Archives for category: Mindfulness

The Bittersweet Spot

June 29, 2015 //

My teen had a somewhat tumultuous weekend. The ups, the downs, and the in-betweens. Usually, during low times, she clams up, goes to her room, and doesn’t share what’s bothering her. Later, she may share but not until it’s resolved.

My child, like a lot of teens, has had trouble finding a niche. However, she’s had trouble for some years and the trouble she has now is more than typical. She is sensitive, emotional, and outgoing. She is passionate about her friends and loves belonging to groups whether it is band, her circle of friends at school, or members of her choir. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of stability in her connections.

Yesterday, she told me that she felt sad. She didn’t tell me why but she was also asking me a lot of questions, which gave me hints into what might be bothering her. Talking to my kid is like talking to a butterfly as she flits in and out of the conversation as well as in and out of the room. I am no mind reader but I am a pretty good guesser. Nonetheless, a lot of the things I say to her are not taken well. We’d had a couple of good talks over the weekend and I thought I’d take a chance. Also, I decided to discuss things generally, instead of personally, something I know as a professional works better with teens, but I often forget to do as a mother.

I asked her to sit down on the couch beside me and this is what I said, “It is really hard in life to find a group in which you feel you belong. Sometimes, you discover a group and it seems perfect and wonderful. As time goes by, you form relationships and there are conflicts. People can try to exclude you. Then you can feel like you don’t belong anymore. This is really hard.” She nodded her head in recognition. I continued. “You will always belong in this family. No matter what.” She smiled, reached for my hand, and squeezed it. “Thanks, Mom.”

I said the right thing at the right time and place to help ease my child’s pain. It is the bittersweet spot of parenting in which I rarely find myself. I am grateful for this.

Tags acceptance, belonging, empathy, gratitude, Parenting teens

Categories Family, Mindfulness

Go fly a kite

June 24, 2015 //

My husband and I are on vacation on the Oregon Coast, just the two of us. We are having a marvelous time. We’ve hiked on the beach, in the forest, and along cliffs above the coastline. It is just the break we needed. An ideal vacation in an idyllic location.
It only makes sense that 100 percent of every moment of the vacation should be positively perfect, right?

If you’ve ever traveled or even lived for more than one minute, you know this is untrue.

It seems that during nearly everyone of our vacations, I am irritated with someone in my family, including myself. Yesterday, I had hiked seven miles along the coast. We drove to little towns and through amazing farmland. I was tired and in need of getting out of the sun. We got back to our hotel on the beach. If we hadn’t already made plans to eat on the picnic table overlooking the beach near our room, I would have changed into my nightgown. My husband said, “Hey, let’s go fly a kite!”

I am a person of inertia. Once I am at rest, I have trouble changing gears. The day before, John had convinced me to go out at night to see the sunset after I’d already collapsed for the day. I got myself going and was so glad that I did. So in the spirit of being a good sport, I said, “Okay”, put on my shoes, and followed him to the beach. My husband asked me to hold the kite while he walked away, un-spooling the kite string. As he was getting farther and farther away, drowned out by the sound of the ocean, I thought, “What does he want me to do? What is HE doing?”

I have flown kites in my day. He was doing it “wrong”. The first attempt failed. Then I asked him, “What do you want me to do?” He explained the game plan. Communication, yes! Now we had a plan. I was game, so I thought, despite the fact that he was doing it “wrong”. I’m not unreasonable. The kite flying was his idea. That made him in charge and me, the helper.

We made our second attempt and it failed. Then I did something I rarely do. I accepted that I was too cranky. I didn’t tell myself, “You are being silly. It’s just a kite. You have no reason to be annoyed.” I told my husband, “Honey, I’m tired. I’m going to go rest for awhile.”

I rested for about a half hour and then we started to make a beautiful fresh seafood dinner. When I brought the food outside, I saw the kite flying, tied to the arm of a patio chair. We had a wonderful dinner. I don’t think John even knew that I was getting cranky. I let me be me, I didn’t invalidate my feelings, and gave myself the space I needed to return to being an excellent traveling companion.

This may seem like a small thing but I know that small irritations can turn into a bad day and bad behavior on my part. Invalidation, makes emotion bigger, rather than smaller. All emotions are understandable even if we don’t like them.

