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	<title>WIRL Project &#187; Survive</title>
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	<description>What It&#039;s Really Like.</description>
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		<title>H: Holding On &#8211; What It&#8217;s Really Like</title>
		<link>http://www.wirlproject.com/h-holding-on-what-its-really-like/</link>
		<comments>http://www.wirlproject.com/h-holding-on-what-its-really-like/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 10 Aug 2015 07:30:54 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Brody]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Family]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Home/Garden]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Life/Leisure]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Love/Relationships]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ABCs]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Force of Habit]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hoarding]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Holding On]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Inventory]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Keep or Delete]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Necessity]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nostalgia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Organization]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Resourceful]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Survival]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Survive]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.wirlproject.com/?p=8265</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[This post is part of a series titled, “A-B-Cs – What It’s Really Like”. Each week a new letter and its word will be revealed. Each word’s explanation will illustrate significant personal meaning, application and ultimately demonstrate, What It’s Really Like…  I just got off of a Facetime chat with my brother where during the conversation he made fun of an old baseball t-shirt I was wearing. It is usually customary for him to follow up ribbing observations with a few jabs to get his point across. He followed up his statement saying something to the effect of, “…all these years and you still have your letterman’s jacket on…” Clothing is something that I do not compromise with when it comes to wearing an item and wearing it out. I’m cheap. Most of the garments I own are worn until complete exhaustion. Each year at least quarterly my wife will boldly announce while folding laundry, “if you can see through the underwear, it is time for them to go!” After doing a bit of cleaning and reorganizing this weekend in preparation for our new baby to be born I started thinking: What is the appropriate line/balance for holding on? Presently, I am experiencing holding on for dear life. My wife is scheduled to give birth to our second son in a matter of days and school will have started by the time you are reading this. In addition to all of the madness of cleaning and prepping for the baby’s arrival at home, I have had to almost completely start over at school (new room, new classes, creating sub plans for my lengthy absence, etc.) Although we have been in our new house for almost a year, I spent the better part of my weekend going through boxes packed away to make room for our newest family member. Between moving our residence and relocating my classroom, I have begun to completely root out all items that are non-essential. There are very few things I hate in life; moving is one of them. When my wife and I moved in together for the first time she immediately took notice to my archive of items that I had brought along to our new home. She particularly focused on the massive number of t-shirts and several boxes of books and notebooks I had kept from high school and college. What began as a mockery soon turned into scorn with no suitable place to store the boxes as there had been in my parents’ basement. The harmless boxes and stacks of t-shirts turned into a source of conflict and begrudgingly I started to throw out some of my reserve. Each of the four times we have moved over the past four years a little bit of accumulation has been eliminated bit by bit. Let’s get this straight: I am not a hoarder. I do not know why I act as if I live in the Depression Era and that I must squeeze every ounce of use out of an item before discarding it. I have tried to think back to why I might have developed this habit. It may have started as a young boy the first moment I saw my dad’s basement hardware shelf. He had carefully and meticulously organized all of his loose nuts, bolts, washers, nails and screws into glass Gerber baby food jars. After my brother and I finished the food from the jars they were cleaned and recycled by my father for hardware organization. I bet you cannot guess who currently also uses that same organizing system in his garage. I blame you, Dad. I can make the same arguments for several items like my school notebooks and t-shirt collection. Justification, in my mind, can be made to items that I continue to hold on to due to their effective and overall resourcefulness. For example, the padded seat tops to broken barstools are now a booster seat at our dining room table for my son. Many could argue that I show the classic signs of initially becoming a full-blown hoarder and am well on my way into starring in an episode of Hoarders or My Strange Addiction. You need not worry about that happening because I cannot stand clutter. I am thoroughly convinced that most items have multiple uses and you may never know when you might need an item down the line. My cell phone is an iPhone 4S. Many people have asked me why I don’t upgrade. Much like some of my see-through, holy underwear I choose not to upgrade because it still works. Currently on my phone I have 1,767 pictures, 23 videos and approximately 100 apps. It is common for there to be under 20MB of space left on my phone, forcing me into a huge dilemma of what to keep and what to delete. I certainly do not regularly use the 100+ apps that I have downloaded.  