happiness

Things That Make Me Happy

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I’ve decided that it is necessary for me to list out whatever I can think of that makes me happy. This serves two purposes. One, it forces me to think about the things that make me happy, which in turn makes me even more happy. Two, I can come back to it when I inevitably have a hard time again and hopefully it’ll help bring me back. So, here goes.

Creating things and expanding my mind. I’ve realized before, but been reminded very recently, that creating things, having any sort of artistic expression, is very important to me. Whether it’s knitting, writing anything, whether it’s fiction or not, drawing, coloring (yes, I said coloring), playing music, singing music, only slightly related, listening to music and discovering new music…all of those things make me so happy. Specifically, though, I have to make sure I keep knitting nearby. For some reason, making something awesome with two sticks and some yarn is the best stress reliever and unhappiness banisher that I have in my arsenal of things that get rid of negative feelings. I also love reading and learning things. I think playing tabletop games can somehow fit in here, too. We play a Pathfinder campaign with some friends almost every Friday, and it is so much fun to get to play a fantasy character and go on crazy adventures. I also enjoy board games, but roleplaying games are my favorite tabletop games.

Feeling like I’m making any difference to anyone. It’s been important to me for a long time to help whoever I can in whatever capacity I can. I do my best on a daily basis to at least create a positive experience for everyone I come into contact with. I’m always very friendly, especially to people in service jobs, because I’ve been there, and I know how important nice people are. I’ve been really searching for a way to do more recently. In college, Bobby and I helped get the Oakland University chapter of Habitat for Humanity off the ground, and it was amazing. The year that Jimmy Carter was here for the week of building homes, we worked on a home for a man and his daughter in Pontiac. It was a beautiful experience. People who receive Habitat homes are required to put in a certain amount of what they call ‘sweat equity’ by helping build their home. Working alongside this man, and seeing his joy and his happy tears, and hearing the gratitude in his voice when he received his keys on the last day was magical and very moving. I really long to be a part of having that sort of impact again someday.

My lovely little family, my big family and friends. I need to be surrounded with people I care about. I do not do well alone, and I can sometimes get a little freaked out when I’m with mostly people I don’t know. Don’t get me wrong, most of the time, I’m a social butterfly. However, if I’m having an off day, I get super awkward. I love having my love, my beautiful son, and my two crazy corgis to come home to every evening. I don’t go out much because I cherish the time I have with my quirky little family. My friends are also very important to me, and it’s important to me to spend time with them, or for the far away ones, time to talk with them. I get very attached to my friends, and I tend to get hurt pretty easily if I feel like I’m being distanced. This is both bad and good. I leave myself wide open to get hurt constantly, but I am also a very loyal and caring friend. That’s just my nature. I’ve been hurt a handful of times, but I can’t change me, so I just work with it. My family, both the one I was born with and the one I married into, are very important. My grandparents will likely get their own post sometime in the future, but I owe a lot of who I am to them. They saved me when I had no one else and raised me as their own child in a very loving and supportive home.

Being good at my job and doing good work. This one plagues me a lot, because it is so hard to gauge. On the one hand, I know I’m good at what I do, and that I deserve to be where I am. On the other hand, I could be so much better and I feel like I’m constantly struggling to keep up. I’m working on things to help lessen the struggling feeling. Good feedback from my boss and him having the belief that I can do more things helps. Having friends who I work with that are very encouraging also helps, even though I tend to think they’re just saying those things because they’re my friends. I know that’s not the case, it’s just hard not to default to that. Having those friends also give me advice on how I can improve and how I can better keep up with current trends is also helpful. TJ sent me a link on a webdev subreddit today that struck home and really resonated with me. It was mostly the comments. Here it is: https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/3kb0rl/the_struggle_of_being_a_developer_with_a_wife_and/

Being active and fit, and eating good food. Movement, health, and good food are all so incredibly important. I feel so much better when I’m active and eating right. I’m starting to try to take a larger role in dinners because it’s not fair for it to all be on Bobby like it has been. Bobby and I have started working with a personal trainer, and it has been awesome. We’ve started riding our bikes again, too, which is great. We went for another ride tonight after dinner, it was a perfect evening for it. I just need to try to fit more running in. I either need to get my lazy butt out of bed earlier in the morning, or I need to get comfortable running after dark. Those are really my only options during the week. I also need to make sure I’m adding yoga back in. Yoga keeps me a happy girl, too. Something about it, maybe the moving meditation aspect, focusing on my breathing, focusing on something other than a zillion different thoughts and worries bouncing around in my head, the stretching and simultaneous strengthening of my muscles, the feeling of peacefulness, I think it’s really all of those things.

