This is taken from my journal I write in everyday.  Today I sat at Madison Square Park drinking my iced coffee, looking around at all the people, today is Mother’s Day.

 I woke up remembering it. I always remember the day, I just choose to ignore it. Well not ignore it, I just choose to be preoccupied doing anything I can to not stop moving.  I don’t want to sit and think about Mother’s Day, not today. I understand how I feel and will feel if I sit alone and just think today.  I would think about all the breakfasts I used to have, the Mother’s Day traditions that I didn’t appreciate until they were gone or in jeopardy of being lost. I don’t wanna think about life after my father passed and what that did to Mother’s Day either. To me, my Mother’s Day experiences over the past 8 years have been impacted by cancer and sickness. Today I don’t wanna think about cancer, sickness or Mother’s Day. I don’t wanna think about how my mom must have felt after my dad passed away and she was alone on her first Mothers Day.  How she felt while she was sick during Mothers Day. I don’t wanna think or remember today. I am not even sure I remember what I remember at times until it’s too late.  I will take the pain the rest of the 364 days a year, but not this one day, please.

 I woke up today, each move I do feels forced, like I’m trying too hard to be normal.  I used to try and celebrate my dad’s life on Father’s Day or his birthday. Now, with time my old rituals have subsided. What I used to do was eat his favorite ice cream, coffee and watch movies he loved like The Warriors and Porky’s. Now I have made new traditions for these modern days, I have picked up a dying flame and breathed new life into what I do. I used to l lose control and went crazy for a little.  Finding comfort in getting drunk and being absent minded while telling myself ‘I am fine, I just want to drink today.’ I could tell myself any reason that I was drinking that day.  I could try and convince myself of anything, but I could never pull the wool over my eyes, I was too in touch with my soul for that.

 Today though. I’m different. I feel like I have control on how I will make my day play out. I have now learned that even though I can’t control life, I can control how I react to life. I know it’s Mother’s Day, I choose to ignore it because I don’t miss her more one day than others, I miss her the same everyday. But what does change is the pain.  It is more real on these days. I am sitting at the park right now, watching people with their moms.  Seeing this makes me wanna hug her and kiss her cheek. On days like today, what I don’t have is thrown in my face and brings out the pain.  It’s days like today I feel like I have a scar. Today my scar throbs with a certain ache and soreness. I used to try and make sense of why and what happened to my parents and my life. I used to look for answers after they were gone. You never stop grieving and missing, all that’s changed is now I have made seeking those answers into a part of me, part of my identity. Now I can sit while I miss my mom, miss my dad, miss my grandma and grandpa not asking why they had to go but what I am supposed to do with their passing? I sit now knowing that I had more moments than many people and for that I will be forever grateful.  I know my mom is with me. I miss my mom everyday, I am able to move on because there was so much love in my life that I know if she was here physically what I would be doing today. Being with her. 

Happy Mother’s Day mom.  I love you. XoX

~Happy reading

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What’s your worth?  Your value? Do you feel like you represent the person you want to be?  Or do you feel like you can offer more than you are giving? Do you act one way with one person, and another way around others?  Are you true to you?

I feel people preserve and protect their desire and ambition in life, with few going after them to the fullest. Some yearn to take full advantage of their passion and drive, however many, if given a chance split and run away. Why?

Is this because you have thought about your passion for so long, you feel like it is unattainable? Are you more comfortable just letting your desire spin and weave a life of it’s own inside your mind?  Where is your mind, away in LaLa land where you now reside? Are you scared to listen to you and follow your desire?  Are you nervous what others would think?  What your loved ones would say?  Are you not sure how to start because you can only see the end goal? Are you so scared of not being successful at your dream you allow that fear to control you?

Many people spend energy burying their passion under the smokescreen of disorder in life.  They may discuss their passion, never achieving it, happy to just pretend they are living the dream.  Lie to friends, family, strangers and eventually lie so much you start to believe. I know some people that chose to follow their heart because they want to show their parents what they capable of before anything happens to them.  I know others who have been handed a difficult journey in life, but they prove that anything is possible by living their dreams.  Maybe a death motivates you, death is a solid motivator to make you want to grab life.  Perhaps a close medical scare of a loved one or yourself makes you see the world from a different view. Your priorities do change along with your perception on how life should go with each action, move and encounter you have, no matter how big or small.

