Headaches, Bob Ross & Happiness:

{Picture kindly borrowed from:  ellies-whole-grains.com}

Remember those ads on television growing up, where they showed you an egg and said, "This is your brain."

Then the person cracked the egg open, threw it into a frying pan and said, "this is your brain on drugs."

Well the picture above was the state of me yesterday.
It wasn't pretty, unless you count being "pretty miserable".

Due to the lasting side effects of a car accident I was in back in January, I have a lot of neck, back, chest, arm and shoulder pain.  I go to physical therapy, massage therapy and to the doctor and chiropractor.

However, the headaches remain, and I'm in pain every day, regardless of how hard I try not to be.

I don't let it get me too down though, I do what I can, and I suck it up and trudge on, because I truly feel in my bones, that life is just too short and too spectacular of a gift to waste it laying on the couch on a heating pad with an ice pack on my head.  Even though that's what I probably SHOULD do, I just can't waste my life that way.  Ya know?

Yesterday was tough on me, the sensitivity to light, sound, smell....the nauseous feeling that had me thinking I might need to pull over and barf on the way home from work was vastly unpleasant.

Certain things I try and avoid when my head is pounding, and they include, talking on the phone, looking at a computer screen, watching television, reading, and basically doing anything that requires a lot of concentration or thought.  So you can imagine my surprise when I found myself sitting at my Editor, Rachel's house last night reading DIAD on an I-pad screen reviewing the work of Theresa Turner, who's spent the weekend fixing my inadequacies as a writer, also known as "tense issues" and just plain old "inexperience".

Now, I've read DIAD's beginning soooooo many times that it's almost like nails on a chalkboard to once again set out and go through it another time....(for the millionth time, at least!), yet Rachel assured me that I would have my mind changed as soon as I began reading it.

I pushed my headache aside and I began to read.

Line after line, I breezed through, finding that it was so smooth, it was like satin.  I believe at one point I might have said, "Theresa just may be the Bob Ross of Editing, (minus the beard and the very round-shaped hair)--waving her magic brush and making my book glorious"....and I don't think I've ever said my book was glorious before.

{Picture kindly borrowed from:  Wikipedia.com}

Theresa's so good, I was hard pressed to find what she changed.  I kept trying to put my finger on it, to say: "AHA!  HERE, I FOUND IT!" but try as I might, I only read my words that I had originally written, arranged beautifully and pleasing to the eye.

So, there we sat, Rachel covered in head to toe poison ivy, me with a massive migraine, sitting on her front porch, I-pad in hand, completely oblivious to our physical state, and enthralled with a story we've both read a million times before.

That my friends is magical.

To make the old new again.

To make stale, fresh.

To take an ole rough rock, and polish it until is shines.

Life is really short.  I can't tell you how happy I am to really be living MINE right now, even in pain, even though it's less than perfect, it still has so much to offer! 

I am constantly surrounded by THE best people a girl could ever ask for....

and that likely includes YOU, who's reading this right now.

Smile about that.

Go ahead, I bet you can't stop it from happening...

mhmm...

there it is!

Sincerely and yours truly,

~Heather Lynn~