Personal Curiosities (3rd Part)

1. I love biking, but I prefer rollerblading. Walking feels great as well. However, I do not like running.
2. One of my first videotapes was a compilation of the cartoons “Wile E. Coyote and The Road Runner.”
3. The Cure's "Lullaby" used to scare me when I was a child. I learned to love it as a teenager, though.
4. At age 12, I started playing guitar. 
5. In the 1990s, I used to play tennis with a Yonex racket. It was the same model used by Monica Seles and Anke Huber.
6. I took horseback riding lessons during the years 1994-1995.
7. I cannot choose between swimming in the sea and in a pool. I love them both equally. However, I do not trust doing it in rivers and lakes.
8. In 2007, I adopted a cat called Isis, which was rescued from the streets when she was less than one month old.
9. I am married to a U.S. citizen named Edgar Amaya. He co-wrote Stella Castelluci’s biography “Diving Deep for Sea Shells.”
10. Edgar and I will be moving to Chicago in 2016!

READ: Toni Goes Personal

Working Boy

Recently, I decided to take some time off Twitter and Instagram in order to concentrate on an important task: reading books I have had pending for some time.

Today I had a quick glance at those and I realized that a co-worker stopped following me on Twitter.

Some of you might be wondering: why am I telling you all this?

Some time ago, I caught that person passing my work as his own and not giving me any credit at all. I never had the chance of speaking to him, since we work in different locations for the same company. Nonetheless, I told my manager, but I never knew anything else about it. Sometimes my team and I would laugh about the matter; we even coined an expression with the employee's surname.

I guess I could have told him directly, but I didn't want to risk certain consequences. He belongs to a much higher area and I was afraid I could be sacked for it. Indeed, I have seen people get fired for being honest.

My dear Tairrie B says that honesty is the holiest disease. And I'm proud to affirm that now I'm blessed to be infected with it.

Trust

You know you cannot make anxiety disappear. You just learn to live with it and have it under control.

You know you are achieving it when:

• You accept it and welcome it into your life. Anxiety is normal. Admitting to it plays a big part in recovery.
• You learn to be comfortable in situations in which you are not in control. The more you demand yourself, the higher your anxiety levels will creep up.
• You are not looking to rely on alcohol/drugs/herbs/medicines/food/other stuff to calm down and worry less.
• You feel you can accomplish things and choose to have positive views on them. Otherwise, anxiety eventually makes the body shut down; that has a name: depression.

My goal is not to eliminate anxiety, but to have it under control so it does not run my life. Some of the strategies I use are: sleep enough, eat healthily, reduce caffeine, exercise and meditate.