A few days before the new year I wrote a blog where I talked about how making resolutions only leads me to further feelings of failure and defeat so instead this year I decided I would try to write down one small simplified goal or daily intention each day in my newly purchased 2021 daily planner instead
Well we may only be 5 days into the new year so far but I’ve decided to give myself bragging rights today because I have kept a promise and followed through on that promise to myself every day since the new year began.
These simplified goals and intentions may seem like no big deal for some or “not good enough” to others or even super silly but for someone like me, these baby steps are a stepping stone toward a path of healing and self-love.
And hey, haven’t we always been taught that it’s the little things in life that matter the most?
Sometimes all you need is for someone to just be there, not to fix you or to take away your pain but to just simply listen with an understanding heart and without judgment.
Sometimes the greatest gift you can give someone is an empathetic ear to lift you up.
Sometimes when we let others share their hurt without any interruption can bring so much comfort.
Sometimes just knowing that beneath all your hurt someone is listening can help you feel less alone.
Sometimes if we just allow someone to be there for us in silence shows how much they care.
There couldn’t have been a more perfect book for me to end this year with. And now all that is left to do is eat every last slice of cake, making sure we leave no crumbs behind.
I stopped making New Year’s Resolutions a long time ago because if there is one thing I have come to learn while in the throes of my mental illness it’s that by setting big goals at the start of any new year will only further exasperate my feelings of failure and defeat.
But I’m a planner and I have always tried to fight off the need to ensure that every part of my life is organized to a tee except that when I do find myself veering off course my OCD, my Depression and my Anxiety will set me back for days on end which only leads me to those further feelings of defeat and failure.
Over the last many years the only daily planner I’ve used to organize my goals has been the calendar in my phone but those daily or sometimes hourly notifications that pop up as simple reminders or good intentions have become all too overwhelming for me and can often be quite triggering at times.
So as the new year nears I have decided to try a different approach to help keep many of those triggers at bay. Several times a day when I receive one of those notifications on my phone I look at it like you would a deer in your headlights and then I find myself quickly deleting it or moving it to some future date. So for now my plan is to begin the new year off by writing down simplified goals each day and my daily intentions instead of typing them into my phone.
This I am hoping will help to alleviate my need to search for them because they will be more readily visible to me and I won’t be able to delete or move them about so easily either. I also won’t be so easily distracted by a ping on my phone that can trigger a sense of hopelessness in me and instead I can choose when I am mentally able to open up my planner for the day.
I do try and set small, simplified goals or intentions for myself each day but I’m finding myself with less and less motivation to tackle much of anything right now.
My headspace is filled with an abundance of clutter; I’m sleeping less and less, drinking and smoking more and more and unable to complete so many of even the tiniest of intentions which is why I plan to use the brightest and most colorful markers to fill in my new daily planner and I plan to do so with the greatest of intentions. And even if some days all I can tackle from my daily planner is maybe taking a warm bubble bath then at least I will know that I did so with great intention.
What do you use to write down your day to day plans/goals?
With a year like no other almost behind us, how have your goals simplified and what do you hope to fill your 2021 daily planner with most?
Today I feel like I’m toast, burnt toast to be exact.
Some days I can pull myself together long enough to eat the damn piece of toast, some days I need to smother it with a thick layer of strawberry jam in order to cover up my pain and overwhelm, some days I try really hard to scrape away the black charcoal on my toast with a butter knife to show the world my true self and then there are days like today when all I want to do is throw away the piece of burnt toast in the waste bin because if truth be told, it feels too hopeless to even try and salvage it.
Last night I watched a movie on Amazon Prime called “Brittany Runs A Marathon”. My family has started rating the movies we watch lately by how much mom cries during them (especially the ending) which isn’t really a fair assessment to be honest because I cry while watching just about anything these days. But if we go with their rating system (maybe instead of Rotten Tomatoes we use Salty Teardrops?) this one was as close to a 10 as they come.
The movie is based on a true story (which usually ups the ante right there) about an overweight woman who feels dissatisfied with pretty much everything in her life and soon gets a wake up call from her doctor when he reveals to her that she doesn’t need Adderall like she hoped but instead needs to lose 50 pounds as her physical health had started to become unhinged too. And even though being the “fat girl” sidekick was always her safety net (or so she thought) she decides to take her doctor’s advice and eventually leads Brittany to take up running, eat healthier and stop using drugs and alcohol to numb her pain.
