I’ve been gone, and I apologize. Physically, mentally, and even virtually in my writings here. Too busy taking road trips to Tennessee and Colorado, or a quick vacation in the sugar white sands of Florida. Emotionally unavailable to any suitor coming my way; I’m still stirring from the heartbreak. This summer has kept me so occupied and it feels rewarding. I thought I had it good last summer, spending my days living in Paris and traveling around Europe on the weekends. Quite a change one year can have, but I always enjoy new adventures. It’s different every day.

But along the way through all this fun I’ve forgotten a lot. Now that I’ve graduated and the school year has started without me, I’ve forgotten what to do with myself. Who am I, and what am I supposed to do? I thought I knew a few months ago, but now I’m just not sure. I always thought I wanted to be an Austinite forever. I wonder if I need to experience something else or if everything I need is already here.

I’ve had day dreams of a new life; maybe I move to southern California and try to make it big in the media industry. Or perhaps follow a boy I’ve always wanted to be with all the way to Philadelphia and adjust to cold weather. I could always go back to Paris and brush up on my French. I’ve always wanted to travel to Egypt and teach English or practice yoga in the Mediterranean. The possibilities are endless, and I’m only 22.

I wish it were as easy as the answer to a multiple choice question or spinning a roulette wheel. It could be. I wish someone had all the answers and could tell me for certain I won’t fail. Perhaps that’s the biggest fear in all this decision-making, the possibility of failure.

Whatever I do, I’ll make it work.

I went out to give my horse some carrots, and since I’m not the give-your-horse-treats kind of person, I decided I’d have her earn the goods. I set out a tarp for her to cross over each direction to see it well from both eyes.

After a little bit, she went over the first side just great, I asked her to head the other direction and cross. Along about that time a huge horse fly decided to disrupt our class. 

I went to swat at it, Sadie cow-hopped kicking her back left leg and nailed my right hand! Hat went flying, I let out a startled gasp, oh my gosh, the pain! Nothing broken, I could still move it. Decided to finish the lesson, give her the carrots in the trough, pet her and go ice my hand.

(Doesn’t look too bad in the photo, my middle finger took the brunt.)

I picked up my hat and as I looked up, our neighbor was standing by the carport with fresh corn, she didn’t say anything other than she’d leave it by the front door, I don’t know if she witnessed any of the excitement.

Richard was working outside, I told him I’d just gotten kicked, it was no big deal, I’d finished the lesson with Sadie and was going for the ice pack. Richard came in with me, we played Yahtzee (I rolled left-handed for the first time ever!) while I iced my hand.

He voiced his concern maybe I over estimate the connection I have with Sadie and is concerned if we were to ride off the property something serious could happen to me. Yup, I’d thought about it myself too. These moments of failure remind me I’m no horse trainer and need help.

It’s scary and disheartening the Natural Horsemanship stuff I’d learned pre-injury and tried to maintain during the injury has faded like most every memory. All the clinics I attended, the ‘watching so hard’ I gave myself eye-strain headaches, time spent working with Sadie, the books, DVDs, videos, poof, gone from memory.

Richard said I know how I want Sadie trained, and I said I really didn’t and that it scares me I just don’t remember all the training that meant the world to me and made my eyes light up. It makes me wonder if I should pursue horses at all. I said I know it’s dangerous, but then again, so is going down the stairs for me (LOL)!

It surprises me I’ve not found a single Natural (Vaquero) Horsemanship person out here – I thought I moved to horse country! I posted an ad on Craigslist immediately after I moved here looking for someone who could help and have found no one. A waitress at a local restaurant has a daughter in college 5 hours from here completing her Business and Natural Horsemanship degrees and asked me if they could count on me for next summer. I said yes unless I found someone sooner.

There is a gal whose name I heard in passing and I’ve contacted her although I don’t know the type of horsemanship she does, so we’ll see.

Horses are my first and last frontier. They were my first love since childhood, and then in my twenties my brother stole my saddles (talk about hurting someone on a deep, molecular level), I gave away my model horses and thought that dream had faded.

But I don’t know. I trail rode when I was probably barely 5-years-old and my joke is ‘horse’ was my first word. So much of life post-TBI ends up in utter ashes, it’s tough to ponder having to give up something like this.