Drive and passion is that little voice talking to you inside your head.  A beacon always going off, but not always acknowledged. The beacon grows in luminosity if you stray to far from the path in life.  Do you still avoid it and let it just live in your head?  Or let the beacon make your path clear?  There is a good marker to understand what your passion in life is. If you feel guilt or stress doing other activities in life that are not your passion, you get this gut feeling that you should be doing something different, spending your time wisely in a beneficial way. Not out everyday avoiding reality, hanging with friends or working in a go nowhere job.

What drives you is your ambition, what you know you are capable of.  If you don’t answer or pay it any mind, it will grow into its own entity, a strong one that has the power of making you feel even more lost and feeling of having no worth or value.  During stressful times I find it is easy to berate yourself, I used to berate myself calling myself a loser, failure, deadbeat if I would sit around not living up to my potential.  It was so hard to actually get up and do something for myself.  It is easier to watch movies and play video games all day then do something that will benefit myself in the long haul.

What drives you, your desire and passion can case jealousy in you. You are jealous of others who grab and harness that drive and follow their dreams.  When others around you discover their calling, you get mad. Thinking they don’t deserve what ever it is it may be. Their passion and success makes you cringe with envy, leaving you thinking you deserve what they just got.  Weather it be a promotion, money, a partner for life.

You must pave your own path, put yourself out there, be noisy yet humble.  Get noticed, but do so in a kind way that you are comfortable with, make just enough noise to let people know you are there.  To do this, you have to know yourself.  Stand toe to toe with you.  Learning you makes the difference between people walking over you and you standing up for you.  You will also understand, you may not be able to control moments in your life, but you can control how you react.  It is easy to let life trample over your desires, using death, lose, sickness as a scapegoat to having no drive or remaining lost.  Somewhere in the search for understanding yourself and reaching for your desires you will seamlessly exchange eternal regret for eternal happiness without even noticing.

To not follow your desires takes too much energy.  That static between the world you forced yourself to create versus the world you want to create eventually will wear you out. It will all come to a boil inside you and create such an explosion that makes you become jaded.  Believing life is unfair and working against you.

What drives you also drives you away. If you acknowledge your passion and seek it out you will enter a new realm you didn’t know existed. A realm of discovering and impressing yourself.  It takes one moment, just ten minutes to sit, write and make a game plan towards your dreams. When you start to make movement, you feel proud.  However, many times after that one time, you push it away, thinking you will go back to it.  When you don’t continue your progress, it eats away at you, now even more since you got a taste.  You get hard on yourself,  berating yourself again.  You promise yourself you will set aside time to work, you never do.  It takes one distraction to put your passion on the backburner again. Take ten minutes that you spend stalking people on Facebook and do something that will actually help you.

Don’t let life keep making excuses and drive you away from your passion.  Life goes by fast, 10 years ago I was 17. 17!  That blows my mind.  I still feel 17, I get taken back every time I see myself in the mirror, I feel 17, but I don’t look 17.  The best part about following your passion, besides learning you is you get to explore what you passions passion is.  It’s a neverending growing and learning experience.

I want you to write your passion, your dream if you had unlimited resources now! 

Next write one step you can take towards that goal now.

Creation is in the eye of you.  You have to see yourself live with yourself, only you have to know about you, what you want.  After you learn you, it’s a ripple effect, you gain more confidence, more insight not just in your soul but all around you.  You are more aware and that awareness makes life more precious.  Knowing you makes you assertive and now you can handle life around you. Knowing who you are, how you will react in certain situations feels awesome.

How to motivate yourself to find that drive?  It’s hard, it takes time, the first few years after grieving or a moment of awakening you will notice a change in you. Your tolerance for people and situations change, you discover you can take on more stress, using your past experiences as a new baseline to work off of.  You are not superman, just a superyou. On the other hand, you still break under stress, you may overreact at times, be up all night thinking about life. Nighttime, after all is the worse time, can never shut your mind off.  I know, I am struggling with a week long bout of insomnia as I write.

Motivate yourself by doing what your doing, collecting data on life, on you, on yourself in life.  You are already doing what you need to do to motivate yourself, just need to be aware of it.  Open yourself up.  Once you break down that wall of you, you can rebuild it how you want and it’s beautiful.  The choice is yours.

Mr. Ambition, tear down that wall.

~Happy reading

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Why love?