The outdoors. I love being outside, whether I’m active or just sitting under a nice shady tree on a sunny day. I love hiking, biking, and camping. I love swimming. I love walking. One thing I miss a lot is that Bobby and I used to take nightly walks together after dark. It’s a thing that we’ve always enjoyed doing together, since back in the days when we both lived with our parents and extended our time together by going on walks before he took me home or I had to drive home. There’s something magical about wandering around at night, talking about whatever is on your mind with your favorite person. We don’t get to do that too much anymore, only on nights when Lukas is spending the night somewhere else, but we’ll have those nights again in the future. One of my favorite things that Bobby and I have done that involved being outside after dark was during the meteor shower this year. We brought our hammock out behind our garage, snuggled up together, and stared up at the sky where the meteors were supposed to be the most visible. We saw four meteors shoot across the sky, the last of which shot across our full field of vision. It was beautiful, and amazing, and our sweet little boy was sleeping right inside the house.

Bobby. I could go on and on forever about him. He’s the most caring, supportive, funny, smart, handsome, awesome dude and I am so incredibly lucky I locked that down. He knows when to push me to do something, and when to back off. He knows me better than anyone, including me. He is always right there to comfort me when I’m having a bad time. We have fun together. He’s my partner in every aspect of our lives. He is such an amazing daddy to our little boy. We have a ridiculous amount of things in common, mostly probably because he made me try new stuff a lot along the way and I liked most of it. He helped me climb out of my shell when we were first dating because I was painfully shy. One of the things he had to challenge me to do one time was to say hello to every person we passed on a walk. That was so difficult for me, and I’m so glad that he pushed me to do it. I wouldn’t be outgoing now if it weren’t for him. He thinks I’m pretty whether I just woke up, just finished a crazy workout, or I actually put effort into my appearance. We have the same ridiculous, silly sense of humor. I love that I can be completely weird around him and with him. I love that we dance together in our kitchen. I love that we’re active together, that we have adventures together, that we experience the beauty all around us together. I don’t even know what else to say, he’s just wonderful.

Lukas. I never knew how much I could really love another person until I became a mama to my beautiful little boy. He’s so smart, sweet, and adventurous, and he’s only 3! I enjoy most moments with him, let’s be real, he’s not always sunshine and rainbows, but more often than not, he’s a joy. I just love watching him learn and do things. This is going to sound super weird, but even the way he eats is adorable. I love that he makes up his own words to songs already. He loves being read to. He loves dancing and singing. He’s getting pretty good at being polite. He ran up to me in the dining room today and was so incredibly excited to show me the fort he made with a giant box and one of his blankets against the couch. He plays lightsaber duels with us. He’s snuggly, when he wants to be, which is a lot. He scares the hell out of me with how daring he is. He’s a little ball of energy that I wish I could harness. He has big beautiful eyes and pretty curly hair. He’s a little peanut. He’s very charismatic, he charms most people he’s around. He’s full of wonder and wants to figure out how everything works. He loves building things. He’s obsessed with trains, trucks, airplanes, and space ships. He enjoys drawing and coloring. He tries so hard to hug the dogs, but they usually want nothing to do with that. There is a lot more, but he’s just absolutely wonderful.

Our dogs. They drive me bonkers sometimes, but they’re awesome. We have had Barkley since spring of 2009 when he was just a 3 month old pup. He’s so much fun and such a loyal, good pup. We added Pancho to our pack this past April, he’s 7. He’s an absolutely wonderful dog. He’s crazy cuddly, he and Barkley get along swimmingly 95% of the time. I love seeing them play together, and cuddle together. Since Pancho joined our family, he’s become a lot healthier and seems so much happier. He wasn’t abused by his old family, but he was neglected, and I don’t understand why. He’s such a sweet dog. I’m so thankful that we went with our gut and went against our brains on getting him. We didn’t think we were ready for another dog, and maybe we weren’t, but he’s so fantastic. Both dogs are great with Lukas, and are so loving and patient. They fight sometimes, and it feels like they’re right under our feet all the time, but they’re so worth the little bit of frustration because they’re awesome dogs.