The movie is about so much more than a weightloss journey though and runs much, much deeper than that. It was an inspiring, heartwarming, super funny, thought provoking and very, very relatable journey to me in so many ways even if I’ve never run a day in my life (or ever had the desire to!).
The storyline brought with it lots of important life lessons (and plenty of stereotypes too), all of which resonated with my own journey through life. It was an emotional journey and one that proves just how hard it can be to fall in love with yourself. It taught us the importance of body positivity, learning to love the body we’re in and self-acceptance. It taught us about the hard work and difficult steps it takes toward achieving our dreams while continuously focusing on small yet attainable goals no matter what. It also showed us that it is perfectly okay to accept help from others, to never judge a book by its cover and that it’s more than okay to walk away from toxic relationships in our life that no longer serve us or who can’t see our worth.
I wrote a blog a couple of years ago (see link below) where I opened up about how I struggled with both Anorexia and Bulimia in my late teens and early 20’s. But truth be told my eating disorder has never truly left me and it continues still to this day to be a constant struggle in my life.
My self-hate is very strong-willed and even more stubborn. It has stopped me in my tracks many times over from believing in my dreams and achieving many of my goals. It very often stops me from loving myself or accepting help from others. My self-hate has also blinded me from seeing through some very toxic relationships over the years as well and learning to accept and love my body has been as torturous as learning how to love my mind except there is no where to hide from your body.
As most of you know who follow my journey regularly I love walking and hiking and way back at the start of the Pandemic in March I began walking several miles every day and hiking on weekends as much as possible (#summerofrich). I even started exercising a bit from home as well and it felt empowering but as the weather began to change over the last few weeks I have basically stopped exercising all together and it has drastically increased those feelings of self-hate and brought with it many of the danger signs that accompany an eating disorder.
I also have a very poor relationship with food itself which has most likely stemmed from several childhood traumas surrounding food (see blog below) and it seems to have created a lifetime struggle with food and self-worth which is something that I am overwhelmingly conscious of around my children as I never want them to have the same toxic relationship with food as I do. I just want them to love who they are from the inside out.
Spoiler Alert: Brittany eventually runs a marathon (it is the title of the movie), the mother of all marathons no less. But the movie is not about how she reached the finish line of the New York City marathon (fun fact: they actually filmed the marathon scenes during the 2017 event!), it was about her incredible transformation (both physically and mentally) toward loving herself and kicking that “fat girl” sidekick to the curb that allowed her to get there. It was about how she kept tying up the laces of her running shoes, tripping over them from time to time as they came undone and learning to tie them back up again every time she fell down while running just one block at a time of the congested and mean streets of New York City and letting the people in her life who saw her worth cheer her on from the sidelines.
I loved watching Brittany’s journey toward finding self-love. She deserves to wear that medal around her neck, not for the weight that she lost but for running all those miles toward her own self-truth, without compromise.
Maybe one day I will be able to run that same marathon too?
It was one year ago today when I made my very first ever appearance on a National Television Morning Talk Show. It felt like a dream come true for me, but as soon as it was all over I collapsed from mental exhaustion.
Leading up to that day I had been working my ass off nonstop for several months ensuring that my new children’s book got into as many hands as I possibly could imagine but when the show ended and I arrived home, I felt a sense of defeat and decided that I needed to take a step back from my whirlwind tour.
I had intended it to be a short break, just until the new year which by now was only a few weeks away and just long enough to get my mojo back but what came next noone could have ever predicted because way before the Pandemic hit in mid March my life took several other unforeseen turns.
New Year’s Day 2020 came quickly and as I had promised myself a few weeks earlier I began organizing my calendar for some new and exciting upcoming events on my “book tour” and I also began looking at what other avenues I wanted to explore in the coming months ahead as well. But no sooner was it than 24 hours later when I found myself in bed for the better part of January with a concussion caused by numerous fainting episodes on the early morning hours of January 2nd.
I soon became further defeated and on a downward spiral as I lay in bed feeling dizzy, exhausted and headachy, cancelling events and trying to reschedule others, most of which never ended up taking place at all because, well we all know the answer to that.
Many more unforeseen events and unfortunate mishaps continued to unfold in my life over the course of last winter and before I knew it I had not fulfilled one promise to myself from the previous December day when I decided I needed to take that short break.
