A year ago, I was working a job I hated, that was actively destroying my health. In fact, around this time last year, I was felled by the worst, and the first case of the flu I've ever had—despite having gotten the flu vaccine well in advance—complete with fever, chills, body aches, migraines, fainting, malaise, nausea, pretty much every possible symptom a person could have, and which lasted a full week. After which I had the cough and congestion to fight for another two weeks.

My immune system was shot. My life was unsustainable, and I was being rudely confronted with the truth, in a way that I couldn't deny.

I came across something I wrote many years previous. I wrote all about this turn of events.

What I have very fully come to realize is that, while it appeared at first to be a surprize, there are no accidents. Sometimes we have to look backward to see that, as one event led to another, there was a logic behind it, after all. One thing that wouldn't have happened unless something specific had spurred it, just before that, and that was spurred by something, a specific cascade of events like dominoes placed just so.

There is a person that started this, inadvertently, though I won't name them. I have to send my eternal gratitude, along with the hope that one day I'll be able to return the favour, if I haven't already. Their very existence being a spur to break free of a life that, if it didn't fell me outright, would have surely done so in a slow, painful way. Their very existence being a call to embrace something else, something closer to my own heart.