Time to take a pause, stop, center myself. I must calm the maelstrom of my mind. Quiet the chaos. I must.......................find direction in the storm, stay a course, hold steady the helm. If I don't, I will soon be sinking with the rest of the detritus of life, left to the bottom feeders and scavengers, or worms. If I can't do this then nothing else is going to work.

I constantly feel as if I have past the point of no return, as if there is no way back from this existence that my life has become. I have to make myself pause, breath, center and come back to an honest reality. The reality is, people lose weight every day. People lose hundreds of pounds. I have done so many things in my life simply because I wanted to do them, I should be able to do this. I must learn to surf the waves again instead of being at their mercy.

Ohh, but then there is the pain. That one constant in my life, the thing that is forever and always with me in some form or another. My knees, my legs, my ________. Something always hurts. How hard it is to find motivation to do anything when in constant pain. To function, the even get out of bed. How do you stay focused when the pain gets so intense at times all I want to do is go numb? When you wake up and wish you hadn't because it hurts so badly. The focus turns to reasons not to kill myself, nothing else. To simply find the strength to function through the day becomes a struggle. Trying to get healthy takes a backseat to finding the will to keep living.

Yet I know others have been worse off than I am. And they have found the strength to turn things around. If they can, what is my excuse? I see double amputees running in marathons with prosthetic legs, people stuck in wheel chairs for the remainder of their life, and I have the nerve to feel sorry for myself? What is it they have that I seem unable to locate in myself?