{"id":10,"date":"2015-02-19T20:30:00","date_gmt":"2015-02-19T20:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.karen-gustafson.com\/?p=10"},"modified":"2015-03-25T15:12:34","modified_gmt":"2015-03-25T15:12:34","slug":"the-lost-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.karen-gustafson.com\/?p=10","title":{"rendered":"The Lost Year"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Have you ever felt like you&#8217;ve lost a year?&nbsp; You know you lived it.&nbsp; You got up, ate breakfast,&nbsp;did stuff,&nbsp;went home,&nbsp;ate dinner, did more stuff, went to bed.&nbsp; And you did that over and over until 365 days had gone by.&nbsp; But when you looked back, you realized that you hadn&#8217;t done what you had really wanted or dreamed of doing.&nbsp; You had just been marking time.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s how it&#8217;s been for me the past year or so.&nbsp;I had been doing the things that needed to get done to keep the house running and the kids alive, but had done little with my dream.&nbsp; It&#8217;s not because my family hadn&#8217;t supported me or my dream.&nbsp;It&#8217;s not because I suddenly became over run with activity&nbsp;and didn&#8217;t have time.&nbsp; I had just slowly pulled back from pursuing my passion.&nbsp; And I had some great reasons why.&nbsp; I had five teenagers which kept life active.&nbsp; My oldest daughter was a senior and getting ready to go off to college.&nbsp; My mom was diagnosed with cancer and was close to my home.&nbsp; All of those things were true and became easy responses to the questions about why I wasn&#8217;t writing.&nbsp; But they&nbsp;were only excuses.&nbsp; Reasons stuffed with lies.&nbsp;You know the lies I&#8217;m talking about&#8230;.&nbsp;You can&#8217;t do it.&nbsp; You aren&#8217;t enough.&nbsp;&nbsp; You don&#8217;t have what it takes. &nbsp;There are at least 50,000 other people who can do it better.&nbsp; Who do you think you are?<\/p>\n<p>Then something happened.&nbsp; My mom died.&nbsp; And at the time of her death, she had a lot of unfinished projects, mostly quilts. &nbsp;Not because she had been putting them off, but because she ran out of time.&nbsp; (Thankfully, she made arrangements for others to finish the quilts for the quad&#8217;s graduation next year.)&nbsp;&nbsp; As I looked at the packed boxes of material and patterns she had organized, I thought of my own unfinished projects.&nbsp; My own unchased&nbsp;dreams.&nbsp; Why would I put off doing what I love if I&#8217;m still here and have the gift of time?&nbsp; <\/p>\n<p>So I&#8217;ve decided to ignore the lies and pursue my dream of writing.&nbsp; I have to admit, there are still days where the lies seep in.&nbsp; I&#8217;m learning to take them captive and throw them out.&nbsp; It&#8217;s hard work.&nbsp; And it&#8217;s scary.&nbsp; But I am determined to keep going while I still&nbsp;have time&#8230;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Have you ever felt like you&#8217;ve lost a year?&nbsp; You know you lived it.&nbsp; You got up, ate breakfast,&nbsp;did stuff,&nbsp;went home,&nbsp;ate dinner, did more stuff, went to bed.&nbsp; And you did that over and over until 365 days had gone &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.karen-gustafson.com\/?p=10\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.karen-gustafson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.karen-gustafson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.karen-gustafson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.karen-gustafson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.karen-gustafson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.karen-gustafson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.karen-gustafson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.karen-gustafson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.karen-gustafson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}