend of sweat. The more you sweat, the luckier you get.\” – Ray Kroc

On July 8th, I will officially have finished all of the requirements for my Master\’s in Management degree.  Truthfully, I will be done all of the requirements long before that date, but that is the date when the course will close and it will be final and official.

I feel like I have been in post-secondary forever.  Immediately after high school, I went to college for a little over one semester, and had to withdraw so I could move outside of the country.

When I was twenty, I went back to college and for the next two years I worked on finishing my Associate\’s degree.  I was a Dean\’s List student all four semesters, and even though it wasn\’t where I had hoped to be at twenty-two, I was glad to have it done.

Just before I turned twenty-nine in 2012, I registered to go back to school again, this time to finish my Bachelor\’s degree.  The company I work for offers tuition reimbursement, and so for the following four years, I worked full time and went to school part time, eventually, finally, thankfully completing my Bachelor of Science in Business Management in 2015.

I had barely closed my books when I decided I wanted to pursue a Master\’s of Science in Management.  I had no good reason for doing it except that I knew I could and it would be paid for by tuition reimbursement.  It seemed a large commitment to take on for myself, but I like a challenge.  So in January of 2016. I began my graduate studies.

Grad school is not like the other schooling I have done.  There is a lot more reading, a lot more research, a lot more of a methodical approach to writing and presenting.  I have a mild form of dyslexia, which makes me a very slow reader, and with all of the additional required reading I definitely felt the weight of how much time it took to complete assignments compared to my other degrees.  However, I love learning, and I have a genuine interest in understanding the course topics.  I have poured my heart into all aspects of these concepts, and it has refined me as a person and as a leader.  I have a much more firmly defined sense of what is important to me and what my personal vision is after completing this degree.

More importantly, I will close this chapter knowing I have accomplished a difficult task.  I have invested time and energy into it, which has sharpened my perseverance.  I have learned how to do things that I never could have imagined that I could, which has boosted my confidence.  I have painstakingly researched concepts to understand them completing before providing analysis, which has increased my patience.  In all of these ways, far more than learning technical skills, I emerge from this process a better person.

It really isn\’t the destination that makes us, it is the process.  Over the last three years as I have tackled this degree, I have had many difficult things go on in my personal life as well, including the death of my father, all of which could have sidetracked me from completing, given me a valid excuse to quit.  I have a level of pride in myself knowing I did not get deterred that I could never have felt if this process had gone smoothly.  I have managed to lose and keep off 30lbs, I have managed to write two books of poetry, I have managed to take on two new positions at work, all while staying the course toward the finish line of my degree.

My focus has been steadfast, and more than any piece of paper, that is my biggest accomplishment.

I hate the word busy.  I avoid it as much as possible, but there is no denying that I have been busy lately.  I am in the final push toward finishing my degree, but what has really put me behind is my wonderful, much anticipated 35th birthday celebration week with my friends.

So, throughout the length of my marriage – and even during the pre-marriage courtship – I have always had an abundance of alone time.  My husband and I have always been on different schedules, which has given us good quality time when we are together and given me plenty of much needed alone time to do my own thing and be \”off\” for lengths of time.

I am reclusive by nature.  I can be \”on\” for work, for family and for my husband.  But like everyone else, I need my me time.  In fact, it takes a lot for me to get lonely.

In the recent months, however, with my husband at home full time (and doing an excellent job at taking care of literally everything for me before I get home) I get almost no alone time.  Moreover, as I finish these last 6 weeks of grad school, even my personal downtime has been greatly consumed with preparing assignments.

Recent conversations with friends and my husband have pointed me into the direction of realizing I need to focus more on incorporating my own solitary version of fun back into my life.  I have recently started expanding my usual evening walks from about 3 miles to 5 miles, giving myself additional alone time.  Exercise for me has always been the ultimate way to indulge myself in personal time.

However, I am going to take that a step further as well.  Especially as I finish out the next 6 weeks of grad school, upon which I will find myself with a huge amount of free time such as I have not experienced in many years, I am committed to enjoying the independence that I am free to have.  To seek out the opportunities to do things by myself.

People, my husband included, find it weird when people go to movies by themselves, but I think that is great and I look forward to it.  Same with going to dinner alone; I look forward to treating myself to an evening out, alone.  This gives me the alone time that I crave, it gets me out, and then it improves the quality of time I spend with my husband and family after.

People find this all weird.  I know of couples who would find this very weird, or it would make them insecure, or people who just hate being by themselves.  But I thrive on this type of personal time, and after the obligations and committments that I have fulfilled over the last several years I look forward to giving myself some down time!