Why eat expensive when you will get full eating cheap?

Why buy top of the line products?

Why does pain battle beauty?

At least one of the questions above for many will end, be taken away, consumed or broken.  When it ends or is taken away before you want, you feel lost and confused. You will ask yourself how did this happen? You will start to analyze your past actions and thoughts that lead to the end of what you are currently going through.  Why did I eat at that high-end restaurant? I’m broke now! Buy those expensive jeans only to grow out of them or have them shrink or spill on them?   I guess you did it because you could or wanted to, easy enough.

Why do you seek championship and love? You know if it ends or doesn’t work out, what will happen.  You will be hurt, jaded, and skeptical of similar future relationships, moments and experiences. Having something than losing it changes your focus on what you use to have and what you no longer have.  You look back and you view the relationship or moment in your head while you had it, telling yourself if only you knew when it would of ended, you would have been different, or so you would like to think.

Is it better to have and lost than not have it at all?  I am sure you have heard that question, mainly in regards to love.  Is it better to have and lost love than love at all? If you don’t have it, whatever ‘it’ is, do you crave it more? Dream of it? Place a higher value upon it until you discover when you get it, it’s not what you hoped?  Or is it everything you always wanted?

There are two variables that I notice in people.  They are designed to dwell on loses and place a value on their expectations and uncertainty until they reach it. Once they reach that goal, they aim their attention on another goal. Which is not to say it’s wrong.  Reading this you may think I will advocate living in a cave, with a blindfold on, living off a pile of stale bread to eat. Void of any fun, entertainment or interaction with people.  That is not true, I just find the idea of human nature funny and interesting. I find the concept of pain versus beauty in life fascinating and would like you to start thinking about it more about your daily life.

Grieving is about finding the beauty from the pain. It hurts because the beauty you knew is altered, gone or out of sight. Sometimes it’s completely out of your hands too, beauty just disappeared in front of you. Leaving you not only now short on beauty and something you loved, but wondering why? There is still beauty all around you; people near you still see it, experience it.  Just because you have pain, doesn’t mean the cashier at Dunkin Donuts has pain, or the same pain as you. All that has changed is your perception of your surroundings and mindset.  You will find yourself seeking answers to the location of the beauty you once knew while battling through the pain. And there is no timeframe or one beautiful moment that will snap you out of this painful spunk you’re in. It will take time, power and a level of intimacy and openness in you to find endless beauty through the pain.  Once you see beauty in one way, it may not be as strong as the first time you saw or felt it.

Think of when you first hear a song, it sounds magical, hits you in a place emotionally where you can relate to the song.  You’re convinced that song was made just for you, right now at this moment in your life. Next time you hear it, the impact of the song is not as intense, it doesn’t hit you in the same places as it did the first time.  Instead of now listening to the song you think of the moment you were in or the person you were with when you heard it.  Now whenever you hear the song you think of that moment or person rather how the song made you feel.  Is it still a beautiful song? Yes, but now with it comes more. You associate that song with a part of you, is it a beautiful moment?  A painful moment?  Do you smile?  Do you skip the song? Or try to push through and see if, now you feel differently?

If you are grieving, for a loss, stressful situation or even after a hard break up, search for no one answer but search for who you are, what makes you tick. Search for answers in you, not in the outside world.  I assure you all things will come to a resolve. You will be at a point where you can wake up or go to bed without the pain on your mind. A helpful tool in finding you is organizing your pain by writing down how you feel.  Express yourself; your thoughts are roaming around your mind.  Get them out of you and see them, feel them.

I love, because love feels good and makes me happy, I accept the unalienable truth that there is pain in love and I understand and accept.  I eat expensive food on occasion because I like to spoil my taste buds, I understand one day I may not be able to eat nice meals, so I want to get my quota in now. I appreciate the gifts of beauty and pain inlife I have been given, I want to appreciate the gifts of life that I can take and appreciate that they are there for the taking.  I want you to seek the beauty from the pain, it may take decades, years, months, weeks, days, minutes, but there is always beauty where there is pain, and there is there always pain when there is beauty.

If we spent as much energy trying to get others to understand you, we all would see the beauty in everybody and wouldn’t have to say much at all.

