I would take this down. Needed to vent. But know it will live on in readers so….. A large part of me feels like an idiot for writing this. Spoiled. Not thinking about people who really have it tough. Self-obsessed. I need somebody to yell at me and tell me how horrible I am for writing this. But therein lies the problem…
I put the rest in draft as this was horrible and self-loathing and let’s just blame it on the heat. I’m sweating; not glistening and my face was sweating as I walked into the ocean –something that’s never happened to me before
My reality is that I’m an incurable optimist who thrashes too many things out for too long. I thought I was over that but moving and everything that’s happened in the past three years has brought too much to the surface.
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Then I walk four blocks to the beach, actually sit in the fierce gray/brown waves with teal teasing at the horizon and forget everything but how incredible the world is.

What happens when you can write forever?  Edit yourself pretty decently?  But the outline and what is this about?  Ha!!!!!!

I need to get this book finished.  I have never wanted something so much.  I’m beginning to lose focus and one thing I’ve always had when it came to writing or work in general was focus.  I don’t want to be “she has NLD, so of course she can’t do it.”  No I don’t want that at all.

Shayna did the graphic years ago.  I would use it for my blog template as I love it but white writing on black–no!  I’m thinking of getting cards made with the info on the back. Whenever I can’t do,  I design cards.  Kind of like a nervous tic

And when I don’t design cards I do home improvement.  Constantly.  Eldon, the contractor turned handyman turned house husband replaced some boards on the patio deck this morning.  I looked at Darryl’s house next door and wondered why when he had his deck redone he used the same ancient boards–new ones would cost $400-$500 total; composite about a thousand.  Too pricey for me but if my boards looked so bad nobody would want to set foot on the patio I would borrow from myself for the bazillionth time.  (Our homes are called patio houses as they have large decks on the second floor; I love living in a beach cottage all year round)

I only wondered about Darryl’s boards because Darryl told me how much federal taxes he paid this year. Did I ask?  Of course not.  Were we discussing taxes or money or anything like that?  Of course not.  I like Darryl a lot. He’s my de facto attorney and has given me great legal advice.  But in NY while money is the primary subject of conversation, next to real estate and schools, nobody ever says specific numbers except for real estate sales.  Here people spout out numbers.  Find that strange.

Next week the gate to my downstairs deck will be painted.  Then I hope home improvement spring 2010 will be over.  Though I welcome the distractions.  But please, I need to work.  Really work.  I’m losing faith in myself and that’s always a bad thing.

Though I’m calm enough to lie down on a chaise and read.  I’m never this calm.  Never!!  I hope calmness doesn’t equal lack of ambition.

I didn’t mean this to sound so sad.  I’m attempting to do my taxes for the first time totally by myself.  They’re complicated.  My damn accountant was angry at me last year for sending him my audit during tax season.  Well duh that’s when I got it and it was due 30 days later.  He let it sit for months.  The tax thing is complicating everything in my life right now.  My Dad was a CPA who would have never been angry at a client for….My dad died suddenly at the end of this month 19 years ago.  These couple of weeks always make me sad and trying to do taxes, uh!!!!!

I fear that someday, not soon I hope, I will die and not leave a legacy; no permanent marker, except for a headstone in Mount Hebron Cemetery that reminds the world I was here once.

People will argue that is selfish to want to be remembered.  That if I wanted to be remembered I should have had children for parents did something important.  But not all children are worthy of being remembered by their parents and parents, sometimes, very sadly, outlive children.

Then of course there’s the career legacy.  As somebody who has had three and a half careers, a bunch of newspaper articles published and a five and a half year old blog, I can be remembered for knowing that one career wasn’t enough for a lifetime long before that was fashionable to think.  But many other people can lay claim to that thought also.

They can’t all lay claim to saying some of the things I have said in this blog at the time I did, and I made sure to put in original thoughts. In the 70′s and 80′s before the era of instant communication and social networking,  my sister claimed a New York Times reporter was following me around recording my every thought.  For I would say something and a month or three later an article would be in The Times with the very same thought and/or lines.

I had no faith in myself then.  No belief that I could write for such a newspaper or write an entire book.

Now I’m not sure I can market myself properly.  Just writing this seems so egotistical.  Yet what are most bloggers, Facebookers, and Twitterers doing but trying to make a mark on the world so that they will leave a legacy?  A lot of money is good too.

I have friends who will be remembered for their careers.  Their writing. Their wit.  Their skill and talents in other areas.  And their spouses, kids, grandkids and I’m beginning to feel very small in statute.  I want what they have.  I can’t have the kids and grandkids, that’s impossible and probably not the adoring spouse, but the career….Of course I’m convinced I’m becoming demented so I probably have about two good writing months left…..

For awhile I think I thought I could leave a legacy as a blogger.  It was different three, four years ago.  When you were known, many bloggers knew you.  There weren’t thousands of different groups all competing for bloggers and fame.  There was competitiveness, of course, everything is.  But we knew we were in the earlier days of something bigger then ourselves something that could change communication.  Then came Twitter.   It’s all too much for me.

