Keep on Dreamin'

When it comes to life and all the things you wish it entailed, dreaming is believing and believing is achieving! Having aspirations in life to work towards, goals to conquer, and fears to overcome is undoubtedly one of the most important things in leading a strong minded and positively happy life!

You, yourself are your biggest distraction. There are always going to be obstacles in your path, there will always be excuses to be made, life's karmic effect will surely happen at least twice; but the thing that will beat you down the most is your own negative thinking. The world that we live in today is filled with negativity that is constantly being thrown in your face. Newspapers, TV, radio; some form of negative media is almost always being absorbed by your body. And whether you choose to believe it or not it takes its toll on you, secretly seeping into your brain attacking your joy receptors. Positivity, after all, is your best friend!


As a child everyone dreams of what they want to be when they grow up. Of course not many of us actually follow through and become cowboys or Disney princess's but we had the right idea. We all had that imaginary job or person who we envisioned to become that made us happy. Simply happy! We weren't worried about money or bills, social acceptance or approval. And that's what we all need to remember! Yeah, we do all grow up and the real world that is all about money and time smacks us in the face but that shouldn't take away from our happiness. For those of us who had our imaginary dreaming days cut short by the real world of a chronic illness (or anything else for that matter) we to quickly learned that life is not all peaches and cream. There is a large group of people that never had the chance to experience growing up or go through the stepping stones to building dreams and how to achieve them. That's why I think it is all the more important for those people to not let their dreams wither away.

So if life has dealt you a folding hand and your dreams haves dwindled, at least save them from shriveling up and dying. Revitalize your dreams by pursuing them as a passion or hobby if nothing more. Yeah if your dream was to become an astronaut or pterodactyl you may find difficulty in taking that up on an amateur level. But don't let negativity push you away from what you love. If nothing more you can get a season pass to the planetarium or prehistoric museum. And if you can't quite make those dreams come true just yet, keep fueling them with love and positivity and hopefully one day soon your dreams will come true.

Your dreams are yours and yours alone! So if you don't keep hold of them in hopes of achievement then who will?

Stepping Back Through The Looking Glass

Would you go back to the other side? 



If you were given the opportunity to step through a looking glass, going back to a time before you fell ill and erasing your life as you now know it, would you take the leap?

Would you take the chance to start over and live your life again without the pain and suffering you have endured without any knowing of what your life would have become? 

When your memories of being happy and healthy are things of the past and a chronic illness has devoured a significant part of your life being presented with the chance to wish it all away and start anew would be an almost irresistible offer. Being able to live the life you always imagined and becoming the person you always wanted to be with no reminders of the tragedies you have had to endure would be a blissful way to live. Having all your possible wants and desires come into fruition and not knowing any other way of life would be as if all your wishes upon falling stars and birthday candles had come true. 

Take a moment to think though...
Would you be willing to lose what you have learned throughout your life’s trials and tribulations? All the lessons you have been taught would not be remembered nor the wisdom or patience you have gained throughout your illness. Would overlooking all the negative in your life be worth disregarding all the good too? 

If the opportunity was given to me to step back through my own looking glass, and my life as it is now would be forgotten, I am not sure I would accept the offer. Even though my life has been one of difficulties and challenges and I would love for it to be simpler and more vivacious, I would not want to jeopardize the understanding of life I have come to obtain nor the amazing people that have been placed in my life because of my illness. I firmly believe my life was given to me to endure for a purpose. I may not know that purpose now, perhaps I never will, but I accept it for what it is and try to see the good that has come from the bad. I like to think that because of what I have had to go through that I have become a kinder hearted person that tries not to judge people so quickly and to understand others more deeply. 

Aside from all the pain, suffering and unexpected directions your life has taken you, haven’t you gained some things from your illness? Considering this is real life and we are unable to take a step back in time through a looking glass to a new beginning we must take time to remember the positive things in our lives, whether those lives are of good health or bad. So take a look in the mirror at yourself and your life as a whole and truly see what you have to be thankful for. 

Life Is A Puzzle

The meaning of life is an enigmatic thought that can be examined and questioned until the end of time. Life can be broken down into textbook understandings and yet still leave thinkers in a reverie daze. When looking at life through a looking glass in a metaphoric way we can much more clearly see how everything in life, every decision we make has meaning in our lives. 

 Life is a puzzle with millions of pieces that intricately fit together to form a picture that hasn’t even been created. Every moment of our lives, every challenge we overcome, and every diagnoses we may receive is one piece closer to completing our life’s puzzle. 

When we are born we are simply a pile of puzzle pieces. As we grow and experience life pieces start to link together and a small glimpse of the overall picture may be seen. Even when we are putting our puzzles together there are those difficult places that take longer to find the missing pieces. Those moments are the struggles we will face in life. We will have hard times, perhaps we are diagnosed with an illness, but even a diagnosis is a missing piece found. Once we have that one piece in place the picture will become a little clearer and other pieces will more easily connect. All the puzzle pieces that we will have to acquire may not be the prettiest or easiest to find but everyone is essential! We can’t skip steps or try to make shortcuts when solving a puzzle; it simple won’t turn out right. That is exactly how our lives are! Some puzzle pieces may look perfect and we are so overjoyed when we finally find them and despite trying to squish them into place, they just won’t work. As the picture becomes more complete the pieces will start to fall into place more quickly. We just have to keep trying, piece after piece until we figure it out.

