The Brilliance of Resilience

In the last few months, I have been faced with multiple instances where the archetype of rising above your circumstances and creating a great life despite your challenges has been presented and championed as the archetype that we should all emulate when the whole world seems against you. That, in fact, anything less than complete victory in the face of undaunted adversity is considered to be a complete failure of a lazy and incompetent soul. It's dramatic language, but so is the story of the underdog. I wrote previously about that appointment with my nice doctor and how he asked me about why and how I do the things that I do. I think that I am so genuinely shocked that someone besides my therapist would be interested in what goes in my head and life that I latched onto that and probably said way more than I anticipated. It's as if he was the old and wise senior and I was the stunted and repressed freshman that completely lost my mind that someone so "cool," would wa...

I wanted to write more about losing weight. I started another post about seeing the doctor and what happened that day, but I found that the thoughts were confusing and overwhelming at the time. They overwhelm me now, but in a more structured way, I think. I got a call from the Bariatric surgery center that I started going to in December. They said they hadn't seen me at the weigh-ins/meetings in a few months and wanted to know if I was still considering surgery. I should back up. In order to be considered for Bariatric surgery by most insurance companies, you must complete six months of a "lifestyle," program that allows you to start to put better habits into motion and hit the ground running after the actual surgery is complete while losing weight pre-surgery to provide less risk for the procedure. It's a rigorous process that includes lots of testing, psych evals, etc. I have a lot of opinions about the lack of psychological testing for Bariatric surgery, but anot...