Something important.

It is 4:30am and I can't sleep.

On the plus side, however, as I was laying in bed tossing and turning, I had a bit of a revelation that is going to change my life majorly and for the better. I don't think anything this important and positive has happened since my wedding day. Granted, that was less than two months ago, but still.

The other day at work, I had some time to kill and I found myself wandering from a blog about professional blogging to a site called "Man Vs. Debt". I'm not terribly interested in personal finance as a hobby, but I have significant student loan debt and I was curious to see what this fellow had to say.

It was about more, much more, than debt. It was about changing your life for the better, whether it be in a small way like de-cluttering your garage, or in a large way, like living free of credit cards. It's about aspirations, ambitions, and life goals.

It mobilised me. I started writing lists of things I wanted to achieve, and the words just poured out of me onto the paper. I felt powerful. I felt confident. I felt... trepidation.

It took me until tonight to figure out why. The cogs had been turning in my head for the past two days. I have two life goals, and I've known what they are for a long time, though not how to put them into action. I want to (1) help people and (2) to travel.

In university, I studied International Development Studies. My intent was to go to Africa or somewhere and feed starving children. I knew I wasn't cut out for the medical professions, so I figured that this would be the most concrete way to help people. However, once I got to school, I soon learned that my way of thinking was imperialistic - very "white man's burden". Also, in my third year of school, a very unfortunate housing situation lead to a relapse of my Crohn's disease, which had gone into remission around the time I started university.

After the return of the Crohn's, I suffered a flare-up so severe that it put me a year behind in my studies. My disease had worsened, and it continued to adversely affect my life, and shattered my dreams of travelling internationally to work for non-profits.

What I need to do is get back into remission permanently. The drugs I'm on now are so new that the long-term effects aren't known yet. It would make so much sense for me to shape up and get myself out of this mess.

This is not an easy proposition. Beating Crohn's is going to take lifestyle changes galore. I am a worrier, and stress is my biggest trigger when it comes to Crohn's. I need to remove stress from my life wherever possible and learn to cope with the problems that I can't get rid of. It could mean creative outlets*, meditation, volunteering, research, diets, strict budgeting, or yoga. My goal for right now will be to come here, every day, and tackle this, and write about my results and discoveries for the day. It may take time, but I read somewhere that it's the dull, plodding types who get things done, otherwise the world would be full of serial novelists and Olympic athletes.

I feel like this idea needs a catchy name of some mind. Something that ends in "Project". I'll get back to you on that.

And so my adventure begins.

Cheers,
Meg

*And all this time, I thought I wanted to write a fashion blog? ...well, who knows. Maybe that's a creative outlet right there. :)