~Happy reading

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I suck

I fail at life

I will never…

You are right, you will never…not if you don’t think in a different mindset rather than a negative mindset.  Being negative brings you down and keeps you down.  I feel thinking in a negative mindset is common for a good deal of people because they are comfortable being there.  We have a habit of retreating back to thinking in negative manner when life gets hard or overwhelming.  We understand negative thinking. We understand how we will act and react to our environment while being negative. We may not enjoy being cynical or pessimistic, but we understand it.  It’s our safety zone, we understand being negative.

Your perception is the difference between a moment or situation being a negative moment/situation/feeling or bad moment/situation/feeling.  When moments are bad, you have the ability to see both the good and the bad sides of the moment.  I feel being able to stand back and view a moment as bad is healthy.

Here are two examples of thinking in terms of a situation being BAD vs NEGATIVE

Running out of gas. BAD thinking

Yes it sucks running out of gas, but minus the inconvenience of running out of gas, nothing horrible has happened. You get gas, your day is not ruined, you still have all your limbs and yourself.  That’s Good.

Running out of gas.  thinking in a negative mindset.

‘Of course this would happen to me’ ‘Can I never catch a break’  ‘My life sucks’  I think you see the direction I’m heading.

You are busy wasting energy on a moment in life that doesn’t require that much energy.  You are busy grouping gas in with all the other static in life that you think about. You react the same to running out of gas as you would a major life-altering event.  Sure running out of gas does suck, it’s BAD, and that’s all.

Parent diagnosed with an illness. BAD thinking

You may not be able to wrap your head around this grey area as swiftly as the gas example.  This will take some discipline on your end.  This requires a certain level of awareness of yourself and your surroundings. From this experience of a loved one being sick you learn about life’s hardships, challenges and yourself.  You discover you and you transform.  You are going through a life changing moment that will shape you forever and that’s good.

Parent diagnosed with an illness. thinking in a negative mindset.

‘I am ruined’  ‘I can’t handle this’ ‘My life sucks’  Being negative controls you, makes you blind to reality around you.  Rather than stepping back and observing what is happening, you stack the world against you, making it harder and unimaginable to get out of this moment.

By viewing life through negative eyes you are not even giving yourself a chance to tackle an issue with an open mind.  You cop out and use words that reinforce your behavior and mindset.  As I had mentioned, being negative is easy, because it is a common escape.  It hides our vulnerability and hides our fears that we can’t yet face, or so you think.

While coping and grieving it is easy to load up on negative words and thoughts that enable you to live in a world you have created. It’s a fabricated world you have crafted, built to protect yourself from a changing life you knew, weather you know it or not.  As I keep saying, a good deal of people understand how they react and think while being negative. You create a world built on strong words such as ‘I suck’ ‘I am a failure.’  Words that you say enough times you believe what you say.

Loving yourself and knowing yourself is not a short easy path that leads to nirvana or fulfillment instantly. It is hard, confusing and overwhelming   WHIch is why I feel people are comfortable living in a negative mindset, they understand it and create what they want to hear.  Being open and objective, you have to de-construct yourself, learn about yourself, figure yourself out. You have to learn how to live in other peoples shoes and view a moment, a situation or choice with an open mind.  You have to look at all of humanity and find a balance between the world you know and the real world.   While taking in all of life you have to balance and understand what works for you and makes you, you.

While my father was sick I would spend days, weeks, months being negative.  I would use that mindset to empower myself, feeling entitled to run away from all real feelings.  This negative mindset was also fueled by my jealousy of others living what I deemed a ‘normal life.’ Jealous of what ‘I couldn’t have’  ‘would never have.’  Truth is I was blind to my surroundings.  I allowed my negative view I adopted towards the world to control me. I would allow myself to explode at people, be miserable, be so busy running and hiding I would go out of my way to do everything but be objective and see life for what it is. I had allowed myself to live in a world of pessimism and self pity. While at the same time I would have moments I where I would be hard on my self wondering why am I being so negative? It was a long, hard road to not just being objective but believing what I saw and felt.

Looking objectively at life, especially when it does seem to favor others at times is hard to do.  It can be annoying even, trying to always see both sides of a situation.  But I do promise, if you start to look at the world in terms of good and bad, rather than positive and negative, that will be a positive change, which is good.  You will slowly realize that you will be able to digest hard moments in life with more ease than previously.  I used this to get through my moms experience going through chemo for 4 years. I started to learn about this negative verus bad by writing what I felt.  Which is what I want you to do.  Buy a notebook that fits in your back pocket and write down your feelings and thoughts.  It will open you up to yourself more and make you more aware of you.  I promise.