I have written a lot about sisters.  It\’s something I have a lot of experience in.  I have been a sister for over three decades, and in my expert opinion, I have the two best sisters you could ever find.

Recently, when my mom was describing us to someone else she said, \”if you attack any one of them, they will very quickly start circling the wagons.\”  This is a fact.  No matter how stupid one of us has been, we can bicker amongst ourselves, but if you come against us, that is a force to be reckoned with!

However, there are also complexities that come with dealing with us, especially as through the years we have at times worked together and had mutual friends.  Being friends with the set of us is not just having mutual friendships, it\’s being friends with sisters.  It poses an entirely different dynamic.

Here\’s the thing: I don\’t care whether you compare me favorably or unfavorably to them, I don\’t want to be compared.  I\’ve had things said to me such as, \”Boy, your sisters sure are pretty.  You are nothing like them.\”  This is annoying.  But no less annoying is, \”Wow, you are way *insert compliment here* than your sisters.\”  Are you talking crap about my sisters?!

Me and my sisters couldn\’t be more different personality wise sometimes.  We all fit our individual molds as eldest, middle and youngest of the set.  We all have wildly different interests at times and we have very different goals and we react very differently to things. 

But we are also tied together genetically.  We make the same funny \”huhm!\” sound when we find something amusing.  Our husbands cannot tell the difference in our voices over the phone.  We have the same propensity for small mouths and wide hips and what I like to call an intelligent looking forehead!  It is probably easy to look at us and make comparisons on how we are alike or different.

And people do it all the time, with absolutely no regard to whether this might be annoying to us or not.

It\’s not that I mind being compared to them because they are my sisters.  They are both respectable, attractive, successful women.  Sure.  If you\’re going to compare me to someone it might as well be them.  But what woman enjoys being compared to anyone else?  I think deep down we all want to be \”one in a million\” but when you make comparisons it stops feeling that way.  I think it\’s just much more likely people will compare sisters.

It\’s a complex dyanmic to know the three of us together.  We bring a whole lot of personality to the table when we are together.  We are unusually close to one another, making it even more likely to make comparisons as we are often together.  But think carefully before you make comparisons.  The dynamic between us, half rivalry and half rock solid loyalty, might generate a response that you don\’t want to hear!

So, there is a Carrie Underwood song that I have never really been in love with, called \”So Small,\” which discusses how sometimes we make a really big deal of really small things and we fail to see what\’s really important.

Despite not loving the song (and I really can\’t say why, it\’s not a bad song), I was thinking about it this week.  How we have those moments of clarity in life where we see the things that truly matter and that the rest of everything else is the noise that distracts us from it.

My husband is going through this to an extent right now.  Some health issues in his family have created cause for alarm, and have suddenly made some of the other things we have been facing seem insignificant in comparison.

I remember reading in the Anne of Green Gables series as a child a scene where, Anne as an adult in college in the third book, is torn about a decision and asks herself what she will wish she had done when she was 80 years old.  It gave her perspective.  I have often since, throughout my teenage years and adulthood, used that same thinking when facing a \”crisis.\”  Will this matter when I am 80?  Will it even matter next year?  If not, then let\’s keep it in perspective.

Carrie Underwood sings, \”Sometimes that mountain you\’ve been climbing is just a grain of sand.\”  How often do we overlook the truly important things because we are blinded by a grain of sand?

I use this for myself even today.  I am carrying a heavy load.  I am in school full time right now trying to power through the next 9 weeks until graduation.  I just accepted a promotion at work, requiring me to learn an entirely new process and take on new responsibilities.  My husband has been laid off and I am currently the single income in my household.  I sometimes even have a hard time thinking beyond the current week or I become overwhelmed.  But then I realize, these things, even if they all fall apart, are small things.  My family is healthy.  I am healthy.  Mistakes made today can be corrected tomorrow.  Failures that I encounter are not an end result but rather part of the process.  Many of my largest problems can be resolved by direct communication or a few hours of focusing on a problem, or even a night of solid sleep.

Choosing this healthy sense of perspective gives me a high threshold for stress.  The day to day burdens, even when heavy, become less overwhelming when you realize in the larger scheme of things it\’s not what matters.  Even if I failed grad school or dropped out today, the world would go on, my life would go on, and everything would be okay.  It doesn\’t make it less important, it just lends it the perspective that it needs.

When you start to see what really matters, brushing aside all of the noise, as Carrie says, \”it sure makes everything else seem so small.\”