I know that my life is going to contain upsets, big and small. Sometimes I will make things better, sometimes I will make them worse, and sometimes, nothing I do will change anything. But I am grateful that yesterday, I was able to take a step away from my expectation of perfection and just gave my imperfect self what I needed.

Tags emotion regulation, emotion validation, Marriage, mindfulness, nature photography, Oregon Coast, Pacific Ocean, silly arguments

Categories Marriage, Mindfulness

Stop Making Sense

June 19, 2015 //

In my work as a psychologist, I work with children and teens who have disorders considered to be primarily genetic in cause. Environmental factors play a role as well, but according to our current understanding, they are mainly factors that maintain or exacerbate symptoms as well as the pervasiveness and persistence of the resulting impairment in carrying out life’s activities and responsibilities.

About 90% of my patients have Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), the primary treatment for which are stimulant medications, which can make an enormous positive difference in an individual who is responsibly diagnosed and treated. However, even with medication, ADHD can make what we typically see as moral and responsible decisions much harder to make. Environmental supports from parents, teachers, and other professionals can help and as children grow into adolescence, individual psychotherapy can also be useful in helping an individual who has trouble internalizing rules that are good in the long run but not salient right now and to use strategies to promote life skills and success. Nonetheless, based on current longitudinal evidence, individuals with ADHD, even treated ADHD, have a much higher rate of high school drop out, only a 5% college completion rate, and a higher rate of accidental death as well as suicidality, among many scary possible outcomes.

This is why these kids, teens, and young adults are the “it takes a village” kind of people. Actually, I believe that we all belong to the village and as social animals, we rely on one another and impact one another for good, for ill, or for nil. But these individuals are particularly vulnerable. They do not tend to be resilient. They need particular parenting and educational strategies that are often inconsistently or not available. They need effective healthcare that is often in short supply.

I consider myself to have been very fortunate for many aspects of my life that just happened to me. I inherited a strong mind, a basically happy personality, grew up in a loving family, went to good schools, and had my basic needs for shelter, food, and belonging more than amply met. I take responsibility for cultivating these gifts very seriously but I don’t for a minute take responsibility for having receiving this gifts in the first place. I got very lucky and have made very good use of what I have.

Consequently, I have a great deal of love and compassion for the individuals I see, even the ones who are honestly, not very likable. Some of them are not even very nice. Sometimes they are very likeable, nice most of the time, but do really impulsive awful things. A common characteristic of many, but not all, individuals is a lack of consistent self-awareness and a very difficult time connecting their actions to negative consequences. This is a neurological issue and it results in difficulties taking responsibility. It is made worse in that when they are aware of short-comings or consequences, they often respond with very harsh judgement of themselves. This lack of self-compassion makes it harder to own up to personal responsibility. All of this is compounded with the fact that medication often makes a big positive difference because it fuels the belief that control is external.

A common way of framing this tension is by saying, “It is understandable that x, y, or z is really hard for you but it is not an excuse. You are still responsible for your decisions and behaviors. We realize it is hard and that is why we are all part of your team to support you. But you are part of the team, too.”

Yesterday, another heinous racist hate crime, an act of terrorism against African Americans was committed in our country. Many of us are angry, grief-stricken, and overwhelmed with sadness and helplessness. We are trying to make sense of this.

I think we need to stop trying to make sense of it, at least in the usual way that we do. The easiest way to explain something horrible is to put it under someone’s control and the easiest way to do that is by laying blame at a particular person. Another easy way to deal with these kind of events is to distance ourselves from them, the “I am not that” approach. Another way we can deal with this is to feel really sad, angry, and anxious for a day or two, or even a week, and then move on to the next horrible news story, further cultivating cynicism and passivity.

It is understandable to feel overwhelmed by this, to be enraged, to feel impotent, to wring our hands in perpetuity. It is even understandable to feel paralyzing and unproductive self-recriminations about the ways that we have acted unkindly to others. It is understandable to criticize the behaviors of others, to join with others in demonizing people we don’t know who have done wrong things; with social media, we join in with the professional media in shaming people in a very intense and protracted way. It has become brutal in a way that makes me fear for our culture. The stockades of the Middle Ages come to mind. Stoning. Throwing acid in a woman’s face.

These are actions that understandably fill our need for agency at times when we can think of nothing else to do. I have participated in these public shame-fests. I have participated in cynicism in the place of effective action. I have participated in judgment that is inconsistent with compassion toward myself or toward others. I have participated in racism, some of which I am aware, and likely some that I have done without self-awareness.

