Inspired Forward

Cut Through the Confusion and Chaos to Live a Well-Organized Life

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World Diabetes Day is About Visibility

November 14, 2018

Today is World Diabetes Day.

It’s a day intended to promote awareness and education about diabetes, especially type 1 diabetes.

I have been a type 1 diabetic for twenty-three years. You can read more about my experiences in these posts:

Today I want to talk about something a little different — why it’s important to be willing to speak up about things, especially our invisible illnesses.

[Read more…]

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The Journey to Magnificence: Week Thirty-Nine

Welcome to The Journey to Magnificence! This is week thirty-nine: November 4-10, 2018.

This week felt 200% more productive than the last few months. I think it was a combination of having clear-cut goals for the week, a plan to achieve them, and a way to track and tally the time spent working on them. It also helps that NaNoWriMo is really fun!

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What I Said I’d Do

  • Write 11667 words for my novel 🙂
  • Finish module 8 of the 30 Days or Less to VA Success course, and start module 9.

What I Actually Worked On

  • Wrote 12,152 words for my novel (measuring to 11:13 AM on Sunday, November 11th)
  • Finished modules 8, 9, 10, and 11 of 30 Days or Less to Virtual Assistant Success. It was really easy to fly through the lessons this week. I also invested in Gina Horkey’s new Project Management for Virtual Assistants course, so I want to get to the point of being able to take that. My plan is to have a VA page live on this site by the end of the month!

[Read more…]

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What is Type 1 Diabetes and Why You Should Care

Even if you haven’t read any of my other articles about this disease, you’ve probably heard about diabetes.  Something about sugar, right?  

It’s more common in fat people. Someone’s friend’s grandma had it and needed a foot amputated, maybe. Another person probably went blind from it.  

These things can happen, but those stories tell you nothing about what diabetes really is.  What often surprises people is that there are two established types of diabetes. Both of them are almost completely different.  

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While both are devastating to be diagnosed with, Type 1 is often called the “worse one.”  

There is a huge disconnect in doctors’ offices, on the internet, and even on TV that there is a major, major difference between Type 1 and Type 2 Diabetes.  So major, in fact, that they really need to be considered two separate diseases.

Type 1 Diabetes is not caused by eating too much sugar, or by being fat/overweight/obese, or any other preventable thing.  

T1D is most likely genetic and often triggered by environmental effects.

[Read more…]

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The Journey to Magnificence: Week Thirty-Eight

Welcome to The Journey to Magnificence! This is week thirty-eight: October 28 – November 3, 2018.

While this week had me focusing on NaNoWriMo (which is what I’ll be focusing on all month) I did get clear on some goals. Gina Horkey, who created the 30 Days or Less to Virtual Assistant Success course that I’m in, just released a new course. It’s all about project management in virtual assisting, which is something I already have experience in and would love to add to my VA wheelhouse.

That being said, I planned out how I’m going to finish the flagship VA course this month before starting on this new PM VA course.

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What I Said I’d Do

  • Finish up prepping for November: posts, social media, pins.
  • Start NaNoWriMo!

What I Actually Worked On

  • Mostly just NaNoWriMo, but I did do some work on November posts.

[Read more…]

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NaNoWriMo: November’s Challenge

So I love that November 1st fell on a Thursday because one, I can post this post at the perfect time and two, it lets me post this post at the perfect time!

Last month I hand-copied the book of Acts, which has 28 chapters, in 30 days. Technically I actually finished in 28 days, writing a chapter a morning (or thereabouts) without taking any grace days. This is contrasting to how Sarah Ruszkowski did it. She copied five or so verses at a time, coming back to it throughout the day as she had time and a desire to.

I’m the kind of person who does it all in one go (or, at least, tries to) so the way that worked for me was doing it all in the mornings when I have time set aside anyway.

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I found copying the Bible to be a very good exercise. I learned things about historical Biblical events that I’d forgotten or never even knew to begin with, came up with questions that I really should be asking my pastor, and excitement that there is literally nothing stopping me from doing more of this with other books of the Bible.

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The Journey to Magnificence: Week Thirty-Seven

Welcome to The Journey to Magnificence! This is week thirty-seven: October 21 – 27, 2018.

It’s interesting how quickly time flies by. It seems like only last week that I started this challenge to hand-copy the Book of Acts in 30 days (really 28, because there are only 28 chapters and I’m not the kind to take “grace” days if I can help it). And yet, November is right around the corner and with it, November’s 30-day challenge.

I’m already a quarter through this year of challenges, and it makes me wonder if this is a side effect of getting older – and subsequently experiencing the speeding up of time.

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What I Said I’d Do

  • Finish writing, editing, and scheduling the posts & social media for November – in order to focus completely on NaNoWriMo
  • Flesh out the outline/plan for my NaNo book so I’m ready to hit the ground running on November 1st.

What I Actually Worked On

  • I spent a LOT of time this week thinking about, organizing, and planning for NaNoWriMo. It officially starts on November 1st, and since I’ve never done it before I wanted to get as much planning and brainstorming done as possible to save time during November.
  • As for the posts for November…those got mostly done by the skin of my teeth – Sunday night. There’s still some editing and scheduling work to be done, but the bulk of the content is written.

