Four years ago when I was 23, I went to a writing retreat organized by one of my favorite authors, Jeff Bethke. When I left, I announced on social media and told everyone that I was writing a book. It’s been four years, still no book.
What happened?
Well, I wasn’t being realistic. I allowed the pressure of being and feeling successful to cause me to make promises to myself that I knew I could not fulfill.
I knew all along that it wasn’t the right time for me to write or publish anything. But, I wrestled with wanting to be seen as successful.
I had just graduated from Cornell University and I thought that what came after needed to be bigger.
As elite as it sounds, I thought, the peak of my “success” shouldn’t be graduating from an Ivy, right? What was next?
But let me tell you what my life was like over these past five years since graduating. And, you can tell me how unrealistic my writing & publish goals were.
My life looked like this:
- spend a couple of weeks living in my parents’ guest bedroom in my southern California hometown,
- fly to Ithaca, New York to visit my boyfriend for a couple of weeks (for the Christians here: don’t worry I stayed with my gal friends),
- take a couple of weeks and travel somewhere else (because…remote work so why not?),
- return to So Cal for an Infliximab infusion treatment,
- and do it all over again.
Then I got married and it looked like this:
- spend a couple of weeks in North Carolina, drive twelve hours to Ithaca for a few weeks so my husband could do any work in the lab he needed to do, and fly to California for those bi-monthly infusion treatments
- After he graduated, we packed all our belongings and drove from New York to California
Oh, sprinkle in pregnancy, giving birth, a Hawaii trip and two Europe trips in there too.
Phew.
So now that I’m settled in my own dwelling, I get to pause and think… and wow have I been doing that.
I rethought my motivations to write, and I was reminded of the reason I wanted to write in the first place. I have a passion for health. Like a really big passion.
It all started when a trial became a blessing. I had lived my entire life as a healthy person (mostly) but, during my second year at Cornell, I started getting sick– and I’ll go into this more in depth another time. That sickness ended up resulting in two autoimmune diseases, a week long hospital stay, a year of vomiting, excessive bruising, and internal intestinal bleeding –yikes, I know–and the commencement of a lifelong bi-monthly three-hour intravenous infusion treatment.
Okay, now here’s the blessing: all of that changed my life. I went through the hardest trails and scariest situations I’ve ever been through. But it made me mature and I saw tangible signs that God was walking me through it. I walked through that trial—more like hiked, crawled, and trudged through it—and came out with a passion for spiritual and physical health.
So that’s what this blog is about. It’s my outlet to help guide you on healing your body and spirit—as I go through the journey myself.
How do I envision I can help you? I believe healing starts with what we consume. What media I consume can heal me spiritually, and the food I eat can heal me physically.
Right now, I plan to write and share about what the Bible says about disease, analyzing and reflecting on each mention of the word in the Word. And, I’ll probably sprinkle in some information about health and nourishing foods. In the future, I dream of creating a food brand to help share food with nourishing ingredients.
But I’ll take it one step at a time, not overthink it, and just try my best to help you heal in body and spirit.
Thanks for reading,
Synclair