Don’t let others make choices for you, make the choice to make them for yourself

~Happy reading

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What is an anniversary? It’s a date that remembers an event that happened in the past.  It is a cause for celebration. It is a cause for remembrance.  It is a cause that is filled with both rejoicing and mourning. March 26 was the one-year anniversary of my mothers passing.  Just like my father’s anniversaries before her, this one-year marker is the hardest anniversary to swallow.  A year may sound long but it is not.  The loss is still fresh, real and painful  The first anniversary is a reminder that this experience is real. Your loved one is no longer here, physically at least. At the one-year marker you are still digesting life without your loved one.  During that year you still try to call their phone or seek their advice and want to hear form them.  You are still overcoming your routine of having them around in your everyday life.  Before the time of the 1st anniversary you can still count back and think that only a few months ago you could have touched them or heard their voice.

The first year is the hardest anniversary.  The first year you can still count the months your loved one has passed. At the one year mark you tip the scale, speaking in terms of years versus months to how long ago they passed.  It is a scary transition because no matter how hard you fight you can’t stop the calendar from moving forward.  You look back and evaluate your life, think of the past in terms of months. For example it’s been 4 months since my loved one passed.  You can’t believe in 8 more months it will be a year.  Those months seem far away. Feels like you won’t ever reach that marker, a star just out of your grasp.  On occasion you will get lost in a daydream about your future. That’s when the reality of your loss starts to sink in.  When you think ahead and realize when you look to the future, one thing will be a guarantee, your loved one will not be there in your life, physically at least.

The first year is a pain in your heart.  It takes many months, years, for you to actually digest this jarring reality and realize this is your life.

During the first year there are many highs and lows. Ups and downs, sleepless nights and nights that turn into days where all you do is sleep. This is your own personal journey. Only you can understand what you are feeling, so only you can decide what you need to do to be healthy.

As you approach the one-year mark you may hear such ugly remarks like:

‘Move on’

‘It’s been a year, that’s long enough’

‘You are still sad?’

‘Everything happens for reason’

(The list can go on and on)

Many times these ‘words of advice’ come from people close to you. People who don’t understand or share your level of pain.   You start applying pressure on yourself to move on.  Convince yourself you are damaged, broken or grieving incorrectly on account that  you still feel sad, cry and all others appear to have moved on.  You yell at yourself to move on, get over it already. Tell yourself grieving is ruining your day, your mood, everything about you.  You thought when your loved one passed a year ago you would have moved on by now.  You thought a year later you would be have worked past your sadness.  But you didn’t understand the pains of grief and how 6 months feels like 2 weeks.  You have to listen to you, in fact after the one-year mark you have to start listening to yourself more now.  At the one-year mark is when the world moves on.  The world doesn’t forgot, it remembers, however the day is just like an ordinary day for others. It is painful for you to remember because the loss is on your mind and shaped your life.

Anniversary’s are funny, it’s a moment to remember all the moments, all the memories.  I recall my fathers one year anniversary, that day was one of my hardest I can remember.  I had finally gained enough courage to look at pictures of him.  For lack of a better word looking at those pictures crippled me, temporally of course.  Those pictures made me miss all that I couldn’t have, I went back to  feeling like I did during the first few months after he passed away.    I was worried this sadness was going to be my life, I expected to be on this road forever.  I want you to know there is no timeframe to grieving.  You have to do you, do what you feel inside yourself.  Don’t absorb other people’s energy and feel like you have to ‘move on.’  You will discover through time how much you have moved forward.  I promise you this, you will not feel hurt or pain or lost your whole life.  You will be healthy, as long as you love and listen to you.

You feel pain after losing a loved one, don’t go looking for more pain

~Happy Readings

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In life you are always looking for options, chances and choices. So what happens when you feel like you have none? Feel like you are in a corner? You may sit and think. Sometimes over think while other times think fast and rash. You do what you have to do to get out of that corner! Sometimes an option, chance or choice all suck, you just have to hope to find the least sucky one that will get you out of the corner. Anybody else backed into the same corner would react differently. It’s different because they apply their own past experiences to solve the situation and get out. It is your perception that makes you able to think the way you do. Own your experiences, they are what make you, you.