Usually, they are the first to get cleaned out. However, I find myself running into the same problem that I have with household items. Just because there is a chance I may use it someday down the road makes me feel inclined to keep it. Out of the near 1,800 pictures on my phone most of them are of my son. I am preparing myself for another major phone cleaning to guarantee adequate memory space prior to my second son being born. I have several backups of the pictures on computers and external drives. For some reason, I can’t get myself to completely wipe away all of the pictures and start fresh. Why do I hold on to something that I know I already have stored? Applying this question is not only applicable to phone memory but human memory as well. What items do we choose to hold on to and what are we able to retain? Just like the items in my house and the pictures on my phone I fear of losing what is important or could potentially be used in an alternative capacity later on. Hanging on to things can be both positive and negative. Hanging on to a picture or a pleasant memory might be good. Hanging on to a grudge might not be so good. What causes us to continue hanging on? Survival, necessity, nostalgia, force of habit?  Everyone will have a different answer. Take it from a guy who white knuckles a few things in his own life – don’t be afraid to audit your own inventory every once in a while.]]></description>
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		<title>When All Eyes Are On You and Your Story</title>
		<link>http://www.wirlproject.com/when-all-eyes-are-on-you-and-your-story/</link>
		<comments>http://www.wirlproject.com/when-all-eyes-are-on-you-and-your-story/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 17 Jun 2015 13:00:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Guest WIRL]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Family]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Life/Leisure]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Technology/Web]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[WIRL Challenge]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Award]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[BlogU]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Brain Cancer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bring Back The Sunshine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cancer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hell]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Huffington Post]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Impossible]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Sorrow]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Survive]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[WIRL Challenge BlogU]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.wirlproject.com/?p=7023</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I spent the majority of last week far from home &#8211; in the exotic land of Baltimore, at BlogU&#8217;15. It was a remarkable trip- I met dozens of new friends, caught up with even more old friends, learned, laughed, danced my ass off, and was beyond honored to be chosen by the Huffington Post for the Term Paper of the Year - an award to recognize the best of blogging over the past year. This award is something I almost didn&#8217;t accept, though. You see, the post I wrote, the one that Huffington Post named the best creative writing in a blog post for a whole calendar year, is something I can&#8217;t even describe without crying. I wrote it after Christmas, when we were in a sort of limbo with M&#8217;s cancer, and I was contemplating the idea that my husband might not live to see another Christmas. At the time it was something I could write, because we didn&#8217;t know anything at all. We didn&#8217;t know when it was going to happen, or if it was going to happen, or especially when it was going to happen, but I couldn&#8217;t begin to write something like that now. Because four months after I published that post, it did. My husband&#8217;s cancer was back, and I was thrown headlong into the chaos of scheduling surgeries and orchestrating chemotherapies. &#8220;Spinning the roulette wheel,&#8221; I believe I called it in that post. For about two and a half months, now, I&#8217;ve been living in the overwhelming uncertainty of brain cancer Hell. In a lot of ways, it&#8217;s not so bad. In a lot of ways, it&#8217;s very matter-of-fact and straightforward. Organize pills into the six or so segments in which they must be taken. Coordinate with physical and vocational and occupational and cognitive therapists for &#8220;return to work&#8221; plans and orthopedic testing. Write down everything. EVERYTHING. It&#8217;s not hard. It&#8217;s