I was pretty honest with Richard tonight saying I know the disconnect with Sadie lies with me and I don’t know if it is due to the last accident. I’ve said since the day I saw Sadie that she was my heart on four feet but I’m not feeling that way now.

I’ve said it many times, what’s the point of fighting so hard when you end up losing everything in the end?

I can’t see giving Sadie up unless I cannot care for her, but what good am I doing her by not helping her live up to her potential? Would it not be better for someone who is a good hand with horses and is not limited to her being a pasture pony most of her days because I’m not able to get out of bed?

Ah, life with Brain Injury, always a plethora of heartbreaking questions and decisions…a heart aching for solutions and doing the right thing no matter what.

Everything in my room has a pinkish glow in the morning, due to some outrageously bright hot pink curtains I’ve put up. And to think, I really was never a “pink” person.

Here is (most of) my Christmas Literary Loot: At A Crossroads: Between a Rock and My Parents’ Place by Kate T. Williamson (which I coveted. Thanks big bro!), two Kelly Cutrone books, and Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit by Robert Bogdan. This last one was from my uncle, who TOTALLY gets me. (He even included a photograph of a “human skeleton” and his wife! BEST GIFT EVER!) I’ve been working on a project for his antiques business, and one of the most fascinating things I am finding is the plethora of bygone circus material. I am fascinated by the way these side shows were advertised, who these people were, the psychology behind the freak show… all of it! I can’t wait to read this book.

Also, since I am completely inept at photography, I’m still Instagraming it (follow me at drunkliterature).

Forty-four percent of all college graduates change their major between the second semester of their freshman year and graduation day.

Five years after graduation, 83 percent of the 2001 graduating class of Duke University was working for a different organization and 43 percent had changed careers at least once.

So chances are, many of you have set goals and have had to readjust those goals over time. And that is OK.

Inherently we don’t like to set goals. Why? Because if you set a goal and miss it you’ve failed. Or have you?

If you remember nothing else regarding goals, remember two things:
#1. Begin with the end in mind
#2. It is important to fail early

College, your job, your relationships with people, your outside activities – they are like a boat at the dock. You will get one. You will get in it. And your boat will start to take off from the pier. If you have a set of oars, you will drive the boat. If you don’t the boat will drive you. You probably won’t sink. But you might find yourself circling the same inlet for a very long time heading nowhere.

How many of you have heard people complain, “I hate my job.” “I don’t like so and so.” “I hate having to work on this report.”

Setting goals are like grabbing hold of the oars. Who’s driving the boat?

Goals are not only about school or your career. They also revolve around asking yourself questions such as, “In my next job do I ultimately want to live around the people I love – my family? Do I like to sail or ski and want to live in a climate that allows that? Do I want to take classes that will broaden my skills so that I can be hired in many different fields?

If you set goals, you will succeed. And goals are not notions. They are specific, measurable and have a time line. “I am going to finish that project early” is a notion. “I am going to do the research on Monday, write the abstract by Tuesday and complete the detail by Wednesday” are goals.

When I graduated from high school I went off to college in Michigan where I majored in an allied health profession and took a job in the Houston Medical Center upon graduation. In my first month living in Texas I knew I had made a mistake. Houston, though lovely, was not where I wanted to live the rest of my life, but I could gain valuable work experience there that I couldn’t get in any other part of the world. I hadn’t anticipated how much I would miss my family and the familiarity of a town I loved. I really didn’t want to fall in love and marry someone and have to live there the rest of my life so I set a goal – I would work in Houston for two years (personal goal with a timeframe) and then move to a place where my professional experience would stand out (professional goal with the end in mind). Two years to the day I moved back to Pittsburgh. Sure while in Houston I had to focus on smaller goals like where I wanted to live, what kind of furniture I’d buy, how long I wanted my commute to work to be. But the ultimate place I wanted to be was back in Pittsburgh with great work experience behind me.

Then I got back to Pittsburgh and set another goal. In two years I would buy a house. Well I hadn’t figured on falling in love so that goal got tossed out the window when I married and bought a house with my husband. We had four children. I continued to work in my profession before my first child was born but I was beginning to see that while I was very fulfilled in an allied health profession at 25, there really wasn’t a lot of room for advancement and I couldn’t imagine doing this work at 45 or even 26 for that matter. I have an entrepreneurial spirit and that personality type breeds restlessness and achievement.

