I’ve already posted about my other resolutions over at my other site, but this one’s deeply personal to me, so I wanted to share this list with the group that knows the most about the peculiar challenges I face living with fibromyalgia and degenerative disk disease: TTD readers.
When I started this site it was with the openly-stated intention of building a platform for a nonfiction book I’ve wanted to write for the past ten years, ever since I was diagnosed with these two conditions. That’s still the plan, but over the last few months, TTD has become so much more to me than just a platform.
The people I’ve had the unique pleasure of connecting with here and because of this site have lit up my life in profound and joyous ways. You guys have made me laugh, cry, and rage with anger over your deeply personal stories and the proud, honest, deeply meaningful way you share them.
So, here are my resolutions for the Tramadol Diaries in 2010, and I offer them to you as a gift, of sorts — a way to reconnect with you all and give back just a little of what you’ve given me in 2009.
Here we go!
1. Share more of my personal story about chronic pain.
I don’t know why but I’ve always found it easier to write about other people’s pain experiences than my own. I start to feel a little twitchy when I dive into my own story, and I think that’s a pretty significant sign that it’s something I need to do more of, to explore my own relationship and experience with pain in more depth. I’ve gotten a lot of really lovely compliments on the few posts I have shared in this vein, so I’m going to choose to believe those folks and open up more on this subject in 2010.
2. Write more often here.
I’ve no excuse, really, except that this site doesn’t pay the bills, another one does, and the bills were a BIG problem for me in 2009. I had to focus on what helped, but the honest truth is that I could have done more here, and done it more consistently. I resolve to post at least twice a week here in 2010. (I almost wrote “every day!” but, c’mon, the last thing we need is another reason to punish ourselves.)
3. Do more features like the ones coming up on chronic pain at work and talking to kids about chronic pain.
I have had such an amazing experience working on these two upcoming series and I’m so excited to share them with you in January! Connecting with experts, learning from them, crafting their advice into a solid sequence of posts … it’s all been incredible, and I really, really hope you all get as much from those series as I have gotten from writing them so far. I want to do more topics like that, maybe every other month or so.
4. Add some video and podcasts to the blog.
I’d love to jazz this place up with some video and podcasts, too! I can’t promise this will arrive in any particular timeframe as I have a lot to learn about this technology before I dive into it, but I’m looking forward to it. If you guys have any ideas about what topics might make particularly compelling video/podcasts, please let me know in the comments! I’m all ears.
5. Get over myself and put my picture on the site.
Again, no excuse. Just major issues with my looks. I’m dropping that here in 2009 and refusing to carry it with me into the New Year. So, I will get a nice picture done and post it here and on Twitter to replace that god-awful “Dark Shadows” thing I’ve got going on there currently.
6. Explore adding forums to the site.
I’ve resisted this one for awhile — there really didn’t seem to be a need for this, as there are already a number of good message boards out there for folks with specific conditions. But a number of you have suggested this and I’m willing to explore it. So I’m not promising they’ll magically appear in 2010, but I will commit to looking into it, seeing what’s required, how hard it would be, how much time it would take, and how much y’all want it.
7. Work a bit harder to spread the TTD “message” — that you can thrive, not just survive, with chronic pain.
There’s so much more to building a platform than just blogging, although I think this is my first and biggest piece of the foundation and I’d like to continue focusing on it. There’s also Twitter, Facebook, and other sites, as well as journalists and freelance writers publishing about chronic pain-related topics, though, and I’m going to do my best to get more active in this area in 2010.
8. Connect with more chronic pain “thrivers” on Twitter and Facebook.
Likewise, there are a lot of tweeps and Facebook’ers out there who are sort of drifting with the social mediasphere, and not connecting with any one site. I’m on a mission to bring them here, as at least one of their stops on the information superhighway, and see if TTD is the place for them. I want to hear more stories, talk to an even more diverse group of chronic pain thrivers, and find out from as many people as possible about their concerns, their dreams, their problems, their unique solutions.
So that’s it! My gift to you in 2010 is a more active and actively-engaged site. I hope you’ll join me. I think it’s gonna kick ass, if you’ll pardon the salt. 
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