Themes

If you listen long enough, you’ll hear themes in the way people get stuck. “I’m not good enough” or “It’s never good enough” or “I’ll get started when I feel better” or “If people were nicer to me, I’d be nice to them” or “It’s unfair.”

I have thoughts like those also. For me, getting up early helps. Honestly, just get ahead of it. I want to tell people that….and maybe someday I will fully join the red hat club and just start saying exactly what I think about what people should do. That isn’t the way it works though. We, the people, are basically blind to direct suggestions of any kind. That’s why parables exist. I wish I were more talented in round about ways to explain healthy living as I understand it.

I’ve been trying, lately, not to let work affect me physically. When I pay close attention, I can feel my guts clench up or my neck start to ache. The things people think and say physically hurt me somehow. I don’t get that.

What does it mean?

I suppose that I lived in my own world, of my own thoughts and feelings, reading and running and writing that I didn’t have the pain I have now. I didn’t really listen to anyone and, while it was lonely at times, I didn’t hurt physically from it.

A gift is that I’ve learned to listen to an audiobook on the way home and leave this behind. You can only do what you can, in the moment, with what you have and mulling back over it for hours on end doesn’t help anyone….and it wastes your own time.

Today I saw a family of turkeys on the drive to work. The babies were oddly cute, and because there was no one else driving behind me, I stopped for awhile to look at them. It was funny the way they walked.

And that may sum up the most important lesson I’ve learned about mental health, it changes moment to moment…if you let it…if you let go and have faith that God is with us. Even when you don’t feel faith or hope…that you still believe that you will again feel those. It could be any moment! Unexpectedly, you might see a butterfly or taste fresh coffee and know that joy is for everyone.

Joy is for you and me 🙂

With Love,

Terra Rose