Mental Chatter

If a friend spoke to you, like you speak to yourself, how long would that friend be in your life? Do you think that self-talk can impact your day? Week? Life?

 

Most of us are in a constant state of mental chatter. This buzzing in our heads can either be positive or negative. Just like when training for a sport you are either doing it proper or improper. There is no possible to way to build your butt muscles if you are doing sit ups. No possible way avoid back paid with poor squat form. Similar, there is no possible way to build your confidence if you are focusing on the negatives.

Mental health is so important yet so underworked. We do not take care of our brains like we take care of our bodies. I have been doing physiotherapy for seven months rehabbing my knee and I have gotten no support for any of the stressors in my life this winter. I go to a chiropractor twice a week to help my hips and I don’t even check in with myself that many times in a month. The mental aspect to any sport is about 80% to 20% physical ability. So what do we do about this? Block the hard stuff out in order to cause no distractions or deal with the problem so there is none there in the first place? This same statistic should be fairly close with life success as well. Yet what do we do? We ignore our own self-talk for what? To appear normal at our Monday to Friday jobs? There are 168 hours in a week and we spend 36-40 of them at work. That leaves around 130 hours that we can do anything we want and typically we are unable to find one hour a week out of the 130 available to check in and see how we are doing.

 

It is hard though. It is hard talking about your emotions and admitting you have them. No one likes to feel sad but ever more then that I think that most of us hate the shame that comes along with negative feelings. So the natural response is to say we don’t have them. I was the Queen of this. I had myself convinced that I didn’t get sad to the point it was borderline psychotic. No movie could make me cry and no one could hurt me because I was in total control of my emotions. Then, life happened and it forces you to feel sad. Now I had no idea how to deal with this foreign emotion and I was a mess. If only I had allowed myself to feel like a normal human being then I would have been so much more equipped to handle it. I see this happening all the time. Maybe on not as large of a scale, but we are not helping ourselves and we are definitely not helping each other.

That mental chatter that we constantly have has a larger impact on who we become then any parent, sibling or friend ever could ever influence. Yet, we allow ourselves to be swallowed by self-hate and we somehow expect it to all work out. We are a population hyped up on anti-depressants because it is an easier choice then accepting who we are. I have depression, I was on meds, and I chose to go off of them and learn to cope with my disorder. Do I have days that are down and days that are up? Always. For me, I decided that my mental disorders were not going to define me. I was not going to be just another person who got stronger meds every year, I was going to teach myself how to love myself. It is hard. It is the hardest thing I have ever done. I struggle every single day with not feeling good enough for my family, for my friends and for my boyfriend. They tell me I am enough and I know they are not lying but the thing about depression and schizoaffective disorders is that even though I want to believe them, I can’t some days.

Most of us don’t want to work towards sound mental health though. We want to go to the gym to get a tiny waist and big ass so we can put it on Insta but we refuse to put the work into something that makes up 80% of our personal success (I could totally make an argument for a larger percent but I’ll stick to what I for sure know.) The external body that we hold our personalities in should not be the deciding factor if we love ourselves or not. I struggle with this but I know, most of the time, that my mind is my best characteristic. I am not loved because of my weight, my hair, or the symmetry of my face. I am loved because I am empathetic, ambitious, brave, determined, emotional, friendly, generous, independent, loyal, versatile and sassy. It has taken my years to be able to list good things about myself without immediately saying something I am poor at. I will feel nothing less than proud that I have went from being suicidal to being able to write a blog about my weaknesses AND my strengths.

However, I will also feel troubled that there are still people walking around that hate themselves. I can’t stand the thought of a human being feeling so poorly about who they are or what they can accomplish that they do not want to be here anymore. I have no idea how to help everyone, I am still trying to help myself, but I want it to change. I want to help it change. I just have no idea how to start.

Much Love,

 

Megan

Second Day Curls

Aren't second day curls the best curls? I mean really... It's like your hair is personally repaying you for all the hard work you put into this life.

"No Megan, no messy ponytail today. Today we look even more fabulous then yesterday because I refuse to lose my bounce, my twirls or my perfectly placed part, just like you refuse to lose your spirit, your passion or your sassiness."

Maybe it's ridiculous but I seriously felt my whole attitude towards this Monday change when I came to the realization that I wouldn't be looking like I rolled out of bed and directly into my car today. Okay, not maybe, it for sure is ridiculous. How could such a simple thing like this make my entire day feel less like an uphill climb? How powerful is it that my mental attitude towards today has made the entire morning fly by. My smile is brighter, my head is held higher and my dread for this upcoming, hectic, week is actually turning into a little bit of excitement to get everything on my list done.

I try to wake up and think of something I am looking forward to about my day every morning but it is so hard. It is near impossible some days for me to get out of bed with a smile knowing I won't be done my day until nine at night. My days are long. I work full time and I keep two horses fit. I feel like I have been working two full time jobs all winter which has put a damper on my passion. I have let my passion feel like a job which is something I am embarrassed by. I should wake up every morning thankful that after I get to work with an amazing group of people I get to go ride two gorgeous, powerful horses. Do I smile every time I get to see them? Of course. I also can't wait to get home and just sit down. I feel exhausted. I feel like I have been pushing myself to the absolute limit this winter and I am ready for some nice weather and a break.