I believe that I am a good person in the way that most people use the term “good person”. That doesn’t mean that I haven’t done harmful things to myself or others. It doesn’t mean that I have not contributed to a hateful culture either through action or inaction, the latter because I was either “busy” or clueless.

As a psychologist, it is understandable for me to see yesterday’s terrorism as a mental puzzle to solve. But none of these understandable beliefs, actions, or conditions are an excuse for not taking my own portion of personal responsibility for being a part of a culture that can be hateful, cynical, passive, selfish, violent, and oppressive.

I am not responsible for the whole problem but I can take responsibility for my contributions to it. These are the steps I have decided to take:

1) I do not consider myself to be a racist person as a trait. However, I accept that as a human being, aggression and dominance are part of me and that I am not immune to the socializing impact of institutional racism. I accept that I can be a good person and person who has done racist things.

2) I accept that I have benefited from institutionalized racism due to the privilege afforded members of a dominant race

3) I will exercise self-compassion despite my moral and ethical failings.

4) I will work to be less judgmental, of people I know and of people I don’t know. In terms of social media, this means objective criticism of ideas or behaviors but not of people and that said criticism needs to fuel a positive purpose.

5) I will work to help children and families be healthy.

6) I will work to maintain my own mental health.

7) I will work to treat cynicism as understandable, but as being incompatible with compassion and effective change, nonetheless.

8) I will work to promote unity instead of division in my culture.

9) I will work to elect individuals who promote unity and fairness instead of division.

10) I try to listen to others with different viewpoints and life experiences with an open mind.

11) I will accept that complexity is common in the very situations during which I feel the urge to simplify to make myself feel less overwhelmed.

12) I will expect myself, despite my best efforts, to fail from time to time. I will work at these times, to keep trying.

I may be wrong in my arguments, in my beliefs, and my actions. That does not make me a bad person. My imperfection and the limitations of my own mind to understand all of this is understandable. But it doesn’t take me off the hook.

It is understandable but it is not an excuse.

Stop making sense.

Start making change for the better.

Tags acceptance, Charlestown shootings, compassion, cultural responsibility, cynicism, effective action, instituional racism, mindfulness, personal responsibility, public shame, racism, social justice, social media

Categories Feelings, Mindfulness

The Horizon

June 17, 2015 //

I was walking around my neighborhood the other day, as I do nearly every day. I don’t always take the same route and I don’t always plan it out in advance. But this was a route I’d taken many times. When I am walking, I typically keep my eyes on the trees and the flowers as well as watching out for cars and for uneven pieces of side walk that stick up. (I have tripped many times.)

It was a clear sunny morning. I happened to look up along the horizon. There was the top of Mt. Rainier looming above. I don’t remember ever having seen it on this route. But perhaps, I was not looking at the right time. I have spent 40 of my 49 years living in this part of the world. It is only a 30 minute drive to the house in which I grew up. I have seen Mt. Rainier many many times, thousands of times.

I couldn’t even see the whole mountain. Nonetheless, I gasped and reflexively put my hand to my chest. The mountain itself, though about 100 miles (160 km) away, is incredibly majestic, even in partial view. There is some disagreement, but standing at 14, 409 feet (4392 meters), it is the highest mountain in the U.S. outside of Alaska. Even from my neighborhood in Seattle, I could see the sun glistening on the ice of the glaciers. America, the Beautiful, right in front of me.

I have been working pretty hard lately, working more hours than I had planned to at least for the next couple of years. But I have my reasons and some of them, like the fact I am having to work more to cover a marked decrease in my collection rate for my business, are not pretty.

Some of the reasons, however, are pretty. I am working more to help pay to take more vacations. This month, my husband and I will spend a childless five nights on the Oregon coast. Next month, we will drive across the border into Canada to visit parts of Vancouver Island that we have not previously visited as well as reconnecting with the city of Vancouver, which is one of the most beautiful cities I have ever been. I take another couple of days off to go hiking with John’s aunt and uncle, who will be visiting us for the first time in Seattle. In August, I am taking time off to visit with dear friends from out of state. In September, my family travels to North Carolina for a much anticipated wedding and a celebration of our kid’s 17th (!!!!) birthday!