Friends are having grandchildren.  I’m glad for them, so excited sometimes you have no idea, but a bit sad for me as I will never know that feeling.

My book is that most egotistical of genres, a memoir, but I do think I have a more interesting than most story to tell. One I won’t go into here as everybody who reads this blog knows it.  If you know me through Facebook you don’t really know it.

You don’t know that I’m much more than a collection of symptoms.  Hey, I met John Gotti and lived to talk about it.  That will always be one of my favorite stories sick as it is and it’s very sick.  It’s me, girl who couldn’t keep her Marilyn dress from doing a Marilyn.  In my memories I have short blond hair, and big red lips.  In reality I had long red hair done 40′s style or maybe I had cut it recently to just shoulder length with volume but not big–it was the last year of the 80′s.  My lips might have been red but they were never big.

That’s not one of my best stories just one of my favorites.  I don’t know what my best stories are.  I have no way of judging my own work.  I no longer have any semblance of a site meter so I have no way of gauging what pages are peoples favorites.

I did that on purpose.  The whole get-to-love-me-through-social-media frenzy sickened me.  I had come early to the party.  Too early as I didn’t realize I was supposed to have a plan, enough energy to spend the hours I wasn’t exercising or writing on social media activities.  I had done that with blogging solely because I’m obsessive and I was burnt out as I burn out of everything.

I’m vain.  Oh so vain I think the story of not knowing I had non verbal learning disorder and living anyway is a good story.  I spent my late teen, 20′s and 30′s being adorable, looking like a generic soap star, and I worked hard.  I confused my bosses who couldn’t understand that the spacey klutzy but adorable girl did such complex excellent work.

Then I broke down.  Though I did brilliantly in social work school I don’t think my work ever equaled the work I did in my 20′s to 37.  Maybe it was the medication.  More likely it was still not knowing what was wrong with me and being more aware since I broke down, had the testing, and found out I was supposed to be incapable of just about everything.  I had always believed in myself before underneath it all.  Always believed that tomorrow I would understand more.  Tomorrow there would be magical answers.

The answers weren’t magical.  There was some relief in knowing at first but then there was anger.  I’m still working it out.  And that’s the problem.  A book needs a happy or tragic ending and I don’t plan on giving it a tragic ending.  I want the happy one.

My life is good.  Very good.  But is buying, all on my own without help from one person, a house, and almost gut renovating it a good enough ending?  Even if girl has problems that should preclude her from being proud of this?

Is girl coming to a city where she knew almost anybody at a stage in life when almot nobody moves except unhappily for a job or for grandchildren, and forging a life for herself, a happy ending?

Actually now that I read the above two paragraphs I realize that it’s just as happy an ending as girl meets boy.  This hasn’t been Ozzie & Harriet’s world for sometime.

Or maybe I’m being defensive.  And what I think are accomplishments are nothing important really.

Alphabet Kidsis the first book to discuss every known, at this time, developmental, neurobiological, and psychological disorder.

It’s both easy to read and very informative. The introduction more than hooked me. It’s a wonderful read that stresses the parents journey as he attempts to learn about the spectrum.

Alphabet Kids are like snowflakes: It seems that no two are alike.

Thank you Robbie for acknowledging that.

The book covers “problems” in alphabetical order, and is an OCD’s delight, she says knowingly. The chapter begins with “terms used“, second is “sound familiar? or an individual story. (The one on page 299 is mandatory reading. Third is Did you know? Or great facts. Signs and Sypmptoms, cause, diagnosis,, treatment,prognosis, and finally sources and resources. Each section is informative and I believe very helpful.

Damn do I wish books like this had been around when I was younger. Or that any book on “problems” was written with the empathy and clarity Robbie Woliver does.

People are so damn quick to judge. Somebody said most parents will read this book simply because of ADD and ADHD. They are but two of many many disorders in the spectrum

I know parents–some incredible bloggers who are desperately searching for answers
href=”http://www.amazon.com/Alphabet-Kids-Developmental-Neurobiological-Psychological/dp/1843108801/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1229465147&sr=1-1″>Alphabet Kidsis the first book to discuss every known, at this time, developmental, neurobiological, and psychological disorder.

It’s both easy to read and very informative. The introduction more than hooked me. It’s a wonderful read that stresses the parents journey as he attempts to learn about the spectrum.

Alphabet Kids are like snowflakes: It seems that no two are alike.

Thank you Robbie for acknowledging that.

The book covers “problems” in alphabetical order, and is an OCD’s delight, she says knowingly. The chapter begins with “terms used“, second is “sound familiar? or an individual story. (The one on page 299 is mandatory reading. Third is Did you know? Or great facts. Signs and Sypmptoms, cause, diagnosis,, treatment,prognosis, and finally sources and resources. Each section is informative and I believe very helpful.
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The story on page 299 wasn’t written by a sixteen year blogger who “got” NLD wrong. I’m not usually hurt when people get my wrong or are critical of my writing. In this case I should feel flattered as I channeled my inner sixteen year old to write that. Nowhere does it say that I’m sixteen. It says that I’m successful (yes) and a popular blogger–I would have disagreed with that but I looked at my stats for the first time since July and uh….I no longer live in New York.