I’m getting lazy now, kudos if you’re still reading, but I want to fit some of the other random things in here. I love gaming in pretty much every form. There’s something about relieving some stress by logging into my game and shooting some aliens. I’ve also been playing a game called Child of Light recently. It is such a beautiful, interesting game with so many elements. It has a great story, beautiful art, puzzles, and turn-based combat, which I’ve never done before. I love punky colored hair, I’m about to switch mine from purple to orange and pink soon. I’m loving exploring these fun colors. Piercings, I like the few that I have. I don’t know if I’ll get more or not, maybe. I also love tattoos, I’ve been obsessed with getting more since I got the one I have 5 years ago, and I love admiring other peoples’ body artwork. I have a few large pieces I’m planning out. I have no idea when I’ll get them, but they’ll happen eventually. Adventures also make me happy, whether they’re big ‘going on a trip’ adventures, or small ‘the brewery we wanted to go to had a power outage and we need to decide on other plans’ adventures. Oh, also, hugs. Hugs are pretty much one of my favorite things. I’m a hugger. If I make a new awesome friend and they seem open to it, I’ll hug them. I hug my friends, I hug my family, I hug my dogs. I just really love hugs. A lot.

So…that’s a list. I might be forgetting some stuff, I probably am, but the point is that there are a lot of things that make me happy, and a lot of things and people I have to be thankful for. This is here as a reminder of those things.

Monday…Not So Bad After All

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This post may seem odd on the heels of yesterday’s post, but bear in mind that yesterday’s post took me days to write, and to decide if I was actually going to write about the things that I did. It’s important for at least myself for me to write about those things, to have a record and see if I notice a pattern, or even to just be reminded if it happens again, that there is a light at the end of the tunnel and that I’ll be okay.

Today was pretty great overall. It was a frustrating day at work because bug fixing for Internet Explorer is just awful. Note to front end devs, flexbox is super freaking awesome…if the only IE you have to worry about is 10 and up. It works swimmingly on Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. It’s a brilliant tool, but since we still need to support IE9 on most projects, it’s more complicated since that browser doesn’t support it. Oddly enough, though, I ended the day in a decent mood. The frustration didn’t really upset me like it has been. It also makes me feel good that my boss is confident that I can get better with programming to help with those projects coming up that don’t necessarily have a front end aspect. I will always prefer front end development, but I do get really excited when I do a programming piece and make it work, especially if there is a bit of a struggle and then a victory. I just really like solving puzzles, and both back and front end development are like weird puzzles that can be hard to solve.

Lukas was absolutely awesome this afternoon, all afternoon. He was in a very happy, fun, hilarious mood, and he didn’t end up in time out once. It was fantastic. I love his funny little personality so much. When I told him he couldn’t do or have something, and offered an alternative, he was very receptive. We took him to the gym to play while we worked out with our trainer, he loves it there. When I gave him a shower this evening, he was happy and decided he wanted to play with the water and dance and sing.

Mine and Bobby’s work out with our trainer this evening was great! It was only our second session, but the experience has been nothing but positive already. He started the session by telling us that we both look a little more lean than last week, which is awesome since we both managed to make it to the gym three times last week. We decided recently that we just need to try harder to be in shape, for nothing more than to just have some energy left after work at the end of the day to play with our rambunctious, daredevil 3 year old boy. Being thin and having muscle tone are just really great byproducts of working out and having the energy to be active. I have a half marathon to run in a month and a half, and I’m slightly terrified at how it’s going to go. Anyway, the workout was really awesome, he had more of an idea of our abilities this time and gave us some fun full body workouts to do during this session, and he gave us a routine to do throughout the week. He also recommended doing a morning fasted run on the weekend, since that’s an excellent fat burner. I used to only run first thing in the morning, but I just haven’t wanted to get up early enough. If I find I’m able to wake up earlier, I might start doing that again. It’s dark by the time Lukas is in bed now, and even though I live in a very safe, well-lit area, I’m not all about running by myself at night. Something about it just really freaks me out.

I got to chat with one of my best friends about her life in Boston tonight. I know she’s super happy, and that she’s doing great work at a job that she loves, but I miss her. Talking to her tonight was really nice, and made me realize I need to make time to go see her in Boston, it sounds lovely.

I kind of wonder if the negative wave of emotions I was feeling last week was a result of my hormones going nuts after starting a brand new workout routine. I haven’t weight trained in a long time, and I was way more active last week than I have been in a long time. I do have a history of struggling with negative emotions that I have a hard time pulling out of, but it’s very possible that it’s just a temporary chemical surge that caused it. I say that because I’m feeling awesome tonight, and just yesterday morning I was struggling with feeling very upset out of nowhere about nothing in particular. It also hit me really hard out of nowhere for seemingly no particular reason. Thankfully, it happens way less frequently than it used to, it’s been quite a while since it’s been that bad.

