Lets give this a,shot.

I am not sure how good I will be at this or what is motivating it. Historically I have been an inadequate diarist unless completing one involves a grade, regardless of the fact that I highly recommend the use of them to clients. And perhaps the cognitive dissonance of recommending something that I don't actually do myself is encouraging me to stretch myself in new ways, especially as I am currently recovering from surgery and have time but not the ability to sew.. Another way of being flexible I suppose.

I started this as Tales of a Gumby Girl because flexibility has been such a huge factor in my life. Being flexible, learning to be less flexible, and finding out that being flexible can be it's own form of rigidity.In the practical sense, my flexibility comes from a disease called Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. It's a connective tissue disorder: the portion of the body that connects part A to Part B and ensures that Part A doesn't collapse into a pile of goo under stress. In my case, the problem comes from collagen, the stuff pumped into lips to make them fatter and eaten with an enormous amount of artificial colors, flavors and sweeteners in that childhood favorite Jello.  If only eating foods never meant to be found in nature would fix it; my tongue would be permanently "blue raspberry". Anyway, from my earliest memories I have been bizarrely flexible, which made yoga easy and falling over things even easier. My childhood was marked by injuries, disorders, diseases and other things that "just never happen". It's less like being struck by lightning twice and more like developing pneumonia from aspirated custard after being hit in the face with a pie.  There are a bunch of other things that also happen, but the central point is that much of my life has been about learning to adjust to being just a bit different in subtle ways that only show up when bizarre things happen. Since I wasn't diagnosed until I was 18, I just figured God had a strange sense of humor and tried to roll with the punches.

The physical really does shape the emotional and spiritual, which you can tell if you've visited any holy places or prisons, as I have. Your surroundings shape your experience, and my surroundings were unpredictable, ridiculous, and at times scary and yet to thrive it was important to focus on moving around it if I could and with as much humor as I could muster if I couldn't. This has helped more than hurt me over the years, though I confess to being known, not always complementary, as "queen of the positive reframe".  I will find the best in a situation even if it kills me.

Recently I've been looking for other people people who are blogging about living with EDS, but mostly found people focused on the disease, or more truthfully dis-ease. I don't think it helps me to focus on the pain and misery of life;  for that I could watch the news. In my opinion it's better to figure out how to see the humor in it than deal with the unfairness which is, after all, part of God's overall plan. S/he has always been a big fan of underdogs and ridiculous situation. So this is my attempt at blogging about my life.