I was at a crossroads: I could continue doing allied health work forever. (Remember the people that say they hate their job?) Or I could work at something new – which was risky. I decided to fail early at my first career choice and regroup.

So I started building a corporate gift business and an antiques business on the side while I was working in a large physician’s office so that when we started a family in two years, I’d have something in place for home. (Calculated risk with a time frame that gave me the luxury of a paying job while building a business on the side.) I had always loved writing and after my first child was born I began writing on a volunteer basis for organizations for which I was volunteering.

What happened was that the corporate gift business and antique business were getting too large to manage from home and I did not want to work outside of the home while my children were young so one day I saw an ad that said the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette was looking for freelance writers and I sent clips of my writing in to the PG for consideration. (The goal of staying at home with my children was ‘keeping the end in mind’ and being a reporter held a calculate risk of rejection.) I didn’t have a degree in journalism but that didn’t stop me. I’ll never forget what the PG editor said when he hired me. “Mary Lee, you can write like you are having a conversation around the dining room table. We can’t always find that.” So by now I had pretty much realized that I was not going back to the profession in which I had a degree. I was writing five stories a week for the PG. I had picked up a lot of freelance work such as being the public relations director of a public school district, the executive director of a trade association, freelance business writing and graphic design and more – all work I did from home.

I taught myself to write grant proposals when the public school district asked me to help them secure a grant for a summer program for special needs children. This work was not in my contract but that didn’t matter to me. I saw this as an opportunity to learn a new skill for which there was a need in society. I went to the Foundation Center of the Carnegie Library and looked up everything I could on grant proposals and then started calling funders all over the city to see if they would read my proposal. We succeed and the district was awarded $68,000 for the program. Next we pursued a grant to put Astroturf on the athletic field. I then started to see that raising money was not just about the written proposal but more about the relationships between those asking for money and those giving away the money. I mentored under a keen school board member and we secured that grant as well – $450,000. I never got paid for working on that grant either. And I wouldn’t be where I am today without having volunteered to learn how to do this work. The school district awarded me a citation from the Pennsylvania House of Representatives for my efforts in securing these grants. Shortly after this and when my youngest child was in school full time I took that citation on an interview which resulted in me being offered a full time executive director position at a hospital foundation in charge of all of the hospital’s fundraising. Now remember, I had never worked as a professional fundraiser. They were not offering me the job of major gifts officer, event planner, vice president of operations or any of the other myriad of jobs in the fundraising profession. They were offering me the lead job because of measurably what I had accomplished in a short period of time – $518,000 in grants on my first two attempts to fundraise.

I was with that hospital for less than two years and was then offered the position at a much larger hospital as president of their foundation where our capital campaign goal was $5 million over two years and we raised more than $10 million. That led to a bigger position at a hospital foundation where I was just recently recruited.

“I will do it by taking these steps it in this amount of time” is a goal.

Again: If you only remember two things about goals remember this:

#1. Begin with the end in mind
#2. It is important to fail early – don’t be afraid to take calculated risks and adjust your goals.

So ask yourself, “Who is driving your boat?” Do you want to get out of the inlet to a destination or is circling the same waters OK with you? What are the steps to get there?

It was Christopher Columbus who said, “You can never cross the ocean unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.” Pick up your oars and start now!

Follow Mary Lee on Twitter at StartingOverNow.

For the FREE Worksheets: “Change – Here’s How!” and “Overcoming Adversity is an Every Day Slice of Life?” go to Mary Lee’s web site at: http://www.startingovernow.com/WorksheetsandArticles.html

Mary Lee Gannon is a cultural turnaround and leadership expert who went from being a stay-at-home mother with four children living in an unpalatable marriage behind the facade of a country club life to the reality of divorce, homelessness, and welfare. As a national guest speaker she demonstrates turn-around strategies that transform corporate cultures and took her from an earning capacity of $27,000 to the president and CEO of a hospital foundation. Her book “Starting Over – 25 Rules When You’ve Bottomed Out” is available in bookstores and on Amazon.com. Visit her Web site for a free e-book at http://www.StartingOverNow.com. Sign up for her free e-newsletter at info@startingovernow.com.