Not surprisingly to me...
I'm not great at doing the things for me.
Self care is not something I excel in. Now I'm not a slovenly disaster or anything like that. This isn't a woe is me post. I don't take terrible care of myself. For the most part I really enjoy the vast majority of what I do. I love my job. I love my other job. I love walking my dog as soon as we're actually walking, I really hate getting ready to walk my dog. I love being with my family and getting things done around the house. I love listening to books and podcasts while I drive. That's the majority of my life.
I have a pretty okay attitude about life and what it means to live happily. I make my own happiness and I communicate when I think I need to... sometimes.
All this is to show that I rarely say hey, I'm going to do X because I really want to and it'll make me feel good.
I always have an excuse, verbal or mental. I do love my work, but it does take my away from my family for the majority of their days. Jenna is doing all the things to keep them moving and on track and most of the "stuff" around the house. So when I get home from work I feel an unspoken pressure to help out and spend time with the kids. These are two things I love doing, I'm a helper by nature and my kids are amazing, so being around them isn't a task. I genuinely feel bad if I don't do the dishes or if the kids ask me to play and I say no.
These are things my therapist* and I have delved into more times than we probably haven't. I'm a people pleaser with unsubstantiated guilt issues. I know I have the ability to make people happy and positively influence them, so I feel an unrealistic need to do so. I'm working on it.
Lost in all of this is the self-care I started talking about before I went on one of my typical rants. I'm not the best friend in the world. I would do anything for anyone (the whole people pleasing thing), but I am not a present friend. I don't make time for interacting with my friends. I'm super happy when it happens, but I don't do it very often.
This is something I value. This is something I feel. This is something I miss... yet this is something I don't actively do. I'm working on it.
Writing is another outlet I full on heart-eyes love😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍. I think of things to write maybe 20 times a day. Movie plots. Characters. Stories for my kids. General thoughts and philosophies. Words that sound cool. But I rarely ever write them down. I don't put time aside to write at all, not even just highlighting the random thoughts that pop into my head. I have been setting daily intentions and weekly goals, which has me holding a pen and thinking, which feels pretty good, but it's not enough.
Yesterday, as I'm reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance with my ears, for the first time, it had me thinking of the act of writing and reflection. Even with that, I really couldn't think of what to write about or how to write anything down. So, like any good 36 year old (I still forget I'm 36 sometimes, strange) I asked social media to give me some hints.
Now, through this... whatever this is... I have decided to write something based on every suggestion that was given to me. Here they are, slightly edited for the sake of clarity and ease with brief commentary:
- Something Magical that happened that day! : Probably makes me the most nervous
Gratitude: One of my daily routines I'm poorly establishing is to think of 3 things/people I'm thankful for and tell them or write them down.- Simple household, non-mechanical tools: This is the perfect suggestion from one of the most magnificent people I know.
- The AIDS epidemic of the 70's and 80's: Whoa... okay, that'll be "fun"
- Kids Adventures - Stories for your kids: I tell my kids stories almost every night. For probably 2 years I told Mabel a different story every night about either a superhero (she knows a lot about superheroes) or a street sweeper named Gary we made up. Gary was the best. I wish, so badly, that I would have written all of those down.
- One Strange Rock Episode 1: I don't even know what this is, but I'm going to assume it's a television show about a zany family who lives at 1 Strange Rock Boulevard!
- Something fictional, like the sun : This one has me thinking oh so much, way too much, I'm very excited.
I'm going to do my best over the next however long... I know goals should be timely, but I'm really bad at setting goals, it's another thing I've discussed in therapy. I'm a highly effective non-ambitious person who accomplishes massive tasks with very little purposeful planning. I'm weird, dudes, I know this.
But I'm going to write something. Maybe it'll be a reflection like this. Maybe it'll be a poem. Maybe it'll be a short story. Maybe it'll just be a collection of Memes because other people are funnier than I am and memes make us happier... probably dumber... but also happier.
You can see that gratitude is crossed off... as I close out this random post I'll bring it all back together. I am so incredibly thankful for the experiences I've had that have brought me the life I live. I am surrounded by grace and privilege. I work extremely hard for my luck, but it is not lost on me that I have also been inspired and supported by the world around me. I have been writing this for 25 minutes and my fingers are just flying. My brain is clear. My heart is beating. I was randomly smiling a few minutes ago when I wrote the list of topics. I'm so grateful for the people in my life to have responded to a random-ass Instagram story asking for inspiration.
It's here and it's real and it's giving me life and energy. If you are interested, but don't see results, call me out. Do it nicely, I'm very sensitive, but call me out on my shit. I welcome it.
Thank you John. J Instagram. Thank you for inventing Instagram and naming it after yourself. Thank you for working with Sally Google and her partner Mary Lou Blogger, who made this medium possible. You're the real heroes in this story.
* An Aside Regarding Therapy and Writing
I don't see any purpose in being untruthful when I'm writing or reflecting about my life in a venue where other people might interact. I write these things for me and sometimes people read them and that's nice too. I've mentioned therapy in conversation before and people have looked at me strange, like it's a dirty word or a secret I should be keeping to myself.
This is my truth and I'm not worried about people who either don't understand it or believe the negative stigma they might have learned growing up. To each their own. This is my life to live and I'm going to make it as awesome as possible. I think you should too. Being self-reflective is nice, but it's also transformative. We all know people who spend all their time complaining about people or the world around them without taking any stock of how they can change it. It's hard, we do not live in a forgiving world, so we need to learn to forgive ourselves and move on.
I see a therapist every few weeks because talking to someone completely objective about the 248,009 things going on in my life helps me understand that life and understand how my weird brain interacts with the world around me. It's amazing and I'm a genuinely better father, husband, colleague, friend and person with therapy in my life. Check it out, I'll share my counselors information with anyone who wants it, she's fantastic.
