Back by popular demand

Hello from Natalie Land!

The forecast: cloudy. With a chance of tears.

How do you help someone that can't help themselves?

I know this blog started as thoughts on creativity, but since I am on Dancer hiatus (which I am HATING, btw,) I have nothing to reflect on but life. Real life. And this is my real life.

A Loved one just took a hard hit. A born and bred pilot. Colorblind.

Go ahead, laugh. it is a little funny.

Anyone who knew this would have figured out something to do with his life by now, but not him.

He was born to do one thing, and that is fly.

So when he took his colorblind test this past friday and (obviously) failed. The results were dire. We are talking 11:30am drinking, followed by wall punching, looking for a new car or bike, talking about becoming a truck driver, and laying in the dark, staring at the ceiling. It HURT, friends. To watch my other (and sometimes better) half go to a dark and scary place that I personally have never been to... It hurt. So I did what any one would do: I searched for an answer.

Well, after not much hunting I found an answer. Across the nation, on the other coast, resides the one AND ONLY M.D. on the continent who specializes in color correction. I of course emailed him immediately to give friend (and myself, i suppose) a glimmer of hope.

Of course, after a long weekend of waiting, here I sit today with my shoulders in my ears. We have heard back from our doctor color friend. The appt. would be 4-6 hours and.... 8,000 dollars.

I reread the number. $8000. None to be covered by insurance.

And it was at that moment, and how I sit now, feeling like an elephant is sitting on my chest. Like someone has me by the scruff of my neck and it is keeping me from putting my shoulders were they belong. And all I can do... is type.

What do you do?

To make matters worse, I went to my regularly scheduled staff meeting and we were going around in a circle to talk about our strengths and how to perfect them... and while my peers went around and talked about themselves, I couldn't even listen...

Peer Mentors, that's who we are. Before college I served a similar position in my church. I help. All I want to DO is help people. If I could stand on a street corner and listen to someone's problems, tell jokes, and tap dance to make people happy I would do it... But how do you fix the unfixable? How do you repeal an outdated rule, and above all, how do you deal with someone whose passion has been savagely ripped from there hands.

I Pray. HE knows I've been praying. But HE also know I am a woman of action so here I am again at my keyboard, restless from my inability to help. And what could I tell my peers, while in this time of day all I could think about was how useless my strengths really are...

"My best strength is my organization skills. I came from a big busy family and as a result I have scheduling down to a science. There was a point in my life where I worked 6 jobs and had 23 school units, which can attest to my organization. I have often been compared to Monica Geheller, and the only reason I know who she is, is because there was a period of time where I scheduled TV into my own schedule, and the only thing that was ever worth watching during my 6 o'clock-6:28 schedule was reruns of friends..."

What good is this strength when you find a situation... a REAL life situation, that is perplexing. I cannot organize his eyes to see green or white, I can't even get a job organizing someone ELSE's life so they can pay me to pay for his procedure.... so I can only ask again....

What does one do?