Preface

Preface

            Hi. My name is Anna. Anna Josephine Midas, to be precise. I take pride in my name because in Hebrew is means “Jehovah increases grace/favor” (Anna=grace/favor; Josephine, feminized form of Joseph=Jehovah increases). And Midas was, like, a mythological king, duh. *hairflip emoji I was born in the Willamette Valley in the Oregon on a particularly nasty day, according to my never-exaggerates-a-thing father. But at 8:56am on October 24, 1994, the sun broke through the clouds over the Willamette Valley at the exact moment I was born.

            I’d been told my mentor, Barb, for forever to write a book, but the thought was far too daunting to even consider. Then one day I realized that I had already catalogued many episodes of my life on my blog: www.newhopeschoolva.blogspot.com. Why not just compile the best ones and call it a day? If you can’t tell, I’m efficient (read: lazy).

So the last week since I decided to go forward with writing, or, compiling the book, I perused some of my old blogs. I started it back in the summer of 2013 when I was just 18 years old. The very first entry is still my most read post and was mainly just a micro-mass media way to inform my friends and family that I had been diagnosed with what we would find out was a malignant Solid Pseudopapillary Tumor in the head of my pancreas. If you decide to read this book, you’ll read a lot about that, so I won’t spoil anything here.

I’ve let the blog go now and then but it has survived the years and made it to 2019. That’s six whole years of life lived with me sharing the blood, sweat and tears of my life with my small but devoted readership.

If you decide to read this book, you might get whiplash at first until you sink into its rhythm. For it does have rhythm. It’s just not what most people would consider a harmony of the spheres type of thing. This is intentional. One thing you’ll learn about me is that at the age of 19 I was diagnosed with Bipolar I Disorder. That means a whole lot of things, but one of them is that my life has seemed like a frenetic set of waves during a hurricane. I want you as the reader to get a little taste of what it’s like to be whipped back and forth without any semblance of control but I will always provide the date of the entry for some context.

So, there you go. I loathe prefaces, intros, and forewords, so I tried to keep mine short. As you read, remember to ride the waves; don’t let them overwhelm you. Welcome to my life.