impossible. But I haven&#8217;t been able to even think about things like that post. Because you can&#8217;t function if you think about things like that. So I stood up in front of a crowd of amazing bloggers and human beings in general, and I read everything I haven&#8217;t been willing to say to myself, even in the quietest, vaguest of terms. And I cried. I knew I would cry the moment Emma Mustich said my name. She looked over at me, and I felt that heaviness in my chest. Not dread, exactly. Not public speaking nerves. Something else. I broke all the rules of good public speaking the moment I stepped behind the podium, looked at the screen set before me with my words waiting, and sighed. A heavy, loaded sigh. And then I began to read. And I cried. There were already paper napkins set next to the microphone for me. I didn&#8217;t miss a beat. I just cried, and wished all over again, with all my heart, that I could bring the sunshine back. If only for another minute. If only for a heartbeat. I wished I could spin the world round and never have written this awful thing, this beautiful and terrible thing, that I was standing watching somebody else bare a soul scarred by their own demons. That I could be drinking too many glasses of wine and cramming my face with pastries and not have a spotlight I&#8217;d asked for shone on my sorrows. When I finished reading, everyone clapped. People handed me gift bags and hugged me, and I stumbled off the stage, into the arms of The Domestic Pirate. She hugged me as though we were the oldest and dearest of friends, and I broke. For a minute I stood in a darkened auditorium and wept into the shoulders of somebody I&#8217;d met in person for the first time that day. There haven&#8217;t been words invented yet to describe the sort of gratitude one feels for friends like that, unequivocal, genuine, and present. The rest of the weekend passed in a manic high. I learned, I laughed, I got drunk and danced until I was pretty sure I tore something. Kind of like I know I said I sometimes do in that same piece. People were so gracious. They were so kind. They said the nicest, most flattering things, and I blushed and tried to accept their compliments without feeling fraudulent. And then I came home, and crashed. What I should have learned years ago was that you can&#8217;t do this to yourself. You can&#8217;t not feel, and then feel, and then not feel things you don&#8217;t want to. The emotional energy invested in not feeling something is outrageous. I spent five years expending that energy, through M&#8217;s original diagnosis, through chemo and radiation and experimental arsenic IVs. Through a wedding and two pregnancies, through unemployment and both of our return to school. Through so much doubt, and so much uncertainty. And the minute I could lift the curtain on all that repressed anxiety, it crippled me. It nearly killed me. I believe we&#8217;ve survived M&#8217;s cancer so long because of this optimism, this blindness to the alternatives, but maybe it&#8217;s not the only way. Part of me is certain that unless I pull that curtain closed, really shut out the doubts and fears, they will manifest themselves. The way that until I wrote about worrying that my husband&#8217;s cancer would come back, it hadn&#8217;t come back. That my comfort with my grief precipitated the new need for surgery by four measly months. Like I did this to him. Like this is my fault, for publicly doubting, even for a second. Like if only I&#8217;d never let that doubt out at all, we would still be living as though we were done with brain cancer forever. And that&#8217;s what hurts the most. Knowing that, no matter how wrong it is, or how self abusive it is, no matter what&#8230; if things go badly, it will be my fault. Because I&#8217;m the one who wasn&#8217;t strong enough to keep shutting out those doubts. No matter what, I will never be as purely certain of the future as I was eight years ago. Maybe the cynicism of age, or the experience, or the realism, or whatever you call it, is inevitable. But that also implies that death is inevitable. And yeah, it is, but I don&#8217;t want it to be now. Not now. Not when I could have done something. Could have been better. Could have been stronger. Could have been more. I want to say I know we&#8217;ll survive, but I don&#8217;t even know what that means right now. All I know is I want to wake up in the morning with my husband&#8217;s cheek resting on my ear, with his stomach pressed into my back, and I want to stay there forever. Until the sun sets and rises and sets again, and we&#8217;re the only things left in an entire universe of passing time. I want to feel warm, and safe, and loved, and to believe that each day is going to be no different from the last. I want to stop waiting. &#160; Join The Conversation! Easily contribute your story here. &#160; About the Author… Lea Grover is a writer and speaker living on Chicago&#8217;s south side. Her writing has been featured in numerous anthologies, including &#8220;Listen To Your Mother: What She Said Then, What We&#8217;re Saying Now,&#8221; and on websites ranging from The Huffington Post to AlterNet to The Daily Mail Online, and she speaks about sex positivity in parenting and on behalf of the RAINN Speakers Bureau. She can be found on her blog (Becoming SuperMommy), on Twitter (@bcmgsupermommy), and Facebook, or preparing her upcoming memoir. &#160; &#160;]]></description>
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