Saturday, March 29, 2014

Every Blog is A Beginning : 365 Stories from Happy Feet

image originally shared on the blog
Home in Luxembourg for the Half Marathon - 7th of June,2013

Be brave enough to live life creatively. The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. You can’t get there by bus, only by hard work and risk and by not quite knowing what you are doing. What you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover will be yourself.

- Alan Alda

Since finishing the half in the Hague, I have been silent on this blog.  I have yet again let  life circumstances "silence my inner voice".

This is My Why for Running.
image courtesy of  Runner's World

A very exhilarating experience always seems to be followed by sinking in the depths...

Most of you, who have been following me in my blogging journey know that I deal with a bipolar disorder

5 out of 8 years of my total blogging years were "anonymous years". I wrote behind a pseudonym. Writing initially for catharsis, which led to meeting many beautiful souls, who helped me recognize that I am not alone, and should not be alone in my struggles.

It was not until 2 years of living in the Netherlands, that I decided I would like to write under my own name. Share the face behind the story. 

image courtesy of My Daily Mooosings in the Netherlands
from the blog Smile - 22nd of April, 2011

I felt stronger, than I have ever felt in years.

More confident, more hopeful that I can live a happy life even though I am still dealing with recurring debilitating depression.  A state that not only hugely affected  my life but the quality of life of my family.

It might sound  preposterous, but the huge motivation for this decision - publicly write my personal thoughts and experiences - was the need  to help others, who goes through the same struggles, I do.

It is my hope that I can empower others with honest writing about how I am working on living  a life of quality in spite of anxiety and panic attacks.  Both disorders born out of going through  numerous cycles of depression.

Life is fleeting. Blogging has offered me a way to capture precious fleeting moments, and record my life to make me see, clearly, in vivid colour, how rich it is and that the good times outweighs the bad times.

Specially when I am unable too reasonably think because my disorder puts my mind in a haze of confusion, fears, doubts and paralysis.

collage from the blog Being Woman (269 days to 40) - 24th of June, 2011
@ Being Beautifully 40
and upper right picture from the blog Fleeting - 7th of April, 2011
@ My Daily Mooosings in the Netherlands

Living 365, blogging 365 have helped me literally live life one day at a time.

image courtesy of My Daily Mooosings in the Netherlands
from the blog Finding Faulkner - 4th of January, 2011

With or without bipolar disorder, the best way to live is: one day at a time.

I would no longer let my disorder silence my inner voice.  I would not want to miss any day of this fleeting life.

In this spirit, I am committing myself to writing a blog a day 365 blogs in this series (EDIT: 22.04.14), beginning with this blog:

A 365 Story Behind the Mind of Happy Feet. (title edit 10:40 PM: Every Blog is A Beginning  (1/365) : 365 Stories Behind the Mind of Happy Feet)  (title edit 22.04.14 - Every Blog is A Beginning : 365 Stories from Happy Feet)

Each story will be a day in the life; it can at times be a story of struggle or often stories of triumphs over the self.  There will be mundane stories, there will be thought provoking stories...

Most importantly, they will be stories about never giving up. Always moving forward with Happy Feet...

I leave you with a quote I chose for a blog, which I wrote 3 years ago entitled Finding Faulkner.

May it inspire you as it has inspired me.


"I decline to accept the end of man... I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among the creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail."
William Faulkner

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If I can run, so can you: big dreams are reached with baby steps!