While grieving you will grow in all areas of life. Your whole mentality will transform. You will be you, but an almost redux you. You are a little noisier and stand up for yourself more. You aren’t as shy, you become a more confident you. As you should, you are going through or went through a giant life change. These are all feelings and part of grieving.

You will have many moments in life were you react without thinking, both at right and wrong times. However, you learn about your feelings by trail and error. Through the errors and trials you will get to understand how you will react. That feeling feels damn good. It’s then when you realize you know who you are. . Your body and mind take over and handle the situation. Your loved ones sickness or passing is a battle scar, but one you should be proud of. It takes a long time to understand the whole transformation you will go through. You will notice slow subtle shifts in your attitude. For example your daily mundane choirs will come with less effort. Or you will stick up for your self more and have less tolerance for bullying or being taken advantage of. This is because your priorities in life change and you view the world around you differently. Grieving changes your perception, grieving makes you aware of who you are.

I describe what you just read as being an impassable giant puddle of water outside on the sidewalk.

When you reach a giant puddle of water in your path with no other way around what do you do? Jump! You know how far you have to jump over the puddle because you are faced with only one option, chance or choice and you do what you had to do. You don’t think about it, stand there staring at the puddle hopeless. You know how far to leap, the pressure you need to lift off and how to land. When you break it down, leaping over a giant puddle that stands in your way is actually not that easy. A lot of mental work goes into leaping over. You do it without thinking though, you just know what to do because you have done it before. Trail and error of life experiences You learn how to react due to your past experiences with other puddles.

This is all part of getting to know you. I would like you to take 60 seconds, just one minute to think and write down ways your attitude has changed over the past 3 months. Do you understand everything you wrote down? Did you think of something different that you never really thought about before? The point of this exercise was to try to understand that you are moving forward in the grieving and coping process. Even though you may feel trapped or cornered, you are not.

Much of grieving is all about your perception, you may sit and think how life was more grand before cancer or the illness entered your life. That is only because now you are experiencing an more extreme emotional hurt. Grieving is not all bad, there are many beautiful sides. Like getting to know yourself and knowing who you are. You learn so much from an experience you become a sponge. Soak it up!

Everyday you become more you, And it’s beautiful.

~Happy reading

Surround yourself with people who respect you. This should go as an obvious statement for everybody no matter the situation.  Be around those who respect you and treat you like you treat others. That is clique but use your respect as a cornerstone for how you want to be treated.

While grieving you will become more aware of your surroundings. It may not be noticeable right away.  At first you may not be able to pinpoint what in your environment triggers what emotion.  It takes you some time to understand the long full impact of the domino effect of grieving.  You may fight off new feelings or unease, perhaps just chalking it up to you being sensitive or a weirdo now since the sickness or death.  But that’s not true.  You’re flaring of emotions is you, you responding to your body talking to you, your mind talking to you.

You become like peter parker or rather spider man when his spidey sense goes off. A beacon alerting you to near by impending trouble. The environment around you causes some challenges, especially during the early phase of grieving, right after a tragedy.  I view your environment during the early phase of grieving like you are a loose dog running around a neighborhood.  You are confused, scared, everybody thinks they know how to help catch you and everything around you can hurt you.  Of course hurt for a loose dog is physical, while your hurt is mostly emotional, which can lead to physical hurt.

Everybody in your life can upset you too.  With the people in your life you become more aware of their character.  Their outlook on life, the way they respect you, respect others. Are they around, not around, do they bring out the best side of you.  You take in their personalities, maybe not even knowing it.  You can slowly see how you act with one person or another.  You become more aware of your own actions based on other peoples actions. Pretty much everything about those you are around multiply your mood and mindset.  This is all part of getting to know yourself.  It is easy during this time to seem sensitive to comments, environments, rudeness, kindness or a million other feelings.  You are sustainable to it all. It.   Besides just understanding your surrounding in regards to people in our life we also have to be aware of  movies, TV, music and even restaurants.  Your whole environment and life you knew before grieving has altered. Many daily routines you used to do now don’t feel as welcoming or fair. Something is missing and it hurts.

I remember I once got that moment of unexpected grief while drinking a soda. The smell of the Mountain Dew I was drinking made me miss my father. It’s not because he wore Mountain Dew cologne, but when smell hit me that day it reminded me of him drinking it. As you move on through grieving it is funny to see what your mind remembers.  Smells, thoughts, conversations.

