Shorty

     Tonight's post will be very brief as I've been sick since yesterday evening & am about to crawl into bed. Thankfully today has only been filled with nausea, headaches, & stomach pain - very mild compared to yesterday evening. It came on in about five minutes & I was done. I could hardly fall asleep last night I was so sick to my stomach. I can't figure out if it was something I had eaten on Friday or early in the day Saturday or if this was just some random, twenty-four hour virus. To me, right now, the cause doesn't matter nearly so much as the effects. Of course, if this were to continue (Dear Lord, please don't let it) then I would care a lot more about the origin story. At the moment, though, not so much. I would probably care more if I hadn't been dealing with digestive issues since I was about twelve. Since I have, I really don't.
     Today wasn't all about me feeling awful, though. Our first puppet skit for the new summer kids' series at church (which I wrote & performed in - not as a puppet) went well. There was one puppet cue mishap & I left right after my part was done since I felt so awful but we pulled it off smoothly overall! Plus, I had my lines completely memorized & pulled them off without a hitch - I even managed to improvise on a line at said cue mishap. While sitting very still at home, I watched a new movie all the way through, something I don't do at home very often. It wasn't the greatest movie I've ever seen, by far, but it was okay, had a couple of good actors, & was a nice distraction for a couple hours. I did manage to unload my dishwasher & do a couple loads of laundry so I'm fairly pleased with that. Somehow or other I'm going to have to get this apartment packed up so I can move back into my mom's house at the end of the month. I'll be staying with her until I go overseas later this year. That's a whole other bit of heart drama that I've been going through since 2010 that I'm not going to go into right now. I'm focusing on the positive in that situation & how many ways I can see God's perfect timing coming to fruition. Moving home is a step of faith towards this goal. I digress, though. I said this would be a short post, after all. I should keep my promises, even if they're only to myself.
     Goodnight, big, wide world of web & wonder. Goodnight tree in the pretty, dimming light. And, of course, goodnight, moon.

Saturday

     Today has been a good day. True, I slept in far later than I intended and was not nearly (read: at all) productive as I should have been, which I scolded myself for until I felt very guilty.

     I still didn't do anything but I felt very bad about it.     

     The best part of today was this evening, though. I got to go to the birthday party of a very special little boy who turns eight tomorrow. I've known him since he was two. I still remember the first time I saw him smile. He's such a source of joy in my life and I love him so much. His family is so sweet to me, too. His older brother is such an awesome kid and his parents trust me with their boys which is a huge honor. Next month I get to take the boys to the science museum. Our first outing together was to the city zoo several weeks back. One of my favorite days, hanging out with these two boys. I didn't feel so guilty for not doing housework when my buddy was talking to me at his party tonight. All that mattered was getting to be there and that he wanted me there. Kids are picky; when they choose you to be their friend it's a privilege and should be treated as such. His parents told him to give goody bags to his friends who came to the party, meaning the kids who were about to go home. He immediately put a goody bag in my hands. Seriously, huge honor. There are so many awards in life but that was about one of the biggest possible in my mind. This boy said he wanted all his other guests to go except for me, he wanted me to stay and watch him build one of his new Lego sets. Man, I love this kid. If I do nothing else worthwhile in my life, I got to have this friendship with him, and that's huge. I don't think there's been anything that's made me more proud than when he's told me that I'm his best friend or when he says he loves me, or picks me of all his grown up birthday guests to talk to and sit in my lap and want to chat with me. God's used him so much in my life and in my heart. He's my best buddy and I love him.

     I was already okay tonight. I just had to gush about why. :)

     Pretty, random flowers from my mom's place for today's picture.

Valleys

     Today has been fairly lovely. My mom graduated as an LPN today and I couldn't be more proud of her. I had a great rehearsal for our puppet skit on Sunday later in the afternoon. I even managed to memorize my lines - a huge accomplishment for me. I have always struggled with memorization; I used to despair when my music instructors wanted me to memorize pieces. Now, if I can manage to memorize lines for the week when I have more than five lines! :) After practice, I came home, made cabbage and sweet potato (It has no name, I made it up as a twist on another cabbage recipe. Nameless though it may be, it is delicious.) and turned on "Sherlock" on Netflix. I also tweeted my #28thanks, choosing to take a more serious route with today's thoughts, focusing on God's power enduring beyond my momentary feelings.

