The third toughest job

While I’ve been absent from the blogosphere, I’ve been pushing the rock of life further uphill. I’m cautiously optimisitc about getting it to the top and watching at least this particular tedious weight roll off in a new direction, eventually.

Being safe, having survival assured, and being surrounded by loving and trustworthy people was the biggest part of it. For the tools that I can control, it was just what your grandma probably advocated: eating good food, drinking good water, and getting fresh air with a bit more exercise than I really wanted to go for.

Food:
With neuro disease, our bodies need more nutrition than our diets can possibly provide (especially when our guts don’t want any), but our supplements go down a lot better and get absorbed much more usefully if we eat well. I used lots of wild blueberries (dense little packets of brain-repairing anthocyanin antioxidants, yum!), a variety of hard cheeses (2-year-old cheddar, 15 month manchego, and 1 yr English goat cheddar, in my case) for the brain-boosting natural phenylalanine, and fresh leafy veg as close to every single day as the two of us could manage, because they are so good for everything.

Water:
We have artesian well water. It. Is. Outstanding.

Air & Activity:
I asked J to nudge me into getting some exercise every day, if I didn’t get onto it myself. That’s easy for him, because he too likes to get out and get into the open air. On bad days, I hold his arm and go anyway. On really bad days, I go slowly. But I get out, walk on the burning coals under my feet, and keep walking out until my feet stop spasming, then walk back. Sometimes that’s over a mile, but the thing is, I find that if I walk long enough, with enough breaks and the right footwear, I can knock back the pain and spasms — not to mention the frame of mind that tends to go with them — well enough to brighten up the whole day.

So.. I can think! Amazingly often!

I wrote a BUDGET last week!!!

It wasn’t entirely in the right direction, but I figured out how to stay (just barely) in the black. BRAINWORK FTW!

So, with that incredibly awkward seque, here’s the hot issue.

It’s a topic that is all too pressing a reality for people who’ve had their butts handed to them by a disability that affected their ability to work, and then destroyed their means of making a living:

Credit repair.

That’s right, ladies and gentlebeings, I am tackling the third toughest issue (right after 1. survival and 2. getting responsible doctors): 3. working through the PTSD, ADD, anxiety, brain fog, and intermittent dyscalculia which this brain disease and its financial consequences have caused, in order to get my credit rating back in the black.

I have barely been able to look at a spreadsheet for years, due to the numbers dancing around like a hallucination. Dada via Josephine Baker. Just unmanageable. But I can look at one almost every day now, and it’s amazing how easy it can be to push those numbers around intentionally!

I’m glad to be able to take this up. More on it later, with numbers to call and strategies to take for rational results.