Sleep

I stay up too late. I've decided that this is the cornerstone of my bad habits, the one that, if picked away at enough so that it crumbles, it will make all subsequent knocking down of other bad habits easier while simultaneously making the building of positive habits that much easier. Lack of sleep can have a whole pile of negative side effects. Cranky moods. Lethargy. Messed up metabolism. Foggy thinking. Really, pretty much anything a person wants to accomplish is more difficult if that person is sleep deprived.

I had realized that this was a problem for me years ago but any attempt to adjust my sleep schedule would never last very long. Each week and each night I had intentions of going to bed earlier, but it seldom happened. When it did happen, it wasn't because I had finally conquered my inner anti-sleep demon, it was because it was the end of the week and I was exhausted.

Now I'm trying it again and have been doing really well for the past week. Why will it work now when it hasn't in the past? Not sure. Maybe it's because I'm looking at it as a means to an end. I'm not doing it to simply get more sleep, I'm doing it to make it possible to fulfill other goals later.

...And Breathe.

Am I really posting on this blog again after nearly two years of silence? You bet your ass I am.

But Torey, you might say, if you haven't had anything to say in this long about your stuttering, what could you possibly add now?

Good question, and thanks for asking it, friend! The answer is, I still might not write about stuttering all that much, but that doesn't mean that this little slice of the internet can't be refocused on something else while retaining its original long-term plans. More about those continued long-term plans later.

Whenever I think about myself - who I really am, who I want to be, experiences I've gone through that have changed me in little or large ways - I've realized that my speech doesn't factor in to the picture my mind paints. When my mind wanders, which is frequently, and it's jumping from my daily stresses to my dreams, it's never about stuttering. Furthermore, if I chose one thing to change about myself, I can say with certainty it would not have anything to do with speech production.

So all that being said, is it any wonder why my blog posts here slowly spread themselves out until pretty soon I was approaching a two-year hiatus? How can a person expect to write on a regular basis about something that isn't that important to them?

I started this blog on a day that doesn't happen very often and with a quote that fit the narrowed focus of the blog, but that quote is still equally as relevant to the new widened focus. See the quote here.

The original idea was to have a slow and steady change to my speech from where I was at point A, to where I wanted to be at point B. I'm keeping the idea the same, but expanding it from "speech" to "my life." But I've actually pulled back even a bit more than that to focus on the processes of getting to where ever it is I might want to end up in my life (I say "where ever" like it's unknown, but it's really not).

The processes that I will focus on will be habits, fears, and motivation. If I make the changes and realizations in the right direction, I'm expecting this to help in all aspects of my life, speech included. That being said, the grand goal of all of this is to get to the point where I regularly do some writing, of the fictional type. I'm aiming to shield my eyes from those bright lights, squint a little, and be happy with what I see beyond.