Your pulse is racing, the sounds are too loud, the lights are too bright…You feel amped up and the need to MOVE is taking over. The need to lash out, to run away, to run towards, to pound your fists against a surface or flail blindly at an unknown assailant. How do you…how can you…how…
HAve you heard this phrase?
It’s okay to not be okay.
Our society places an unhealthy burden on our reality as we perceive it. While setting peace and happiness are wonderful goals to aspire to, the reality is that most of us feel trapped in our own skins. We feel as if we are not enough. Not fast enough, pretty enough, smart enough. Not good enough.
Or, the flip side of that? We feel like we are too much. Too hard to love, too difficult to understand, too emotional for anyone to get too close. We isolate ourselves, and remove the ability of other people to get too close.
Sound familiar?
Admitting you are not okay is NOT a weakness, friend. Being honest and vulnerable takes a strength beyond any holding onto a lie can claim.
breathe. find your calm.
Oh, isn’t that so much easier said than done?
I’ll be honest with you. Sometimes, my mind can’t focus on happy thoughts. I can’t block out the noise, and the colors, and the people who constantly want more of me than I have to give. I can’t dip into a reservoir of pleasantness when my soul well is tapped dry. When I get overwhelmed and the expectations of everyone around me keep piling up until I feel as if I’ll smother under the weight of them…I am NOT okay.
…and that, my friend, is okay.
You don't have to "feel" like crafting.
How many times have you had a passing thought that you would like to do something, then immediately answer yourself with “…but I don’t feel like it”?
I am a true believer that when we are empty, when we have tapped ourselves dry, the void WILL fill itself. What do you want to have swimming in the depths? Despair? Exhaustion? Grief?
Or a satisfied little smirk that you didn’t think you had it in you to do…and yet you did it anyway?
It takes little effort to make a paper airplane. It takes less effort to draw a stick figure. It only takes a fleeting moment to craft a “special” cup of coffee, or make that quick kitchen-crafted snack. How long has it been since you drew a crooked smiley face on a napkin?
Did you realize that you can craft without doing anything at all on those days where you just CAN’T? In those moments, “crafting” a moment of silence and meditation to bring yourself back from the brink of a nervous breakdown counts, too. Crafting a beautiful moment to just allow yourself to be still may be the most stunning creation of all.
choosing your happy shouldn't be hard...but sometimes it is.
Your feedback has been priceless, friends, and we hear you.
Choosing to be happy should be easy, but it can be the hardest thing in the world to do. Trauma exists in the minds and hearts and pasts and present of so many people in our world. Physical, emotional, spiritual…the list is endless, and this isn’t the time to list specifics. Many believe that happiness isn’t a choice at all, that it is a myth simply manufactured to make us each feel insignificant in the vastness of our universe.
How you choose your happiness is up to you. I find peace when I craft–when I allow my mind to wander into creative spaces unhampered by the demands of my job, or the emotional constraints of being around the people I love. I find peace when I coordinate my chaos into making something beautiful, from a space where only unrelated and inanimate things lay. I find peace when I breathe life, and joy, and imagination into a void previously bereft of it.
our challenge to you:
You know when you hear a song on the radio and it makes you smile? The sound triggers a memory in your brain that takes you to a specific moment in time that was important to you.
Crafting can do the same thing. Make a memory and tie a craft to it. When you need to choose your happy…pull that craft out of the bag.
Who knows? It might just work.