The next burning platform.

We’ll go with our integrity or we won’t go at all.

Giving Tuesday is on the horizon, I am told, by a generous offer from Missy to match donations to Ani’s Orphans up to $500.

It’s on the 28th and it goes for 24 hours.

That means I have a deadline to get to a finish line of what amounts to a summary of all the untold stories of my work.

I’m not asking you for one red cent until I get a chance to have the floor in a way I’ve never stepped onto it before.

Part of my journey in Crazy Town was reconciling with my own labels. ADHD in my youth was not well studied and especially not in girls. In all the settings that determine our worth and success as we grow I was measured by the same metrics as my more competent peers. I grew up knowing my shortcomings, with behavior charts, disabilities, getting kicked out of places, offending people, etc., which are not nearly as damning as the labels I took for myself. No help ever came. Judgements did. Labels. Add some sensory issues into the mix, and little Ani Cannon was starting school already pissed off at her pants.

Those learning environments make offbeat kids like me feel like abysmal, incompetent failures, and bad people, but I had no idea were weren’t ALL mad at our pants. Fish look pretty ‘funny’ trying to breathe on the shore, don’t they?

I didn’t last long in girlscouts, but it was within the stale walls of some school cafeteria where a little asshole dubbed Crabby Appleton got her first journal – the safest place she’d ever taken a gut rumble.

My Crazy Town is a safe haven for all the social rejects I deeply love and understand, and to whom I devote my life. But I am their mom which means I signed up to give them a chance to get out of here and several years ago I set out to see if could understand what the dog AND human needs, and whether I could stack the deck.

So I combined all of my labels-turned-strengths in an attempt to figure out if there was anything that I in rescue could offer your relationships (and, yes, shamelessly give special needs a leg up) and then figure out how to systematically deliver it by way of value-added foster care.

What a rabbit hole and a journey of fails, blown hypotheses, and humility.

But ANSWERS.

It boils down to this: the perfect dog is subjective and relative to the person, not the dog or the behavior itself, but the perception of that behavior.

None of y’all were asking for some unattainable arbitrary standard of training perfection… you said you want a dog who is perfect FOR YOU, who you could understand and see fitting into your lifestyle. My job then is to supply all the information and try not to waste your time doing it.

It required that I change the story format and realize that Facebook is not where storytellers go to tell stories. For 6 years. Oops.

So I’m learning how to tell stories on the website and figuring out how to deliver the deliverable there. It might mean changing how I tell the story, or telling it in new ways. I’ll need volunteers to help me answer that.

I’d be honored if anyone would take an interest in this work at all, but so incredibly grateful to all perspectives willing to participate in and give feedback on my first big attempt. If you are interested, please reach out.

Failure for me is not even trying because I built this for you. And I did it because one guy devoted his career and his studies to understanding the 1 thing ADHD people all have in common and he met us there at a core need. He wrote for me, a wary failure in the bathtub who called out by way of Google and for the first time got an answer that gave me authority. It wasn’t me. It was the system. Just change the rules.

Blue has spent his time here guinea pigging value-added foster care where the rescue services aim to level the playing field and in the pilot story, I tried to give you the humans an adequate and clear picture of who he is and what to expect in multiple formats.

I have an agenda and it’s that I want all of you to end up in relationships that feed your souls because those relationships feed the dogs’ souls too. I know how cruel this life is, and I also know the only place as safe as the page is with a canine who came to suffer with us and show us the way to the light. Day after day.

Only you know what you need out of a companion, friend, etc. I can merely speak for the dog and introduce them as who they are based on what I know and the perspective I have today and try to do my part.

Everyone is doing Giving Tuesday, so put the 28th on your calendars as Giving BLUESDAY because if I did get it right – even just a little bit; even a tiny little piece – Ani Cannon will be surrendering Blue to Ani’s Orphans, Inc. so that I may never be accused of “rehoming my dog.”

Thank you Missy for letting us know about Giving Tuesday by way of your generosity, and thank you everyone for allowing me this last-minute opportunity to tell you what you’re supporting and why it’s important to me.