     Letting my feelings control me is a struggle for me. As you've probably inferred from my first post, I have some mental and emotional health issues. It's not something I talk about very much with very many people. Only a very few know the full story and for now I need it to stay that way. Someday, I want to be able to share my testimony and help others but for right now I still have too many moments where I need help and too many fears of judgement (which I have already experienced from within the church, unfortunately) to feel comfortable being transparent about my health. I'll get there. God will get me there. It's like Eli's "Valley Song."

    

     It's this rock that tells me

     That's what valleys are for

     It's from here that we measure 

     Just how far we must go

     

     I love this song. Eli is actually one of my favorite Christian artists. I'd encourage you to give his music a listen. For a whole now I think I've been in a long valley. I think this blog is a way, not necessarily to escape the valley but to chronicle the walk through the valley. I think a light is coming but I don't want to miss this. I can't appreciate it yet. Some things we have to walk through. Sometimes it's about pressing in and pressing through, touching the garment, wrestling with the Lord, coming face to face with the Divine in the moment of desperation. I don't think we can forget that moment. Did Jacob forget the moment when the Lord touched him? Doubtful. The woman who bled? Unlikely. It is in our darkest moments that we have the opportunity to find our true selves as well as the Lord's true nature. Love eternal. Glory in the midnight hour. Light in the darkness. The soft whisper in the storm. The arms of the Almighty encircling His beloved. Whatever your feelings on the Harry Potter series, take a minute to appreciate this quote: "Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light." That's what my #28thanks tweets are for; they're me, turning on the light. This blog is me grappling with the darkness. Not always, and not always so seriously, I hope, but I can't internalize my thoughts and feelings anymore. I've found my outlet and I think it's going to be good for me. Especially since outlets are used for plugging in lights.

One of *Those* Days

     Today was hard. I was so frustrated and overwhelmed by stress at one point I was ready to cry. It didn't start out that way. I actually had a very productive morning and felt good about where I stood with my workload. My co-worker and I get along very well and had a pleasant morning together, enjoying our hot tea and going over upcoming procedure changes. The key word there is "upcoming." As in, we're still suffering at the moment. Still, we were doing fine in our checkout area, me with my data entry, she with her billing. Then, the whole thing went straight down the toilet.

     I arrive at work at 7:00 and take my thirty minute (an agency wide time allotment) lunch around 13:00 (1:00pm). Today at 13:00 I was asked to cover a lunch at the front desk so other clerks could take the lunches they had not had. I was hungry and, I'll admit it, not very happy about waiting another half hour for my break (I had a feeling the front desk clerk wouldn't come back on time - after already showing up 13 minutes late that morning, delaying my work), but of course I said yes (I don't tell the boss no) and relieved the front desk clerk for lunch. Remember that foreboding I mentioned? Yeah, it's about to get important.

     An hour and twenty minutes later (forty minutes before I was supposed to leave for the day), I had to call my supervisor to see if anyone was available to relieve me at the front desk so I could take my lunch. I was starting to feel sick to my stomach from not eating. Ten minutes later, as my supervisor is coming to se me free, the front desk clerk returns. What did I get to do while the clerk was gone? I got to deal with angry clients complaining about how long they had been waiting to be seen, nurses telling me not to call and ask questions on behalf of clients, told to tell the clients the nurses were too busy for that (they had time to answer the phone just fine), handing clients comment cards begging them to fill them out so we could prove to supervisors the surprise new system implemented Monday wasn't working, and of course apologizing over and over again for things that weren't my fault, I couldn't control, and worst of all, I couldn't fix. It was somewhere in there when I found myself so emotionally frazzled I was ready to burst. I felt so judged by the angry people pacing in the lobby. I wanted to scream out, "It's not my fault!" I wanted someone else there to take the blame but the people to blame refused to arrive. 

     I didn't go to lunch until 14:50, wrung out like a wet dish towel. I was so upset by everything that was happening. My co-worker in the checkout area said clients had screamed at her about the long wait, as well. We couldn't understand what was going on and why no one was doing anything to fix the situation. In all honestly, I don't know what could have been done at that point. I wanted the clerks to stop checking in clients, the nurses to speed up on the clients we had (sitting around with no patients?), and I wanted everyone to get a better attitude (including the clients and myself) and pull together to get things done and make our clients happy again.

     Yeah, none of that happened.

     Now I know I'm not a nurse and I don't know what all they have to do in the clinics, and there were plenty of things going on that probably made other employees even more frustrated than I was. This isn't their blog, though. It's my blog, and quite frankly I've just about written myself to okay this evening by writing the whole story down. 