Then the plan is for the work-a-thon to end. No worries, I am already scheduling patients in September and I am taking care to go back to my old ways of not working full time hours. My energy level typically drops in late October, anyway, as the daylight hours grow shorter. Today, we will have 16 hours of sunlight. I’m not coming home from work in the dark. I have been gardening and doing home projects, like getting my home organized again!

But it is true that when I work more hours, I tend to live less in the present, to keep my head down, shoveling. These are also times of greater stress, when it is easy to borrow trouble in life and to expect bad things to happen.

It is good to look up to the surprise of a mountain’s majesty. It is important for me to remember that there are good surprises in life.

My husband and I took a three hour drive to get up close and personal with Mt. Rainier a couple of weekends ago.

Tags mindfulness, vacation, work/life balance

Categories Flora and Fauna, Mindfulness

Not ready made

June 9, 2015 //

One of my favorite classes while an undergraduate at the University of Washington was, “Ideas in Art”. We learned about visual art from different time periods and cultures along with the poetry and philosophy associated with each culture and time period. One of our required reading for the part of the course that covered the early modern art era in Europe was Marcel Duchamp’s, The Green Box. Duchamp was one of the founders of the Dada movement, an avant-garde style that stood with one foot in the absurd. “Dada” after all was named after the babbled phonemes that infants make before they learn to utter full words. Each of the 320 original Green Boxes contained 94 scraps of paper, notes, sketch studies, and more. What we read was an English translation of these items.

The Green Box contained a lot of information about Duchamp’s approach to art. He was a painter, sculptor, and art discoverer. Examples of the last category was his “readymade” art. This consisted of a manufactured object that made into art by calling it art. The infamous of Duchamps’ readymade art was, Fountain, a urinal that he displayed upside down and signed with the pseudonym, “R. Mutt.” Duchamp also made modifications to readymade objects, which he called, “readymade aided”.

As you might expect, the art world was not greatly enamored with Duchamp’s readymade’s, aided or not. Duchamp was provocative, to be sure. But he was trying to test the meaning of art with absurdity and to make his own meaning for art by using found objects. Aesthetics are, after all, highly subjective.

A lot of my experience of breast cancer has been about making meaning of it. I know that as a psychologist, this is a common process in dealing with loss, grief, and for many but not all of us, trauma. Meaning, however, is not something that has already been manufactured; it is a process. Maybe that is a piece of the resistance to labels like “survivor”, cancer metaphors like war, or traditions like wearing pink feathered boas. I have also seen the tradition time and time again of resisting all established traditions by attempting to make a new paradigm.

Cancer research and treatment needs objective standards in order to make discovers in a systematic way and to deliver treatment in a way that makes objective sense. This doesn’t mean that everyone is treated the same but the focus is on standards and protocols. And the things that people consider “unscientific” like rapport and responding to a cancer patient in an emotionally competent manner, are not unscientific. They are included in the science of psychology!

The meaning I make from breast cancer, however, is more about my individual identity. The meaning is subjective; it’s personal. Psychology can study the typical course of grief and loss and it has. I can read about the process and it may help me understand what I am going through. But I still have to go through it. I have to experience it for myself.

There will most certainly always be labels in our culture. To have no labels would make any chance of shared meaning and connection impossible. But labels, used inflexibly, like cookie cutters is not healthy. Language and labels are dynamic because cultures are dynamic. And within every culture, we have many individuals.

In my professional life, I provide information and guidance based on objective research and my subjective experience. A gift of my blogging is that most of the time, I only have to speak for myself. This is a vital part of my self-care and healing.

Just as there are many types of art, there are many types of people. Personally, I prefer to go to museums that feature more than one vision. Before we became cancer patients, we were individuals. There’s no reason for us to stop now! The objective similarity among individuals who have been diagnosed with breast cancer is that we have all been diagnosed with breast cancer at some time in our lives. The meanings can differ but still exist as truths.

Meaning is not readymade.

Tags Breast Cancer, Dadaism, identity, labels, Marcel Duchamp

Categories Breast cancer, Mindfulness

Days and Nights

May 25, 2015 //

I had a wonderful three day weekend with my family at the beach. That is, during the day. Saturday and Sunday nights were full of nightmares. As I mentioned yesterday, three years ago yesterday, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I had a wonderful day yesterday, during the day. Last night I dreamed that I had a scan and that there was evidence of a recurrence. I spoke with a radiologist on my dream phone. I can’t remember quite what he said, but I recognized it immediately as a segue to bad news. I told him, “You are saying that to tell me that my cancer has come back!” He admitted that he had. Healthcare professionals, for the record, I am also a deliverer of bad news. I know your tricks, especially when it is dream and my unconsciousness is writing the story.