But who knew what was waiting for us just around the corner right at the exact moment I was finally ready to get back to where I had left off all those months earlier, who could have possibly known? Noone could because noone truly knows what the future holds.
But there we all were, together, facing so much uncertainty and unknown and nowadays we spend so much of our time fearful of the “not knowing” and as someone who lives her life with a major depressive disorder and severe anxiety I’m not quite sure if the not knowing what the future holds (depression) is worse than always trying to predict it (anxiety).
My illness has caused me to look to my past with many regrets and when I look to my future it feels very purposeless and uncertain. But I know I’m not alone in my feelings of an uncertain future especially after what we and the rest of the world have been living through for the last nine months or longer.
2020 has become the year that nobody could have ever predicted and has crippled so many people with fear and uncertainty of what their future’s hold and has also created a sense of powerlessness in so many more, even those amongst us who may have once enjoyed a lifestyle of risk taking or living unpredictable lives.
This year has sucked big time for all of us. If I hadn’t already before 2020 hit, I have for certain by now lost so much faith in the kind of hopeful future that lies in wait for me and I am pretty certain that I have felt defeated more times than I think is humanly possible this year alone but as the year quickly comes to a close I can’t help but take note of the many valuable life lessons we have (hopefully) all learned as well.
Some of my thoughts:
Our relationships with family and friends must take precedence over all else
We are never to busy to make time for the people and things that matter the most to us and we must stop using it as an excuse
Taking care of our health needs to be a top priority
We CAN actually live without many of the “things” we once thought we “must” have in our lives in order to live a more fulfilling life
Saving money for a “rainy day” is imperative
It’s okay to take time to stop and smell the roses
Our definition of who is an essential worker has changed. Honour and respect them all equally as they continue to tirelessly (and with very little pay for some) take great pride in and care for all of us each and every single day
We are all human beings and we all deserve to be treated as equals
CAMH (which is Canada’s leading hospital in Mental Health, Suicide Prevention and Research) has developed a new campaign that focuses on today by giving hope for a better tomorrow.
I feel like I am knee deep in quicksand today and I find myself drawn in by this video. Hearing the words “Not Suicide. Not Today.” repeated over and over again may not seem like much to some people but for someone like myself who is struggling to breathe right now as the quicksand pushes me deeper below the surface and my thoughts of suicide keep urging me to end my life, listening to these words are serving as a gentle reminder that maybe it’s not actually my life I wish to end but just my life in this very moment instead.
“Not Today” means not now and “when we all say ‘Not Today’ together, it’s easier to say it when we’re alone.”
I’ve attached the video below for anyone else who may need to hear these words today too 🤗❤
Thank you for always supporting my journey and reminding me “Not Today”.
Yesterday I was feeling a bit under the weather and BEYOND exhausted. All I wanted to do was sleep but as physically exhausted as I felt all day I knew that as soon as I were to get into bed that all bets would be off. So I decided to take something to help me fall asleep because I needed to sleep BEYOND badly.
I’ve been prescribed sleeping pills in the past but like all other medications I’ve tried they really never worked properly and within days I would build up a tolerance to them anyways. This did eventually lead me to start abusing some of my prescribed meds, taking upwards of 8 to 10 pills a day, just so I could feel numb and maybe get a few solid hours of sleep at night.
Well that didn’t end well at all on so many levels and once it was discovered that I had been stashing away certain medications in my home Rich began having to hide all my prescriptions and distributing them to me every day and I guess it’s a good thing that I have also since been flagged from being prescribed certain medications all together unless under proper supervision.
But that’s okay because they never really helped much anyways and so nowadays when I do take something for sleep I go for more of a natural remedy instead. I fight with myself to take anything most nights because truthfully they don’t really help much either.
It’s almost 4 am as I am writing this and I should be fast asleep since I was so BEYOND physically exhausted yesterday and I did take a sleep aid before I got into bed but my case in point, sleep remedies don’t work for me.
Ok maybe I’m lying a bit because after taking something to help me fall asleep last night I did in fact fall asleep within an hour of taking it and I got a solid 1 hour of sleep!!! 1 whole glorious hour of sleep! And then I woke up and have been up since before 11 pm, which is about the same time most of you reading this were just about to doze off to dreamland for the night!
I’m starting to think that sleep is kinda, sorta beyond overrated anyways? 😢😢😢
YouAreEnough 
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