All Flared Up

I put off starting this blog for a long time. The idea first came to me over a year ago. Since then, it has taken many different forms inside my head: A blog about menopause. A blog about being an ex-pat. A blog about having an autoimmune disease. I had tons of ideas and would have flashes of insights that lasted for days, but I lacked the follow through that would carry me through the hard stuff of actually doing it.

Every few months a small voice would call me back to the laptop, reminding me of what I wanted to do, nudging me gently on. I’d spend hours designing the pages and picking out the photos, only to abandon the project yet again after a week or so. Because inevitably, I would find out that someone else is already doing this. Someone better. Someone more educated. Someone with much more to say than I did.

Then I got diagnosed with my second autoimmune disease, this one a doozy. And something in me shifted. There is an urgency now. A sense of now or never. The realization that there are millions of ways to allow myself to get pulled off-track. And only one way to stay on it.

And that is by actually DOING the work.

I decided to drop the perfectionism…thank you, menopause!

And to start keeping the promises I make to myself. Because that is how I will teach myself, one fulfilled promise after another, that I am trustworthy. That I have my own back. That I can actually tolerate myself.

So, here I am – raw and unfinished, writing a blog about my experiences being a menopausal ex-pat with autoimmune disease. Because it’s what I said I was going to do.

Because I need to do it for me.