Every month since my stroke comes a day of absolute terror: the day I receive an injection in my eyeball to treat my retinal hemorrhage.

Yet, every month, the Sanford Eye Center is so family-like and so kind that I come away with only good memories.

Some people only see and talk about the bad things in life but as I suffer from chronic, indeed, terminal optimism, without which I couldn't survive this crazy life, I only see the good. So each month, I write an email to Sanford Patient Relations to tell them how wonderful their Eye Center is because "credit where credit is due."

Here's this month's email. I hope you find it as amusing to read as I found it amusing to write.

Ah, eccentricity! My lifelong passion. It began when I was a shellshocked twenty-two year old, afraid of everyone and living in a state of constant distress over Dad's shock cancer diagnosis, accompanying him to every chemo appointment, bearing his 'roid rage afterwards.

Eccentricity became my armor. It kept everyone at arm's length, just where I wanted them. I joked it really weeds out the riffraff. People give eccentrics a wide berth. Eccentricity started as my protection and soon segued into normalcy.

Here's the thing about eccentricity: If you do it mainly to attract attention, you're not truly eccentric.

If your eccentricity makes you self-conscious, you're not truly eccentric.

If it's perfectly normal to you, you're authentically eccentric.

If you delight that your eccentricity brings joy to others, but you don't do it for that reason, you're the genuine article.

But when you're a true eccentric, it's so normal to you, it doesn't feel like eccentricity anymore in which case...well, like adulthood itself, eccentricity is basically untenable but a fun untenable.

I was blessed to grow up around people eager to pass along their Wisdom and Life Lessons to me. What I learned from them has stood me in good stead in life. But sometimes Time is the greatest teacher of all. So many of the problems that I stressed and obsessed over for years resolved themselves merely with the application of time and a lot of it.