In the dream, my husband looked at a written report and in a tone that communicated a lack of sufficient concern, he said, “It says here that it is an 18 meter mass.”

I grabbed the paper and saw that it said that it was a .18 meter mass. “Oh my God, John! It’s a .18 meter mass, not an 18 meter mass! That means it is a 1.8 centimeter mass NOT 18 METERS!”

(Dream mind does not always move the decimal point correctly, I admit. I also think dream mind perfectly illustrated the most stupid of the stupid marital disagreements, the one that MISSES THE POINT. I have DREAM CANCER GOD DAMMIT! Stop fighting with your husband. Neither one of you know how to treat DREAM CANCER!)

People, you get it. My brain is working crap out. Mom, if you are reading along, my brain needs to work crap out. I am doing my very best to keep the crap to a minimum. It is easier during the day time. I had a wonderful day yesterday and a wonderful today. I have less control over the worlds that my brain creates in my dreams.

This year was easier than last year. Perhaps next year will be easier than this year. Healing is a process that is approximately linear over time. But it has its fits and starts.

This morning, John and I took a walk on our own. That time together, along with the sweet historic buildings, and the beautiful farmland, did much to quell the nightmares.

I wish I did not still have them, but I do.

I am, in sum, a pretty happy person. It has been awhile since I let the fears in my nightmares ruin my waking hours. I didn’t do that today, either.

Living with the uncertainty of life, the horrible, the traumatic, all of the things that I have experienced thus far, for me, is not about pushing it out of my mind. I can’t! My mind does not work that way. If I can’t notice both the good and the bad, I can’t help people as a psychologist. I can just spout platitudes that are not true and do not honor the hardship that many people experience.

And if I don’t notice and validate the good and bad in my own life, I can’t live with the kind of truth that gives me a sense of purpose and integrity.

I need to notice and remember in my life. But I’m living, too.

And pretty darned well if you get right down to it.

My selection of a Boho Chic outfit thumbs its nose at nightmares!

The gentle farmland is decidedly not nightmarish.

Even pink, in its original form, is not scary to this breast cancer survivor.

Tags Breast Cancer, cancer anniversaries, mindfulness, survivorship

Categories Breast cancer, Feelings, Mindfulness

Today

May 24, 2015 //

Today is the first day of the rest of my life. Today I am exactly 49 1/2 years old. Today is a new day. Three years ago today, at about 10:00 am, I was told that I had an approximately 1 centimeter tumor, invasive ductal carcinoma, in my right breast. I was about as surprised as I could be. I had only a limited idea of how my life would change. Today is today. I am spending it in rural Washington, on the beach. Yesterday was a wonderful day, much better than I expected. Today, I may be in the mood to write, I may not. (I wrote this post yesterday.) I am hoping that today is a good day. I try to be grateful for each day. I mostly succeed.

The view from the rental house in La Conner, WA. Can you believe this?

Deception Pass
Anacortes, WA

Old warehouse in La Conner. The exterior was dilapidated. What a surprise to see this beautiful ceiling. Also, we probably should not have been in this building.

I look at poppies all of the time and very closely. This one held a whole new universe.

My best food photo from tonight’s dinner. In all, I made salmon, salad, oysters, and these clams.

Tags cancer anniversaries, gratitude, mindfulness, nature photography, Northern Washington

Categories Breast cancer, Mindfulness

Single Parent

May 7, 2015 //

We all know people who are hard to contact. They don’t return phone calls, emails, or texts on a consistent basis. My husband is one of those people. It’s kind of a joke in our extended network of family and friends. He’s not mean or thoughtless. He just gets wrapped up in what he is doing at the time and has trouble shifting gears. To be fair, he has gotten much more reliable about returning text messages, though it is not unusual for him to text me a question, my immediately answer it, and then my not hear from him again for quite some time.

Consequently, I don’t communicate with him as much as I’d like to when he’s not home. It’s not particularly effective or satisfying. But I do know that if I REALLY need to contact him at work, if the situation is urgent, I can do it. We have a system. I text him, call his cell phone, and call his office desk phone, one right after the other. Then he knows that he needs to drop what he is doing and to contact me. I don’t do this often, in fact, it’s been years and I don’t even remember the reason I last engaged the Bat phone/text/land line sequence.

