I got a free therapy session, courtesy of a fellow caregiver. He wrote,<\/p>\n
My counselor asked me last night, “what makes you unhappy?” I was struck by that. I struggled to find something that made me unhappy. I started to blame (my ill spouse) for not taking care of herself, to justify my unhappiness. But that is exactly what she does to me, so I didn’t say that. No one can make me unhappy, that is why I struggled for an answer. After a few moments of deep reflection, and this was really hard, I reasoned that I am making myself unhappy. It’s that simple. I don’t do the things that bring me joy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I recognized myself in that.<\/p>\n
I haven’t been drawing, or working with glass, or doing abstract photography. I have spent only a little time with my herbs and only been hiking a couple times. I have been bogged down in cooking to recipes instead of cooking the way that I like, which is improvisational, just riffing off seasonal vegetables or whatever I have on hand.<\/p>\n
“No one can make me unhappy.”<\/p>\n
I keep saying that I don’t have time, or I’m tired, or there’s some other reason that doing what I enjoy just doesn’t come up in the day’s schedule. But if I’m unhappy, I will be unhealthy.<\/p>\n
So I’m going to find a\u00a0way to do at least some of what\u00a0makes me happy.<\/p>\n
Tom is trying to help. He sat down today and distributed his own pills for the week into the daily pill-minder box, and he is taking over the recording of his blood sugar numbers and making his own doctor appointments.<\/p>\n
He made himself breakfast, too.<\/p>\n
Besides getting some of my Pakistan work done, and taking Tom to therapy and driving us to the mountains for the weekend, I made time for myself.<\/p>\n
I read a chapter of a book on stress that I’d been longing to get back to. I looked at the schedule for fused glass classes and got in touch with the instructor to make up the sessions I missed this summer. I played around with some photos. I bought\u00a0a random bunch of produce to improvise with for this weekend’s meals. And I went to kickboxing class<\/a>.<\/p>\n
It’s a start.<\/p>\n
Today’s penny is a 2015, because that’s the year I got my first big wake up call about the need to do what makes me happy. Featured image is called “Discussion: Raining or Dancing?”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I got a free therapy session, courtesy of a fellow caregiver. He wrote, My counselor asked me last night, “what makes you unhappy?” I was struck by that. I struggled to find something that made me unhappy. I started to blame (my ill spouse) for not taking care of herself, to justify my unhappiness. But … read more Whatever makes you happy<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9174,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[318],"tags":[67,35,378,284,779,504,537,62,20],"class_list":["post-9172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-refraction","tag-67","tag-art","tag-cooking","tag-glass","tag-happiness","tag-recovery","tag-stress","tag-time","tag-tom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9172"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9172\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9175,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9172\/revisions\/9175"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}