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1,016 Days: The Cost of Putting Myself Last

  1,016 Days: The Cost of Putting Myself Last It has been 368 days since my doctor shared with me that there is a specialist she felt might be beneficial for me to see.  At that appointment, I was told there would be a significant wait and that I would be placed on a waiting list. I understood. Specialists are difficult to get into, and when you need someone who focuses on a very specific area of medicine, patience becomes part of the process. This summer, I was told I needed to see yet another specialist. The wait for that appointment? 361 days. But the first specialist? That one was different. There are only THREE specialists in the country currently accepting patients who specialize in the particular area my doctor believes may help us better understand what has been going on with my health. Three. In the entire country. So, for 368 days, I waited. I put the appointment on my calendar. I planned around it. When other activities were being scheduled, I communicated the impor...
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Grab Your Rhinestones and Find a Dang Shovel

For the Love of Dolly Parton The last time I was here, I started this blog, For the Love of Dolly Parton. So it feels fitting, and honestly a little strange, that I find myself back here talking about Dolly. In the wee hours of the morning on August 25, shortly after midnight, I had a dream. Dolly was performing her final show. At the end, the Looney Tunes “That’s all, folks!” played. Dolly announced that this was it. Her last show. Her last song. And then she faded away. And I woke up. I don’t typically dream about Dolly. But my affinity for Dolly started long before my Tennessee years. As I grew older and found more of myself, Dolly somehow became what I can only describe as a distant close relative . Someone I had never met, yet somehow always knew where to find when I needed her. If I needed advice, I could go looking through Dolly quotes. If I needed perspective, I could find an old broadcast or interview and listen to her talk about life in that unmistakably Dolly way...
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For the Love of Dolly Parton, Teach the WHY

  I have questioned EVERYTHING this week. And somewhere between questioning systems, practices, decisions, and probably the meaning of life itself, something clicked.....I figured out why people do not hear me when I say, "They don't understand, we have to teach them." or  "They know what to do, how to do it, they have no clue WHY we do it."  As a society, we spend a whole lot of time saying: “They should know this.” Should they? Like... SHOULD THEY REALLY? Because I am becoming increasingly convinced that we have built entire systems around the assumption that people know things nobody ever actually taught them. And then we are shocked when implementation falls apart. Here is the thing. We are mimickers. We watch the people around us. Someone models something. We follow the steps. We learn the routine. We get pretty ding dang good at doing exactly what we saw someone else do. And that can look a whole lot like mastery. Until something changes. Change the routi...
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