Today was good, so I’ll take it.

Yesterday, I made fresh salsa with tomatoes from the garden. I put boneless, skinless chicken breasts in the fridge to thaw, I got everything ready to make dinner for myself and my parents today. I was looking forward to baking that chicken in my salsa with smoked paprika and all its wonderful veggie chunks… I was going to arrange it all beautifully over rice and serve it with roasted broccoli. I was going to take pictures. Sounds like a good plan, eh?

We got out of the house late to go grocery shopping this morning, had a ton of little side errands, picked up my niece to shop and spend time with us, hung out with my brother and sister-in-law, went to the bank, went to the Secretary of State, got home late, unloaded groceries and threw together a quick lunch. After being allowed to relax for a few minutes, company showed up and it just got later and later. My thawed chicken instead decorated a pizza because no one wanted to wait for rice (brown rice seems to take forever!).

Things didn’t go as plan, my meal plan changed… but I had a great day! I got to hang out with my family, I got out and about, found a new blouse and a sleek almost-blazer-like piece for job interviews I’ll hopefully be getting. I wasn’t planning on pizza calories, but it’s a small price to pay for the day I had. I even bought new shampoo! new shampoo is very exciting, I’m going to introduce it to my hair in just a few minutes.

So I’m going to try to remember this when the bigger things don’t go according to plan. Life happens, you know? I can’t micro-manage every moment and I wouldn’t want to. Seems like it would suck the life out of, well… life.

I’ll probably be back after Labor Day weekend since I’ll be spending it and the holiday working retail. I’m really hoping to make pretty food to share pics of with you!

Oh, oh it’s magic! No, not really.

I hate it when the people about me are miserable. I’m seeing a lot of great people really down on themselves lately because they’re feeling in a way that they haven’t experienced in this depth before. It’s hard to figure out what to do with yourself when you reach the point of “What the hell do I do now?” Where you consciously know that it’s time to pick yourself up, dust yourself off and get on with it… but how? One mistake I see time after time is giving this mood, these feelings, this darkness time to resolve itself. As if, magically, the clouds will lift and it’ll be easier, and you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps because, somehow, your mood started the heavy lifting for you. You wait and you wait, ready for that epiphany to stroll by and smile at you, but you get caught up in coasting along in a horrible mood, feeling less like yourself than you ever have and you get stuck.

.

I’m here to tell you, after spending years in the emotional trenches, that things don’t just happen to get easier. Maybe circumstances change in your life and things get better financially or physically, but turns like that don’t happen as easily on a mental level. You can’t wait out the issues you’re having with yourself and hope that one day the sun will come out and all the things will clear away that were cluttering up your head and your heart. I waited, I hoped and I prayed. I thought some magical wind would swirl down from the heavens blow away my depression, the dismal place my mind was, and I’d be able to fix my life then. I waited for it. I waited and waited and waited some more. You know what? Things got darker, I got more depressed, I got fatter, I did less, I enjoyed less and there seemed like there was less hope. It felt like punishment and I couldn’t see at the time that it was all at my own hand.

.

You have to work for it. I’m sorry, it seems like a raw deal… but that’s what has to happen. You have to reclaim yourself from the bad funk your in and make your own life better. There’s no magic, there’s no mystery, there’s not some date in the future where things will just fall into place and, overnight, you’ll be happy again. You have, have, have to make an effort to be happy when you’ve been thrown into a deep, dark place in whatever situation helped put you there. It’s going to be hard, I wish that I could tell you that it wasn’t, but you have to fight for yourself.  Even when you don’t fee like it, you’ve got to get out there and put a brave face on. Even when it seems hopeless, because the gloom will try and trick you into believing that it is, you have to KNOW that you’re strong enough and can come out on top. Some days you’ll feel it, some days you’ll have to fake it until you do but working on it, your mood and yourself, is the only way that you’re going to get your life back.

.

You’ve got to find what works for you and there are so many resources to address the things that are going on in your head and your heart and your soul. You can look to religion, no matter what form of it that you seek out and find that you can believe in and that soothes and rewards you spiritually. There’s meditation in all kinds of different incarnations and they do help you to reconnect with yourself and it helps you see who you are, what you want and quiets you inside enough to make a plan to figure out what you can do to get there. There is medicine, whether prescribed or something natural that you research and talk over with your doctor. Using medicine as a tool helped me get to the point where I can cope with life without the drugs. Talk to someone. Open up to someone whether it’s someone in the medical profession like a therapist or a clergy member or a family member or a friend or even a stranger. You can also write to get some perspective on your feelings and your situation. It also gives you a removed sense of self when you’re forced to slow yourself down to put it on paper, read it and consider it. Then, there’s exercise which is as good for your brain as it is for your body. Yoga, Tai Chi, kickboxing, swimming, running, whatever it is you can do, do it. Notice a theme here? All of this takes effort and going outside your comfort zone. All of it takes practice and patience and honesty with yourself. All of it is really, really hard.

.

Why put forth all of this effort? So you don’t have days where you feel hopeless and worthless and depressed and stuck and miserable. Those days will still happen, but not in the quantity and they won’t be as hard to get through. If you work as hard on yourself as you would work on the other aspects of your world that you work for. Why should anything be worth more effort than your very self? Plus, when you take care of yourself, those other aspects of your life will improve as well. I admit that I have a long way to go on myself and things have been really rough lately, it’s been so hard but I can’t give up. Once you get out of that dark little box of despair, you don’t want to go back. Period. You don’t, and that’s the gift of getting out, you earn the will to fight to stay out of it.

.

You have to decide. How do you like coasting along feeling like you do? What would you change? What are you willing to do to change it? What path would you like to follow? How can you get back on track. I’ve said it and I keep on saying it: You are worth anything in this world. You are worth trading in your bad days for mostly good days. You are worth a life full of beauty and light and adventure and love for yourself. Love yourself. It’s a simple concept but often times so hard to do. Love yourself despite your appearance and your faults and your quirks. Love yourself and know that you deserve the things in life that you want for yourself. You are worth love and I can say that I love you even though I may have never met you. I love you because you are a fellow wanderer in this world looking for what completes you, because you’re human, too. I have my faults and my quirks but I’m strong and I know that you’re strong, too. Things may not always seem right or seem fair, but we’ve got the tools to affect our lives for the better if we’re willing to use them. We have to make our own magic, and I intend to sparkle.

.

Much Love,

~Glo