PMDD and the Water Lily

For once, I don’t know where to begin. Me, at a loss for words, can you believe that? I’ve just been so busy focusing on Lent and Easter and trying to keep up with everything around here, trying to keep my life in balance, mind, body, heart and soul, that I haven’t had time to think about blogging.

One new thing I’m working on is a website for my PMDD book, which is meeting with resistance finding an editor or agent to represent it. Most of the publishing houses I researched won’t accept submissions without an agent, and the agents I queried overwhelmingly said that without a certain set of initials behind my name to lend the book credibility or a co-author with the necessary initials, no publisher will touch it.

Funny, how living with something for forty years doesn’t give you enough credibility to write about it.

Platform is everything these days. When you approach a publisher, you need to come with a ready-made audience. My only audience is you guys, and I’m not willing to turn this into a full-time blog for PMDD, so I have to create a new one.

So I’m walking at the Y, participating in my 100 miles in 100 days challenge, just going around in circles around the track and letting my mind wander, when an image of a water lily comes to me, fully formed, along with the words, Living on a Prayer, Living with PMDD. For that’s what it’s like, living with PMDD, and in the past ten years, I’ve learned nothing short of my faith is going to get me through it.

The problem with coming up with ideas like that out of the blue, is that either have to drop what you’re doing and at least write down the idea, or try to hold onto it until you get home and can do something about it. I managed to finish my walk, then went home and hit the internet, looking for pictures of water lilies. I found the perfect one three pictures in (not the one above), but of course (being slightly OCD), had to keep looking to see if there were any better ones available.

There weren’t any better ones, but there were a ton of options. And so my idea began to expand. I contacted my favorite web designer, who designed this blog and the accompanying website, and she said to send her the pictures I’d chosen and we’ll come up with something.
So that’s where that is right now.

In the meantime, I wanted to know…Why a water lily? I’m not really into flowers, and don’t like the water at all, especially dark, murky water, so I looked up the symbolism of water lilies.

This is what I discovered: Lotus: Water Lily: The Lotus flower is symbolic of rebirth, but in addition to its religious meaning, the lotus is also a symbol of all that is true, good and beautiful, representing good fortune, peace, and enlightenment…In modern times the meaning of a lotus flower links closely with religious symbolism and meaning. A lotus represents life in general. As the lotus flower grows up from the mud into an object of great beauty, people also grow and change into something more beautiful. So the symbol represents the struggle of life at its most basic form. Lotus flower symbols are also popular for people who have gone through a hard time and are now coming out of it. Like the flower they have been at the bottom in the muddy pond but have risen above this to be an object of beauty or represent a life of beauty as the case may be. Thus the lotus flower or blossom can also represent a hard time in life that has been overcome.

I’d say that captures my (or any woman’s) struggle with PMDD perfectly. And since Easter is about rebirth, and the word I received from the women’s program at church during Lent was peace, and I’ve been looking for more ways to share my faith journey with others…the Water Lily is the perfect symbol for my new venture.

All I know is it didn’t come from me, so it must be a sign that this is the next step I need to take on my path.

Stay tuned and we’ll see :)