Until two years ago I didn’t know what was wrong with me. Knowledge is power. It took several months to adjust and then I began trying to sell my apartment. Sometimes I think I sold the last one bedroom in Manhattan for a half decent price–maybe the last apartment. I moved to a new city by the ocean where it was in the 70′s today. I’m meeting with the contractor who is renovating my new house tomorrow and this isn’t going to be a horror story.

I try not to focus on what I could have been had I known earlier and to focus on the present. 95% of the time that works.

Thought today was Tuesday. Put a lot of pressure on myself considering I closed on Wednesday and got here Thursday. In the past two days I have taken literally hundreds of photos of houses.
I forgot how friendly people are here off season. I forgot how great the air smells. I forgot…
I don’t have a rhythm yet to my life. I want to write fiction as I love it and almost all my friends would rather be fictional characters than the
real thing and I can’t blame them. I would say it’s a generational thing but even the young women in my life, my Goddaughter and niece aren’t girls who want to be talked about or seen. I respect that. The right to privacy might not be inherent in the Constitution completely or in ways we want it to be but it is natural.

I’m hoping that if this economic crisis does anything positive it brings us back to values that don’t include watching Brittany’s every move. I think it’s been proven that Katie Couric might be over 50 but is much sharper than somebody ten years younger. (Somebody having initials the inverse of mine. Somebody so much better when played by Tina Fey. Somebody who says she understands the needs of special needs children as she has one. But he’s six months old. Her foray into special needs hasn’t yet begun so she and the people who support her are frigging delusional if they think she knows what’s ahead. Oh my fourteen year old niece says this so much better than I do.)

I’m unsettled. I’m scared in ways I never expected to be, and ways that I did. I knew that I had a limited window in which to sell my apartment and I just made it. I knew the economy was going to go south, I just didn’t know when or how sharply.

Many people think I have it easy and create my own problems. That’s true to a point. What’s also true was that I put my apartment on the market Bear Stearns imploded. When I came back to New York Lehman Brothers went under. As my apartment was in Manhattan and my income very tied into the stock market these events were significant to me.

It’s simplistic and stupid to pretend otherwise. The buyers could have walked away from the contract. People with less money have walked away from contracts with more money

I feel inhibited and scared to say that money is important to me. That I almost wished the buyers would break the contract as this is a time of great economic uncertainty and I could easily get a job in New York. I might have hated it and all the reasons I wanted to leave would have been intensified but I would have felt secure.

I was going to take my apartment off the market when all of a sudden there was much interest in it. I know I probably wouldn’t have been able to make that kind of money for the next five or six years. It wasn’t a million or anything people think when they think Manhattan. On the other hand it wasn’t shabby.

I have been around the block often enough to know how hard it is to keep money. I have lived in Manhattan most of my life so it’s still difficult for me to understand the concept of not spending, spending, spending.

I just arrived here on Thursday, and I intellectually understand that I need time to adjust. I’m trying not to put pressure on myself, but I don’t know how much longer an all cash buyer will have an advantage. I could probably get a small mortgage and buy something incredible but the whole point of this is to be as unshackled from bills as possible. Because I didn’t have a mortgage in New York I was free to do what I wanted to do until the maintenance and health insurance costs became unbearable.

My friends who live here are summer people. Though they can’t wait until I find a house so they can come and approve or disapprove. It’s not up to them to make a life for me. It’s up to me.

A friend appointed me Myrtle Beach coordinator for a project. Nice but I know uh my hair stylist who is very tied into the community but away right now. I don’t feel comfortable asking people to participate in this project when they don’t know me yet. I’m not going to fall back on my “I have an invisible disability that makes strategic planning more difficult for me” excuse as I have proven over and over again I can strategically plan. Yet…

i realize that this project can help me meet people but I also have to focus on finding a house and this is the first time in two years I have had any breathing time.

Color me psyched but scared. Color me almost having a panic attack. I don’t have panic attacks anymore. I found out that they were an actual physical thyroid problem. I do have panicky feelings and my emotions change from moment to moment. I think that’s normal considering there are so many different options in just buying a house. Broker? Foreclosure? Pre-foreclosure? Bank foreclosure? For sale by owner?

Then there’s that project which culminates in less than month. Color me pink, yellow and with gag over mouth. Color me talking incessantly.

I want to buy a house as I do think this is a good time to but I’m scared to spend money. That seems to be a common instinct. Just as I shook my life up, America went to hell….

When I was in my 20′s it was so easy to just pick up and begin new lives. I lived abroad. I lived all over Long Island and Manhattan. I visited my sister for a weekend in Cambridge MA and came back to New York two years later with a college degree. It was very easy for me to meet new people and “bond” but hell it was the 70′s.

No longer near my 20′s this is difficult. I need to be able to structure my time better. I need to stop saying “I need…”

crossposted at ThoughtCafe