As we get ready for the warmer weather, I looked back on some of my photos, and found four that really speak to summer time:
What are your summer go-to’s?
I made a small graphic thinking about what helps me focus when things get to be too much.
I began to think about where I begin my mental health awareness. How do I become self-aware and how do I keep on track and moving forward?
These four squares came to me in simple ways. They are both simple and entrenched in my way of being. They are my touchstones. They are not necessarily yours. You will find your own touchstones and ways to cope with whatever comes up daily.
In a similar vein, I’d like to share an exercise that I did on a recent retreat with the Dominican Sisters. The main topic was time and how time affects our priorities and ways we can use to change them and shift where we spend our time. While this retreat wasn’t geared towards mental health and awareness of mental health, time plays an important role in how we perceive our mental health challenges and push and pull until we’re being intentional with our time and our mental health, emphasis on health.
Below I explain the exercise, and hope to come back to it in a couple of weeks. I plan to think my own choices and perhaps begin again.
Continue readingAs I mengtioned on Thursday, May is Mental Health Awareness Month. There’s also May Day, and May the Fourth, and Cinco de Mayo. Plus college graduations, Memorial Day, and the “official” start of summer.
Today is three spcial days that should be acknowleged and observed, each with their own reverences.
Continue reading
Today is the first of May. It is the first day of Mental Health Awareness Month.
Mental Health Awareness Month has several facets. The two that I find most helpful are
In other words, assess yourself, share your struggles, challenges, and successes and be there for others in explaining mental health, coping, and the ongoing recovery. Be there for yourself and for others. Some days you can only do one of those, and that’s okay.
Beginning on Monday, I will be publishing a weekly column called Mental Health Monday. I have done many of these throughout the previous several years. Search through the tags to see older but still valuable approaches and coping tools. Sometimes, we forget and rereading and reestablishing some of them again is a valuable tool.
Reassessment in recovery, I find, is ongoing.
None of the strategies and coping tools that I post this month are intended to suggest you forego medication alternatives. I take medication – both prescription and supplemental, all with my doctor’s input and approval. I wouldn’t be here without medication. Don’t let anyone shame you for taking care of yourself. Just like getting from point A to point B, there are many different roads to travel. Very rarely is there just one way, and one (or more) of them is the right way for you. Changing direction is okay, too.
Recognizing a better way and adapting.
Just as a counter has a take a penny, leave a penny dish, in mental health, take a strategy, leave a strategy.
We are all here to help each other.
The tag “mental health monday” is your dish to choose from.
I’ve always thought of my depression, anxiety, and mental health struggles as a journey – a period of recovery with no tangible cure; only moving forward in my mental health, my mental space, my mental recovery.
This is my path and sometimes we cross paths. This is us crossing paths and offering insight, motivation, and ways to keep getting through.
Today, in 1777, two years after Paul Revere’s famous ride, at age 16, Sybil Ludington rode all night on horseback, forty miles to rally militiamen after the Brits burned down Danbury, Connecticut. Whether the ride occurred has been in question since about 1956. The accounts of the ride come from the Ludington family, possibly in an effort to promote tourism.
Last week in talking about Revere, I asked who will warn us this time? I linked to the Alt National Park Service, an invaluable source for what is going on in this administration – clarifications, corrections and call outs of the lies and falsehoods perpetuated since before Election Day.
In reference to Sybil Ludington, I have the same questions. On social media we’re told of the women, so many women who are standing up to the fascism, and yet, when a woman warns us in 1777, we dismiss it as ‘maybe it didn’t really happen.’ And to be honest, I don’t really know if it happened. I do know that when women accomplish anything there is someone there to take the credit, to claim the discovery, and to shush the little lady. We dismissed Kamala Harris, the Vice President for four years, Senator before that. We dismissed Hillary Clinton, First Lady for eight years, Secretary of State for four, Senator before that, and accomplished lawyer before that. At what point, will women be taken at face value, and I don’t mean at pretty face value.
How can the women save us if we won’t listen to or acknowledge them?
Abigail Adams wrote to her husband John, “Don’t forget the ladies.” We are not only forgotten but ignored, blamed, and pushed aside while (many, too many) men crush this country under crippling debt, ruin families, arrest women for biological functions, and allow them to die for those same reasons. We are not less than. We don’t need to apologize for existing.
If we were treated as we should be, as equality requires us to be, we wouldn’t need to constantly put ourselves in the stories to uplift us. We would already be there, and there wouldn’t be a question as to whether it is a true story or a folktale.
On this World Book Day, I have three that I want to highly recommend to you:
What three books would you receommend for this World Book Day?
Today marks Yom HaShoah, which is Holocaust Remembrance Day for the more than Six Million Jews who were murdered by the Nazis in World War II.
As we remember them and keep their descendants in our prayers, this year (as last) we also remember the hostages who still remain imprisoned in Gaza. May they finally come home.
Yesterday was the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere’s Ride warning of the British Army approaching. He was forty years old. The Sons of Liberty put lights in Boston’s Old North Church: one if by land, two if by sea.
Yesterday, projected on the front of the Old North Church was the following warning:
One if by land, Two if by D.C.
There were two lights.
When I first wrote this post, I asked who will warn us this time?
We have that answer.
However, who have we ignored the warnings of?
There are two lights in the church window.
Actually, when crazy people online were talking about a birthday party for a fascist, or some other such nonsense, another person on threads said April 18th is David Tennant’s birthday, and I said we should celebrate that, he agreed, and so we are.
Right now.
In honor of this momentous holiday, listen to these two podcasts; at’s how I will be celebrating today!
David Tennant Does a Podcast with…Georgia Tennant
Where There’s a Will, there’s a Wake
Also coming or out there:
Macbeth on Marquee TV
The Thursday Murder Club
Rivals on Hulu
Good Omens 3
Broadchurch
Staged
And, of course, Doctor Who!
Griffins and Ginger Snaps 