The Why's

I thought quite a lot about whether this blog even deserves to be written.  Here are the Why's (I'll let you figure out the Narcissism).

Why
It's 2:49 a.m.; I'm in a Super 8 hotel room.  My wife is asleep (I'm pretty sure, but you never can  tell for a certainty).  My dog is 100+ miles away (so I can't just pet Luke until the blogging desire goes away).  So why not?

But,  seriously.  Writing makes one a better writer and reflecting on life can make a person a better person.  So I can get a "win" out of this whether there's a small audience or a large one. More about the audience in a separate post.

I currently have a high dose of Methylpredisone (steriods) coursing through my veins and my nurse virtually promised me a sleepless night. Might as well make good use of the extra energy, drug-fueled as it is.  I should have been a professional athlete.  But I digress.  But who wouldn't digress under these conditions, so give me a [proverbial] break.

Also, I've got this cancer (Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia, 'CLL' to its friends and I use that word loosely) thing.  Which is a bit of a gift in that I have much more of a sense then most that I'm mortal, temporary, not very important, and very important. Becky (my wife, the probably sleeping one) put a quote on our refrigerator: : 'To the world you may be one person but to one person you may be the world.'

Another of my "why's":  Brian Kaufman is a physician in Newport Beach who also has CLL.  Part of his response to this was to write a blog and then form a non-profit corporation in service of those similarly struggling.  Brian is clearly making a great contribution with the gifts he has and I thought perhaps I should work on the "micro" level while he works on the "macro" level.  If you want to read some really good stuff on CLL from a medical (though personal) perspective, check out his blog. If your goal is medical depth, read his stuff, it's pretty damn good.  As for me, I'm a psychotherapist and a coach.  So you get what you get.

Another reason:  Maybe this will be relevant to some struggle (hopefully not Cancer) someone else is having. I often say to graduate counseling students that, though they likely don't share some of the problems of their clients (e.g. addiction, homeless, etc.) they do share the common human pain.  I haven't met anyone yet who's totally escaped that and that is a potential rapport-building connection. There's more in that than you might think (and, a word of caution to budding therapists:  that is not carte blanche to engage in narcissistic self-disclosure).