It could honestly be a multitude of things that helped. Writing about it may have helped, not only to get the negative stuff out, but also writing about how good I have it. Sometimes I have to remind myself that when there’s nothing in particular causing my sadness and self-confidence issues, I just need to look around at my family, my wonderful and supportive husband, my amazing little boy, my dogs, my job that I love, and my friends, and realize that things are good. I don’t know if this works for everyone, I’ve never been diagnosed with anything and I’ve never taken any medication for it, I just know that I get uncontrollably sad and negative sometimes, and it can take a little while to dig myself out of the pit of despair, so to speak. Bobby’s never-ending support always helps, he’s able to help me be objective, even when I don’t want to be. Maybe my body has balanced out since I worked out regularly last week. I really don’t know. I’m just glad that the terrible feeling I was having has receded, and that I had a pretty awesome start to the week.

Small Victories

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Today was a day for small victories, as the title implies. Small victories are important, though. Sure, the big ones are fantastic and exhilarating. However, it’s the small ones that keep you going when you’re frustrated, or when you’re just about to give up. I’d say they’re almost more important, because they help keep you going, and help you realize that yes, you really can do it.

The first victory, and most important one to me at the moment, was that I was working on a project at work today that had three boxes that were structured exactly the same, just with different information and colors. I had originally written out the code to be very repetitive. I should add here that I develop in WordPress primarily, and almost exclusively at the moment (yes, I will build my own theme for this site eventually). So, when I structure a page in a site, I’m pulling info from the admin onto the page (very simple explanation). I originally wrote out the PHP/HTML to be repetitive instead of looping it, because it was easier and I was already going over quote for the page as it was. Friday, I just couldn’t deal with my bad code anymore and decided to take the time to re-write it as a loop. Now, that sounds simple. For someone who doesn’t do programming as their primary job, I’m a front end developer, even though I got started in programming, it was a big frickin’ deal that I got it all working today. I had to pull info from multiple fields in three separate admin boxes, build some arrays, loop them out into three separate boxes, and each box also has unique links that are added in the admin, and there can be as many or as few as the user wants. So, I was pulling a lot of information, and doing a loop within a loop. I got really close to finishing it Friday, but I needed to get home, so I put the rest off to this morning. I got really close to giving up, because I was having a bit of trouble figuring the inner loop since I was accessing arrays within arrays inside of a loop within a loop. But, I did it!! I frickin’ did it, and it was glorious. I needed that.

Why did I need that? Because I’ve been feeling imposter syndrome hardcore lately, and let me tell you, it is an absolutely terrible feeling, and I think I really upset the people I care about when I just refuse to believe when they tell me I don’t suck. Imagine, if you haven’t experienced it, being at your job that you really enjoy and really care about, and feeling like you suck at it, that you somehow tricked your way into your job, that your boss will find out how terrible you are and fire you, and that you will never be good at this thing that you enjoy doing so much. It’s awful, and I don’t wish it on anyone. So, this is why I say that small victories are so important. I so desperately needed that little victory this morning, and it was enough to make me feel so great that I shouted with excitement, did a little happy dance, and made my friend come look at it because I was so proud of myself. That moment is what I need to remember next time I’m feeling so incredibly down about my abilities.

On an only somewhat unrelated note, Bobby and I had our very first session with our personal trainer today. It was hard, but it was really good. I did assisted pull-ups (I’ve never been able to do any pull-ups, the goal is to eventually not need to use a machine), and even though I had terrible form and had to modify my last 2 sets, I did 3 sets of 10 push-ups. I’ve never had any significant upper body strength. Again, even though it wasn’t great, it was a small victory. It made me realize that eventually, I won’t need to do modified push-ups, and that I can work up to unassisted pull-ups. It gave me goals. I finally got to do some kettle bell workouts, and some different weighted squats. My legs are jelly, but I feel happy. It’ll feel so great to be back in shape again. I’m a small person, and I can run and cycle, but I need to build muscle to truly be in shape. Our trainer is so awesome that he’s helping us adjust our diets and told us we can text him whenever we have questions. I have a great feeling about this step in our journey.

We’ve capped the night with a delicious dinner, time with our wonderful, hilarious child, a bit of housework, and some relaxing time. I hope I get some time to knit tonight, but I’d settle for some reading.

I guess, in closing, take the small victories and internalize them, because they’re an important part of your happiness. Tell people about them, write about them, remember them when you’re having a bad day. I’m not typically great at it, but I’m going to try to take my own advice here, because I think it’s one thing that will help battle the days that I’m frustrated, or down, or just feeling like I can’t win. The truth is, I can win, you can win, we all just have to remember that on the bad days.