The Adventures of Kidney Boy

A Journal About Living With End Stage Renal Disease. Dialysis. Transplants. Love. Family. Friends. The Unsung Donor. This is my life, from the end of a needle to the bottom of a pill bottle.

Monday, December 13, 2021

Size is relative

 When I was a kid, our neighbors and friends down the road had, well, a really cool backyard.  An above-ground pool, all kinds of stuff on the edge of the woods, and there was a large tree where their older kids had built a tree fort.  To me, as a 5/6 year old, it seemed so massively tall and huge.  I was afraid to climb up into it - besides, it was like the older kid's clubhouse.  But eventually, I did climb the ladder up to it - as I recall (and this might not be how it was, after almost 40 years now, my memory has faded in places) but I remember the ladder just being 2x4's nailed into the tree.  It seemed like they went up 100feet and there were 100 of them.  There were probably 10... it was probably 7-8 feet off the ground.  But at the time... it seemed so large.

Sometimes the size of things really tricks us - our own minds really can twist things around and make things seem much larger than they are.  When you're a kid, it's the physical world. As I've aged, it's been the mental world that's gotten to big for me sometimes.  Sometimes I have problems that seem so large and insurmountable, that I don't face them.  I hide, or I put it to the side for a while.  But, eventually, I start to climb that ladder.  And after some time, perspective shows me that the massive size I imagined wasn't always the case.

I've cleared some large hurdles in my life - some that most people would never have to climb.  But I did them, and they don't seem so bad to me.  Sometimes it's the simple things that trip me up.  But in the end, I have to remind myself that I can do pretty much anything.  And, often, if I fail... I'm still where I was.  And I can try again.

Writing this little missive is a reminder to me of that - I can conquer most anything. I'm stronger and better than I know, and sometimes I have to throw fear off a bit and try harder than I did before.

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