And when your puzzle is nearly complete or if you are just starting out, if you feel like you still have missing pieces that’s ok. I have accepted that I will always have a missing piece to my puzzle, a certain unknown factor in my life and that is just fine with me.

No matter how many pieces are missing to the puzzle the picture will always be beautiful!

Gaming For A Cure

 

 Wouldn’t it be great if merely playing video games could cure Cancer, AIDS, or even Lyme Disease?
That is exactly what the University of Washington’s Center for Game Science and the Department of Biochemistry had in mind. Adrien Treuille, an avid game inventor lent his expertise to Rhiju Das, a biochemist that needed help solving protein puzzles to help cure diseases. Treuille’s and Das’ intellectual collaboration created the ever growing in popularity online game, ‘Foldit’. 

Where computers were not the elite problem solvers for protein folding Treuille used crowd sourcing to recruit gamers to find the answers they needed. The player’s ability to predict possible patterns in the proteins was something that no computer had yet accomplished. The games goal is to optimize protein prediction and eventually use protein folding strategies that the players discovered to create protein prediction software. Another advantage and anticipated goal of the game is figuring out the structures of infectious bacteria proteins and creating new proteins that may be able to kill virus and other harmful proteins. 

Could this video game be the answer to finding cures for the most plaguing diseases? It may not rid the world of all its sickness and problems but the game has already had success in the science lab. The Mason-Pfizer monkey virus had stumped scientist for 15 years and the Foldit community figured out the protein structure in just 10 days. So I think there is hope to be had here. 

Want to play? But science isn’t your forte? Don’t worry; you don’t have to be a science nerd in order to get the game. Think of it as the Rubik Cube with the addiction rate of Angry Birds! Newbie players have beginner puzzles to solve that show you the rules and how to optimize your score. Once you have mastered that level you will be hooked and anxious to twist and turn the more complex proteins.

So if your mom yells at you for playing video games or you feel ashamed for using video games to procrastinate just play Foldit then you can declare you aren’t simply playing video games, you could be curing Cancer... and hopefully one day Lyme Disease! 

CLICK here to play Foldit: http://fold.it/portal/

Resources:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTlNNFQxs_A

http://fold.it/portal/info/about

http://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2012/08/tech/gaming.series/research.html

Why I OWN My Disease... and It Doesn’t Own Me!

Some people may see medical diagnoses as defects of their bodies or as if something is wrong with them. Diagnoses may be used as labels and defining factors to dishearten people instead of instructions to help heal them.
When you own your disease or when you own any situation, it gives you a sense of control over something that may be completely uncontrollable. ‘Owning’ those circumstances allows you to determine how you will let them affect your life. Will you let those challenges crush you or will you stand strong against the storm? It may not be “mind over matter” but your mind most certainly does matter!

When you are faced with any stressful event in life there is always an attuning period that one needs to readjust and focus. Being diagnosed with a new medical condition is exactly the same. You need time to accept what has happened, embrace the changes you will need to make in your life, and then learn to deal with it so that it doesn’t own you. I personally don’t think any of those three stages are ever 100% completed because your life is ever-changing but by striving to achieve those three things you are ‘OWNing’ your life! Use your new found sense of ‘owning’ to be self empowering to help heal yourself and evoke positivity upon others. (‘Owning’ however isn’t arrogance or ignorance!!! Be confident and courageous, not cocky and conceited!)

I have chosen to ‘OWN’ my life; as diseased, multi-diagnosed, or strayed it may be from where I imagined it would have taken me. A lot of people find receiving a diagnosis very comforting, it was for me. If for no other reason, finally having a name to blame for the misunderstood torture I had endured for so many years was relieving. Had I not been diagnosed, I don’t even want to imagine were I would be and I certainly wouldn’t have made the steps forward (as small as they may sometimes seem) to becoming healthy again.

 ‘OWN’ your disease, don’t let it own you! You don’t have to like how your illness has impacted your life or be cheery all day but don’t let the disease take over you! Take control of it, ‘OWN’ it and fight for your own future because you can’t change the past!  

Diamonds into Coal

Deep down under the earth’s surface there lies millions of pieces of coal. Throughout time the heat from the earth’s core and the pressure that continuously pushes on the coal slowly turns it from an ugly black rock into a brilliant diamond. 

Those of you that are living difficult lives and going through hard times, you are exactly this... a piece of coal! The world and all of its hardships are putting pressure on you. You may feel the heat of people’s judgments and expectations, perhaps you feel as if you are stuck in a situation with no way out, or maybe you feel like you are just going to crumble under the pressure. You might just feel like an ugly forgotten piece of dirty, useless coal.

But you’re wrong! You are all a diamond! You are all beautiful and brilliant in your own ways. You say you can’t be a diamond because you are flawed? You are wrong. Even the most beautiful things in life have flaws, even diamonds! It’s our flaws that give us each our own unique qualities even though we are all diamonds. 

Right now you are just a diamond in the rough. You may still be buried under the earth, you may still be going through hard times but don’t be discouraged. The earth is making you perfect and one day soon you will shine like the diamond you are! While you are a piece of coal enduring the journey of having the world weighing down on you and holding up through the pressure it has brought, know that it is making you stronger. So when you are finally a diamond, shiny and bright, you have been made stronger and are more beautiful for what you have gone through.

Even diamonds start as coal, Just wait for your time to shine!