Disclosure: I hope, in all sincerity, this does not come across as arrogant or “woe is me.” This is an exercise in trying to recognize how hard I work because anxiety and depression have a funny way of convincing you’re lazy, weak, and incompetent!
I want to leave a legacy. I like being busy. I like having obligations and feeling like I’m making a difference in the world.
I don’t like feeling like I must be always busy in order to be productive. I don’t like feeling overwhelmed or like I’m letting people down.
I have a job as a CF scientist where I spend 40 hours a week with fantastic and brilliant colleagues bettering the world for individuals with CF and the CF community at large.
I have a blog. It doesn’t get a lot of hits but I take it seriously; it’s where I’ve grown as a writer and bared my soul.
I have a writing column on CF News Today. It gets more attention than my blog, gives me a place to talk about important issues in the CF community on a weekly basis, and I know it has at least a slight benefit in the CF community. On this site, I’m also a Forum Moderator for the new CF Forum, as well as working behind the scenes on an HR initiative to increase employee collaboration and morale.
I’m also actively working with the CF Foundation in a variety of ways: I’m on a couple of committees, I’ve written a couple of blogs for them, and I’m the Local Ambassador for the Greater Cincinnati Chapter.
At home, I exercise nearly every day, spend time with Duncan, write and read an hour or two a day, do my treatments, hang out with friends, and work on an assortment of other projects that I have plenty more work to do on all of them before I’ll ever publicly talk about them.
This doesn’t include the fact that I must grieve my sister daily. I want to be the best friend to people that I love, I want to be the best son I can be to my incredible parents, and I want to be able to live happily.
And every single night, I go to bed with the suffocating feeling that I could have done so much more with my day. I fear that if I were to spontaneously combust into nonexistence in this moment, I wouldn’t be content with what I’d done with my life, but then my neurotic mind retorts back that, in death, I wouldn’t or couldn’t care about it anyway. This catch-22 is probably a waste to consider but yay anxiety!
I want to leave a legacy but I want to be happy with myself in each passing moment.
Somehow, these two goals sometimes seem to run perpendicular to one another.