John is in southern Utah with his step-dad, camping and backpacking. They’ve been planning the trip for a long time. It is a 10 day long trip, which is slightly longer than our family vacations. They on Saturday of last week. They will return on Tuesday of next week. They are seeing incredible country. John is texting photos to me every day as well as “I miss you” and “I love you” texts. I’ve spoken to him twice by phone. It’s not as if we are not communicating and in fact, this is much more frequent technology-supported communication than we typically exchange. But I can’t rely on being able to contact him at any time. Phone reception is spotty.

I don’t know exactly why but since the day he has left, our daughter has been having a very hard time, and shall we say, she is not suffering in silence. I feel like I am alone in some kind of parenting Hell. We did have a brief texting conversation this morning. He’d spoken to her yesterday and was worried about her, based on the conversation they’d had. I’ve been in a tricky position of wanting him to enjoy his trip but at the same time, I need support and he is my husband. I tried to need less than I did and as usually is the case, this strategy does not work well and I end up getting needier than I was in the first place. This morning, in a texting conversation I told him that I would not agree to him being way and unreachable for so long again. It was not my plan to tell him this. That’s just going to make him worry and detract from his trip. People, I am a work in progress. I will keep trying.

Sometimes being alone is a beautiful and peaceful place. Sometimes it’s just lonely.

Photo of John by Don Girvin, 5/2/15

Tags communication, loneliness, Marriage, Parenting

Categories Family, Marriage, Mindfulness, Parenting

Today’s reflection

April 29, 2015 //

This is another poem I read in the woods while visiting Bloedel Reserve earlier this month. It is a good reflection for me today.

The Art of Being

The fern in the rain breathes the silver message.
Stay, lie low. Play your dark reeds
and relearn the beauty of absorption.
There is nothing beyond the rotten log
covered with leaves and needles.
Forget the light emerging with its golden wick.
Raise your face to the water-laden frond.
A thousand blossoms will fall into your arms.
-Ann Coray (2011)

Tags Ann Coray, Bloedel Reserve, gratitude, mindfulness, nature photography, poetry

Categories Flora and Fauna, Mindfulness

This. Is. Seattle.

April 28, 2015 //

Yesterday was a gloriously sunny spring day. Actually, it was like a summer day. It was 77 degrees (25 degrees C). I was taking my daily walk in a different neighborhood than usual. A light breeze carried the scent of lilac, bearded iris, and wisteria. At times, I could see the mountains and the sea. At one point, I passed a man working in his yard. I greeted him, “Beautiful day.” He looked at me, smiled broadly, raised his palms toward the Heavens and exclaimed, “This. Is. Seattle.” I replied, “Yes, the city at its very best.”

It is gray today and considerably cooler. I am wearing long sleeves and walked from my car wearing my waterproof and hooded trench coat.

This. Is. Seattle.

The statement is as true today as it was yesterday. And yes, I am using the weather as a metaphor.

And yes, you are no doubt familiar with this metaphor.

My daughter is a very bright and sensitive teen. She is as cynical as Hell with liberal doses of wit. Just yesterday, she responded to friend of mine’s sincere compliment, “Aren’t teenagers GREAT!?!, ” with “No. All we do is complain about you guys ruining the economy and being close-minded.”

To her, the negative aspects of life are more real, at least from an intellectual standpoint. I was the same way at her age; it is part of growing up, realizing that the world is complex and largely uncontrollable. That part of reality sucks.

But it is part, not the whole. I come back to this metaphor time and time again as well as to just the thought that almost no situation is all good or all bad. A lot of my blog posts are about this very topic, staying positive, but realistic. Staying in balance.

I almost didn’t write this post because I thought that the theme was too much of a cliche. Then I realized that there are things that never get old like saying, “I love you” or giving someone appreciation, or even TALKING ABOUT THE WEATHER. Those are actions that tie us to our loved ones and to our communities as a whole.

I repeat these thoughts, the importance of seeing both the positive and negative, the good and the bad, the painful and the joyful, because they tie me to my own mental health. My life is not going to be about pink ribbons. But it’s also not going to be a black out of light. If there’s a flower to to look at, I am going to do my best to see it. If there a need for compassion, I will do my best to give it. If there’s a loss, I will do my best to grieve it.

This.

Is.

Life.