I recall I had to walk out of the movie theatre during Transformer and Ratatouille.  I can’t tell you for a million dollars what I felt that was so strong for me to leave.  There was a moment in that movie which brought up something inside of me and I knew I had to go.  I knew excatly where sticking around to try and watch the movie would get me.  Quieltly stuffing tears on the inside of my jacket. Sure I had to hear it from my friends after, busting my chops about leaving.  They kept saying “I don’t understand?” “What happened in there?”  If your job was to make everybody around you understand grieving, either grieving would be a breeze or you would drive yourself crazy.  It didn’t matter to me if my friends understood. I understood and that was all I needed.  I have to live with myself and my mind. I had learned through trail and error how I needed to react in moments of unexpected grief that benefitted me.

I have written about self-preservation before. Protecting yourself in advance from a situation or moment you know will make you feel vulnerable, sad or hurt.  Self-preservation to me is looking out for your well being.  When you pay attention to your surroundings you are listening to yourself, which is amazing.  You have the anticipation, attitude and openness to not move on in that one direction right now.  There is enough organic pain and sorrow swirling around you on a daily basis. Why go looking for hurt and pain.  I can not stress the importance of surroundings, it is all part of helping you love you and learn you.

Just because you see a bridge, that doesn’t mean you have to cross over it.

~Happy reading

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While grieving your mind is working a million miles a minute.  Sometimes you over think life,  sometimes you don’t think at all.  Sometimes you are happy, other times you are miserable. This range of emotions and confusion is so common.  You may feel have no worth. The mind acts like it’s separate from the body.  You may think one way but act another.  These emotions you feel are natural, normal and nasty.

You use words that empower you to live in a negative world.  Think your life is a diaster.  My life sucks. I’m a loser. I’m a failure. Thinking you deserve this unhappiness.  You deserved what happened to you.  You feel cursed. Think you attract trouble.  You feel like you are drowning and can never catch up in life.  You feel like you are always behind in life.  You use words that reinforce your current mood.  Words that let control your life for sometime.

You are in a slump that you think you can’t get out of.  You can get out of it though. You have a voice, you have a mind, you have the courage. You have been through a courageous event not everybody has been through.

At times it can be easy to let the mind work against you.  Turn on you. You can become disgusted with yourself.  Think you are damaged.

I used to think ‘why am I even alive?  I add no purpose to life.’

I struggled with thinking of a reason to live somedays.  The pains of life got under my skin and itched so bad I wanted to stop the itching forever.

But forever is a long time, cliché and true.  Thinking you are no good, you add no value is not true.  Sometimes in life you may be behind.  Sometimes you may be ahead.  The race is long and life can turn around on a pinhead. Thinking poisonous thoughts pollutes your mind, it pollutes your relationships, your body, every avenue you can think. You spend your energy and focus worrying/over-thinking past situations. Getting fueled by your anger over circumstances you can’t control anymore.  Intersections in your life you have gone through.  Instead of thinking about what you have to offer and experience   You make your environment around you so toxic you can’t escape. You may try reality through drugs or drinking which only clouds your senses more than anger.  When you become sober, life is harder to grasp.

I know about this side of grieving because I have been to this side of grieving.  I have been so disappointed with me I cried in the mirror looking at myself.  To pull yourself out when you are so deep into your mind with negative thoughts seems impossible. I want you to know that it does get better and is possible.  Life is what you make of it.  It is not always a bed of roses, but if life were a bed of roses, roses would mean nothing because they would be everywhere.

You are building yourself, learning yourself. Taking in life.  These moments of misery are helping you to become a revamped you. A beautiful you.  Experiencing such pain makes you unique, interesting and awesome. As I have said, all experiences in life you take bits and pieces from.  From your sorrows and pain you can find you.

You can take life as it comes at you.  Taking life as it comes at you allows you to live in the now while using the past as a reminder on what you don’t want for the future. Ask yourself don’t you want to find out something about you. Discover something new. Know your limits and push them in a positive healthy way. A healthy way to help you help yourself is to write what you feel.  See the words, feel the words.  Sometimes you just need to vent and listen to you.  Sit back and just think about life, not dwell on life.

You are brave, you are scared.  You are fierce, You are gentle.  You are you, You are you.

~Happy reading