There’s a ten-year-old boy in my life (not my own, though nearly just as dear) who is obsessed with birds. A couple of weeks ago he downloaded a bird call app on my phone, and we listened to the various warbles and calls, chirps and trills.
The best antidote for anxiety I’ve found (besides medicine and sleep and exercise and skipping caffeine and going to therapy and all of that jazz) is presence. And what better way to be in the moment than to call out the things that make us happy right now. Gratitude helps me consider exactly where I am at today, not in some far away made-up life or one spent regretting past actions. Here’s what I’m grateful for today…
A few weeks ago, I began reading On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good. And then, as embarrassing as it feels to admit, I gave up reading it. The prose is excellent, the topic timely, and yet it felt like another task on my burgeoning to-do list. The very nature of reading a book promising clarity on women’s desire to be good enough felt like a step on that very journey.
I’ve been feeling stressed as of late.
My anxiety has been a constant for most of my adult life. Some days it’s a low hum in my body, just some static on the radio before switching the dial. Other days it’s a loud incessant barking, the rabid sound my next door neighbor’s dog Buddy makes whenever I’m out in my yard. “I live here too, you know!” I want to shout back. But like Buddy, my anxiety never listens.
I used to have this thing with appliances. Maybe it was too many years of fire prevention education in school, or maybe it was a touch of undiagnosed obsessive compulsive disorder. Whatever the case may be, in elementary school and later, into adulthood, I would often find myself lying in bed at night thinking about appliances, specifically the ones that when left turned on, could start a fire.
Right now we’re in … week 3? 4? 1 million? of staying at home to hopefully flatten the coronavirus (COVID-19) curve and naturally my brain is on budgeting and finances. Whether you’ve lost your job or are just being intentionally frugal in the face of the unknown (and the general state of the economy, yikes!), you’re likely thinking about money too.
When I was little, my sister was afraid of monsters in her closet. I’m not sure who started this, but every night, my dad or I would spray into her closet from a Pledge can we’d covered in construction paper and labeled “Monster Be Gone.” It actually seemed to work.