Photo by Manuel Sardo on Unsplash
2024 really sucked.
I lost my Mother towards the end of March, and my wife lost her Father in late November. And my adult children lost the two grandparents that they had grown up with. Even if my Mom’s passing was expected, after all, she was 96, going on 97. Thinking about it happening is different than it actually happening.
My grandson and new granddaughter kept me grounded this past year.
In 2025, I will have a second granddaughter, making three grandchildren. Although I have never expressed my wish for grandchildren to any of my children or their spouses, I am excited that it is happening. They will never know how grateful I am to be included in their lives.
Going into the new year, I am ready to start life anew.
Yet, from a housekeeping focus, I am not sure how prepared I am for the new year. While I have addressed the bigger issues, I am repeatedly ignoring all of the small stuff. And the saying is that I shouldn’t sweat the small stuff.
Or is it that I shouldn’t sweat the big stuff?
Either way, I should not be sweating. Sweating things is fretting about things. I cannot control what happens in situations. If it snows or if it does not snow, it is correct. I cannot make one type of weather occur just as I cannot make another type.
But what I can control is my attitude towards the event.
That is becoming a big hurdle for me. As the new year begins, I have an opportunity to begin anew. I can choose to be any way I want to be. Yet, I know that I will not change so much that I am unrecognizable. I am not sure that I could see myself doing that. But then, I never thought I would turn and face my depression either.
It only took me 63 years to decide that my depression was no longer going to be in charge.
And this decision is clearly still a work in progress. I have collected many tools that are helping me understand my relationship with my depression. I have a Peer Advocate that, even 5 ½ years later, still calls me once a week to check in.
Heck, I have even started talk therapy again.
This time, I feel like I am discovering things about myself that I either didn’t know, or had ignored. I am so thankful to have found her. I can tell her anything and she responds without judgement. She tugs at things I am thinking and brings them back around. This type of focus is helping me better understand myself.
And I am better able to see what I want.
This is a new concept. I thought I was doing this my entire life, but I was usually more concerned about other’s feelings or perhaps it’s their perceptions of my actions. Either way, this focus never gave me a chance to think about what I might want or need. So, once again, I am back to figuring out what I want.
As the new year begins, I am left deciding if I want a new life, or the life I have created for myself.
Either way, life is going to happen. Now I am thinking of John Lennon and his quote:
“Life is what happens to you while you are making other plans.”
What do I want to see happen in the future? Am I focusing on the right things? Can I get myself to be something other than OK? These are questions I mull over when I sit down to write. And these are questions I consider. It feels like I am going in circles once again when I can’t get to sleep at night.
I even think about these questions randomly, at very odd times.
Like when I am in the middle of doing laundry, all of a sudden, my brain wants to know what’s causing me to feel OK. It really is asking me to think about and stake out a plan for myself moving forward. And knowing what that is is the question. But instead, I am kicking the can down the road.
My therapist pointed out, for instance, that there is a reason why I haven’t pursued a change in my medication.
In the back of my mind, there are extenuating circumstances that I am not talking about. I am thinking about the why behind the decision not to address my OK’ ness. And now I am seeing how my laptop is still getting over my accidentally pushing it off the kitchen counter recently. At first, it appeared to have taken the drop in stride. While I noticed that the top, the screen portion, was a bit looser, everything else seemed okay.
Now, my keys are getting stuck, and the text is moving around as I attempt to correct spelling errors.
I am now quite lost and am not even sure what I was attempting to think about. I will stop here and come back to this later. Perhaps my laptop will be more forgiving. I am not ready to purchase a new one or to research and set up possible repairs.