     Before I left work I went to our wellness center and go through a thirty minute yoga routine. Normally I'll ride the exercise bike for at least half an hour but I had no energy for it today. The yoga was exactly what I needed. I walked out of work feeling drained but calm, tired but relaxed. For the drive home, I rolled down my windows and listened to an iPod genius playlist with Joshua Radin and other soothing artists. I opened my blinds at home, put my feet up on the couch and read a magazine cover to cover. I ate dinner while watching BBC's on Netflix. Now I'm sitting on my balcony listening to my wind chimes enjoying the breeze, the sunshine, and the view:

     I had been planning to go to a girls' life group tonight but I couldn't do it after the madhouse of today. I'm an introvert to begin with and dealing with so much face to face conflict today had given me all the social interaction I could handle on one night's sleep. I was much slower on Tweeting my #28thanks for today - I still haven't finished. I have time, though. It's only 19:30 and I have plenty of my evening left to enjoy now that the recovery process has come to an end. I've written myself to okay.

28 Thanks & Panic Attacks

O     I've been inspired by my friend Brittney to start keeping a blog again. It's been so long since I've done this the words feel rusty in my head. I think I need a place, though, where I can put my thoughts and give myself some sort of catharsis at the end of the day.

     Thoughts for right now: my #28thanks project on Twitter (@LG_Abroad). Inspired, again by the bestie Brittney as well as my friend Kara, my goal is to tweet 28 things I'm thankful for every day for a year. At the end of the year I'll have listed 10,220 reasons to praise and thank God. Their (Brittney's and Kara's) inspiration came from the song "10,000 Reasons." For the record, I did the math to see how many thanks I'd need each day to reach exactly 10,000 at the end of he year, but since there's not a way to send 27.397 tweets a day I'll have to stick with 28. Oddly enough, 27 tweets per day would only bring in 9,855 thanks - it seems like such a big difference from 10,220. Normally I'm not a numbers person (I have an English degree) but for whatever reason I found all of this this fascinating.

     I had made it up to thanks number 14 when I realized I was at the edges of serious anxiety. The agency I work for is having a health fair today and instead of working all the employees are attending. I don't struggle a lot with panic attacks but as people arrived and the building became more crowded I could feel myself growing nervous. I didn't know anyone (I was hired in March) and I didn't know what to do with myself. Vendors were still setting up and in the auditorium where I was I felt I had no safe place to turn. I started longing for a corner to hide in, where I could shrink down and be unobserved, back against the wall so no one could sneak up on me. I felt exposed and threatened - for no good reason but anxiety, I think, is rarely rational. It was like the feeling I always imagine animals have when they're being hunted on camera for the Discovery Channel. I fled (not literally of course) the auditorium and breezeway until I found the empty boardroom. As soon as the door shut behind me I could breathe easily again. No one had seen me duck in so I felt safe and secluded. My own little hidey-hole. A little big for a hidey-hole honestly, but there was a chair at the back of the room (back to the wall, remember) and the view was gorgeous. 

     I love rain. My favorite part of getting ready this morning was listening to the rain from my cozy bed. So while not quite the tiny closet my nerves might have preferred, the view of the rainstorm was worth the extra space that rejected an adjective of cozy. I could also listen to the rain tiptoeing across the roof from this space, a more soothing sound to focus on than the booms of voices from the hallway. My fear dissipated quickly and I sat down and sat still, enjoying myself to no end.

     I didn't emerge for half an hour until my best friend, the aforementioned Brittney, arrived on the scene. Strength in numbers - I had a new herd member to help me and give me strength. I sat with her, chatted with people she knew but I did not, and even participated in the health fair, visiting tables, gathering freebies, entering drawings, getting massages (Yes, plural, and wasn't I oh so happy?), and setting up a free chiropractor appointment. By this time, another hour had passed, Brittney had left for other assignments, and I decided to make my way back to my boardroom. I was much more calm now (thank you, massage therapists) and could face the people passing in and out of the room in preparation for our meeting in half an hour, even admitting to a couple of them I don't enjoy crowds and had sought out a quiet corner for myself. An understated description of my earlier anxiety attack at best, but it was the one I was willing to share. 

     While writing this post I think I decided this blog will be a lot more personal than I originally thought it would be. I didn't know what I was asking for when I first dreamt of a catharsis at the beginning of the post. I will say, though, it feels good to get my thoughts out, to express my feelings and share the experience. I don't do a lot of that in my normal life. Most of the time I wind up apologizing for talking about myself. I don't want to do that, I don't want to apologize for expressing myself and sharing my thoughts and rambling on until I decide I'm done and I'm okay. So I think that's what this blog will be, me writing until I'm okay.