Days 253-259 

So.

NaNoWriMo.

Prep is heavily underway, and every day I’m more excited to start this project. I have my outline and synopsis done, character sheets filled out, worldbuilding ideas percolating, and I want to share the preliminary synopsis with you here, in advance of the post dedicated to November’s challenge (which will be up on Thursday 11/1).

My NaNo novel is actually a mash-up of the two stories I wrote as a teenager.

“Emma Jackman from small-town Palouse, Washington, about to turn 18, is also about to receive the shock of her life. She grew up reading letters left to her by her father (who died the day after her first birthday) – letters that somehow predicted events for each year. She’s kept the contents of these letters secret from everyone, including her mother (or so she believes), but she’s starting to have doubts. Day by day, the tesseract birthmark on her palm gets darker. And every time they Skype, she can tell her brother has his own secret. The final letter cracks her world wide open, at the same time isolating her even further from her distant and uncaring mother. Can Emma confirm the truth of her new reality before it consumes her?”

I’m also going to be extra wild and share a cover I created on Canva in about five minutes:

week thirty-seven nano

So what does NaNoWriMo have to do with mental health?

A lot, actually, at least in my opinion. I firmly believe that writing is a form of therapy and that everyone has a story inside them. They just have to write to let it out. I cover this concept in this post on why everyone should write every day.

I’ll admit that this past month I have not written every day, and I feel lacking for having let that practice lapse. As part of my endeavor to embrace extreme ownership (affiliate link), I have no excuses for letting myself stop writing consistently.

Ahem.

Do you have a story living inside you?

Have you thought about participating in NaNoWriMo to finally get it on the page?

Check out NaNo resources here.

What’s Next?

  • Finish up prepping for November: posts, social media, pins.
  • Start NaNoWriMo!

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The Journey to Magnificence is a series of weekly summaries of my journey through courses and resources provided by or found through the Work at Home School, hosted and delivered by Caitlin Pyle.

If you missed a post or found this one first, the others can be found here:

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Why Victim Blaming Needs to Stop Being a Thing

Hi.

Hopefully, you clicked on this story because you too are slightly outraged that people still exist who think that people actually choose to be mentally ill.

Or maybe you clicked thinking that you want to prove me wrong. That those of us with mental problems do, in fact, choose them.

Maybe you think things like this:

  • That we choose our anxiety, depression, bipolar, and schizophrenia.
  • That addicts choose to be addicts, or that people who OD (like Demi Lovato) do it by choice.
  • That we ruin our lives on purpose, by design, because our anxiety or depression or attempts of suicide is the result of poor choices.

I have some words for you.

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But first, let me ask you some questions.

Is a family member of yours currently going through some issues you think should be easy to handle, but they’re struggling?

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The Journey to Magnificence: Week Thirty-Six

Welcome to The Journey to Magnificence! This is week thirty-six: October 14 – 20, 2018.

This week marked a turning point in my mindset – tracking time is part of what makes me feel on top of things, makes me feel better about myself, and can tell me what I’m wasting time on (like reading Harry Potter fanfiction for four hours straight), and where I have time to really get things done.

I also think I may have finally figured out this whole prioritization thing.

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What I Said I’d Do

  • Track my time for at least 80% of the time, but preferably way more. One of the biggest problems I had with the time tracker is if I missed recording a block I felt like I had to clear out the whole column otherwise it would mess up the calculations for averages and totals.
  • Pick my top priority and do that to completion before moving on to the next thing. I’ll do my best not to do “two things at once” (not multitasking, but multi-prioritizing).

What I Actually Worked On

  • Tracked my time 100% of the time
  • Got website back up and running (minor plugin problem)
  • Hand-copied chapters 14-20 of the Book of Acts

[Read more…]

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How Budgeting Can Banish Your Nightmares About Money

The golden standard for being financially sound is having a budget.

For some reason this is something many people don’t do–and it’s why they live paycheck-to-paycheck.

As for me, I didn’t know how to handle my money until I had a “real job.” I worried about how I’d be able to afford things like a house, a car, possible future children (which are no longer an option), and pets.

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There are affiliate links in this post. If you click through and buy something, I receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

While in college I used a tool called Mint. It let me connect my bank accounts to categorize transactions, but I found it clunky and unable to reliably tell me where my money was going or if I had enough money to cover my expenses for the next month.

After too long using Mint I switched to YNAB and have been using their digital envelope system for over a year now [since September 2016].

For many people, finances are scary and difficult to talk about.

[Read more…]

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The Journey to Magnificence: Week Thirty-Five

Welcome to The Journey to Magnificence! This is week thirty-five: October 7 – 13, 2018.

To be totally honest, having a cold kinda messed me up. I’m not totally blaming my feelings of burnout and feeling behind-ness on it, but it certainly didn’t help.

What really messed me up was stopping using my time tracker.

I tried to make my own for fifteen-minute increments, thinking it would give me a better idea of where I spend my time, but it just made things a lot harder to track – so I didn’t.

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What I Said I’d Do

  • Since this cold is changing things up, pretty much I just want to make it through the week without missing any deadlines or putting things off “just because I feel sick.”

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