That would be escaping though. I don't need to do that. I need to just remind myself every morning that life isn't all that hard. It isn't all that painful. It most definitely isn't lacking beauty. It is never a complete absence of these feelings but it also doesn't swallow us into them unless we let it. Hard things have happened to me in my life so far. Hard things have happened to the mom who almost drove me off of the road this morning. Hard things have happened to all of us. I have felt pain, physical and emotional. Who hasn't? Maybe the stranger who is taking his time to cross the road isn't doing so to annoy you personally, maybe he has that limp which acts as a constant reminder of pain he once felt. Maybe the entire universe is set out to do things for you, or against you. Maybe, we create our own luck, our own moods, our own futures. Maybe this winter wasn't so hard on me because of my long days. Maybe it was hard because I chose to look forward to the day being done, not the activities that the day consisted of.

We have to start helping ourselves. We have to stop letting other people control or take away our happiness. I have come to learn this past year that hard things happen to everyone but the people who wake up every morning and look forward to the good experiences the day will bring are the ones that appear as if they have never experienced pain. Those are the people we all need to learn from, not hate on because of their "good luck." This world is full of selfish, corrupt, hateful people. It is also full of people who genuinely want to help others, inspire others. It is full of people who will make you laugh and feel whole. These people are not lucky, they are people who work harder then anyone else to paint every single day exactly how they want it to look. They are people that experience pain but they don't try to avoid it, they sit in it, learn from it, then make a serious effort to move on and come up with a plan on what to do next.

Lucky people exist. But not in the way most of us would think. These lucky people don't wake up with perfect second day curls every morning... they plan ahead and pin them up before bed so the bounce is even stronger then the day before.

Much Love,

Megan

Change

It's crazy to think about change. About the little day to day changes we make... About the larger, working on ourselves changes... About the traumatic, would do anything to go back and do everything you could to undo that moment in time. But still, we change. We change into these people who have laugh lines from the good memories and scars from the traumatizing. 

When I woke up this morning I was expecting pain. Not just in my chest but my whole body. This week I have been a mess. I have been getting chest pains that I would compare to the start of a heart attack and I have started getting incredibly itchy to the point I have bruises on my legs. Apparently these are both stress related side affects. So, going to bed last night I was scared. I was sure I would wake up and have a real problem with my heart and have to go to the hospital, even with that thought I still slept in my regular hoodie and no pants attire. Obviously prepared for strangers to rush me away. 

I find myself okay though. It's as if this year full of "firsts" is finally over. And I made it, we all did. We all somehow pulled together and made the best of Syd's birthday... Now, love everyone and everything day. I managed to not to cry my eyes out on Fonzy's first birthday.... July 6th, three months after her passing and the day Brodie came into my life. I am going to manage this last first, in a year filled with random sensitive moments, surrounded by people who knew her and love her the exact same amount that I do. We will change together today and Syd will somehow manage to make our scars beautiful. We will let her. We will remember the pain we all felt a year ago. We will remember the tears that were cried for months past this date. We will remember the passion that drove her. The animals that fulfilled her. The giggles that only stopped bubbling out of her when she need to use her resting bitch face to her advantage. We will be thankful for the positive changes this moment of time brought us... We will still forever wish to take that moment back. 

Change is scary when it's sudden. But we must all relax into the wild waves and allow our souls to grow. You cannot fight a change like death. You cannot refuse to let the emotion swallow your whole body. You cannot fight the sadness you feel with anger. You can only cling onto loved ones for support and hope you have enough good memories to allow you to come up for air every now and then. You must change. 

I have seen all of Syd's people change. I have seen the strength we all somehow grew take over and put our differences aside, help us push our egos down and just be people. We have all changed into better versions of ourselves, softer versions, and we managed to do this because of our shared tragedy. Maybe not gracefully but we all got there. We all were taught the lessons that death brings and we were given the gifts that surly come alone when you lose someone. Such negativity is not possible without some sort of positivity to balance it out. Tami had told me over and over again "death brings gifts." I rolled my eyes behind my computer and stubbornly refused to make an effort. But I have learned that death truly does bring gifts, it humbles you, it makes your edges jaded only to slowly sand them down to the softest they have ever been. It ruins everything you think about life but it shows you the importance of loving everyone one and being the most humble version of yourself. It rips your heart a apart so you can clean out all the junk and bring in the new... Forever missing a piece with wild, curly hair, but being able to see the beauty in the most simple of things. 

My soul went through an unwanted spring cleaning last year but I am thankful that even though I... We... Lost so much good we also got rid of the bad. Every April 6th I vow to spring clean my soul. Get rid of whatever doesn't belong in order to make room for what does. I vow to always remember my best friend for the beauty, stubbornness and passion she brought into this world. I vow to be there for anyone who suffers on this day, on any day, because death taught me that we are all the same, we just suffer differently. 

So today, on the day that marks my greatest loss, I ask all of my friends to clean their souls. Today, April 6th will forever be a great reminder of what is important, raw, meaningful and what is superficial and needs to be swept away. 

Much love,

Megan