My eyelashes are falling out... five at a time.

Actually, I've lost a total of 11 or 12 eyelashes throughout the day. Oh, and did I mention that I have a couple of grey ones?

I think it's how my body is recovering from all of the stress I've endured over the last six or so months. [Or over a lifetime if you want the real sob story...]

So I'm kicking back and listening to my Will Hoge CD. He's a fantastic bluesy rock artist from Nashville, and I feel that my mood calls for it. I'm not terribly depressed, I'm not extremely energetic. And it's a great album to just kick back and have a good ol' brew.

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If you know me at all, you know that I enjoy a good conversation. I don't like to talk just for the sake of breathing hot air. I like to converse.

Some of my favorite topics, if you haven't picked up on it quite yet, generally run along the lines of growth. Personal growth. Professional growth. Spiritual growth.

The best part of those discussions usually involve walking the line of grossly inappropriate. I love it. I live for it.

It's no surprise that I subscribe to, and religiously read Dooce.com and The Brazen Careerist. These go under my "Absolute Favorite Blogs of ALL Time" category.

Heather at Dooce.com is absolutely amazing. She crosses all of the lines that I'm still a little afraid to come near. She's got the perfect attitude [a bit cynical in her writing, but you can tell she's generally enjoying life].

Penelope at The Brazen Careerist has so much to say about how to be a decent human being, usually in a workplace setting. Her post about finding your identity and self-knowledge today was about eight shades of excellent.

To quote part of her post:

By examining how I fit into the generations, I can see the larger context of myself and my community. And the larger a context you can see yourself in, the more varied your self-knowledge will be. When it comes to making choices in your life, you will make better choices with better self-knowledge—understanding how you are the same as other people. If you know how you are the same, you can leverage the knowledge and research what has come before you.

This is so important when it comes to effective communication.

Sure, it's easy to lose yourself. I did it for an entire year and I'm just now trying to pick up the pieces from it. And because I didn't know who I was, I didn't know how to talk to anyone about how confused I was.

And it wasn't until I started making major mistakes that I realized I needed to take a step back and regroup. I'm still working on it. I have to because I've lost some of the things I wanted. I fought for it for quite a while, but I'm tired of being treated like crap. It's not worth it.

And now that I have gotten a least a few of my little ducks in a row, I am able to talk [in great length] about what I think and feel. But to some people, it doesn't matter. To some people, I'm a broken record. And to those people, I'll pray that you'll learn to grow up and act like a decent human being instead of a consistently drunk dumbass.

To the people who have listened, I thank you. I've ended about ten posts with this, but I can't say it enough.

You understand what reaching out and communicating means.

It means being strong enough about who you are to be able to be strong for the person who doesn't. It's a shame I didn't start complaining a year ago. I could have saved myself months of heartache and pointless fighting.

So now I'm focusing my energy not on what I've lost, but on what I've gained and what I've got coming my way.

New. Exciting. Amazing.