Good morning! It’s Monday again. Doesn’t it feel like Monday are always here? Seems like every seven days or so we have another one. Jeez…
But today we’re finding something to be happy about!
It’s been a rough week around here. I’m feeling stressed and anxious and downright grumpy.
But this week, the husband and I get to have some time by ourselves.
I’ve been anxious about a very impromptu trip to Memphis, but the closer it gets, the more excited I get.
Thursday we head to the birthplace of Rock & Roll. And even though I hate Elvis and don’t eat meat on bones, I’m pretty sure I’m going to love it there.
We’ll head home late Friday and then on Saturday, one of my best friends gets married in North Georgia. We get to dress up and have fun with old friends!
Now that’s something to be happy about this week, right?
************************** What’s your Happy?
Don’t think you have one? Look harder. Something will make you smile today.
Clear blue skies and the green of the trees made so sharp in the sunlight.
Curling up in my room with a good book.
Listening to my dad and step-mum when they come to visit, and seeing how happy they are.
Seeing my sister for the first time in months and being so proud of the amazing woman she’s becoming.
The silk-like feel of my cat’s fur.
Putting my ear to the ribs of my other cat when he’s purring and hearing it thunder around like an engine.
The first page of a new sketchbook – utterly terrifying, but thrilling too!
Crawling into my bed when I’m so tired I can barely keep my eyes open.
Seeing an old couple holding hands.
My mother telling me she’s proud of me and cherishing that she can say that to me now, when all we used to do was fight.
A refreshing, cold drink on a hot day. The type that has so much condensation on the outside that you worry you might drop it every time you pick it up, so each sip is even more rewarding.
Feeling the cobbles under my feet as I walk down the main shopping street in my town.
Clear water and white sand. And fish. There must be fish.
Going a day in control of my eating disorder, not it controlling me.
************************** What’s your Happy?
Don’t think you have one? Look harder. Something will make you smile today.
That’s right – I know you’re reading this right now. This post is for those who come here to read stories, but haven’t submitted their own… yet.
(Before you start thinking, “this girl is nonsense, just let me read in peace,” hear me out, okay?)
When I first stumbled on to the Band Back Together site, I had massive steel walls up. Sharing anything that made me vulnerable was a HUGE no-no.
The devil on my shoulder told me that The Band was everything I didn’t deserve – supportive, honest people talking about REAL shit without fear. That stupid devil told me I had nothing to offer; no one could possibly relate to me. (Needless to say, those negative messages ran through all aspects of my life, not just about submitting a story here.)
So, I became a silent lurker.
Every single post led me to believe that I, in fact, was not alone. Life deals us all some horrendous, ugly crap.
Finally, I shoved that devil off my shoulder and decided to submit something.
The first moment I pressed submit, my heart fluttered with fear. Fear that I’d done something horribly wrong.
But you can probably figure out the rest of the story – nothing went wrong. In fact, it went truly, unbelievably RIGHT.
The Band told me I am brave, worthy of love, and not alone – three things that are incredibly hard, but important, to hear. In order to knock that devil off my shoulder for good, I needed to read those comments that were a direct response to writing I submitted.
As that devil lost his power, I had the urge to write about absolutely everything that was eating me up inside because I knew The Band would be there for me with unconditional support, hope, and virtual hugs. And, damn it feels so good to have that for the first time in my life.
Maybe you’re reading this right now and think:
–No one can relate to what I’m going through;
–My story isn’t worth reading; and/or
–I am not a good writer.
STOP. IT. RIGHT. NOW. All of those thoughts went through my mind, and let me tell you, NONE of it is true. That devil is trying to trick you, and you gotta FIGHT BACK.
You are 110% worth becoming part of The Band. It might be hard writing your first submission – in fact, it SHOULD be scary because you’re probably writing about something that you rarely talk about. But trust me: THIS is the place to do it. You owe it to yourself.
As I’ve gotten older (read: 29 for the first time), I’ve come to realize something.
Family is what you make it. I have a fuckton of blood relatives – aunts, uncles, cousins I can’t even name or recognize on the street. This is because we don’t live anywhere close to them. I have two sisters I rarely see because we can’t always be in the same room with each other without wanting to hurt someone. And, again, we don’t live in the same state.
When I got married, I got a whole new family – Uncle Sam’s many minions. Again, we don’t all live in the same state, but we have that one thing in common: our significant other is a military member, and we deal with that in the best way we can. Some of us handle it better than others. Whatever. We’re bonded. We know. We speak our own language.
This past September (ish – I don’t remember if I got dressed unless I look down), Aunt Becky put out a call on The Twitter. She was looking for some peeps to help with behind-the-scenes here at Band Back Together.
I’ve been a long-time reader of Aunt Becky’s and read all of her posts, then jumped on the bandwagon when she started this site. I love this site. I’ve loved it from day one. I’ve read all your stories. So when AB asked for help, I thought, “Heh, how hard can that be?” So I sent her an email and said “I’M IN!” And I got a new family.
Actually, I kinda got two. I got to be a part of the amazing people who submit, and I got to be an official member of “The Brains.” (Kinda sounds like its own band!) Seeing the front-side of the site for so long, I kinda thought I’d have a hard time finding stuff to do; it seemed to run so smoothly and without many hitches.
Boy, was I (mostly) wrong.
Behind the scenes is a WHOLE ‘nother world. There are so many e-mails everyday, I almost can’t keep up. But, this is my new family. One I take with me everywhere I go. I’m waiting for the day when I’m wearing my “With the Band” t-shirt and someone gives me that knowing smile. Because they KNOW. They know what an awesome thing this site is.
I can’t speak for the other Brains, but we’ve saved lives. Mine, most especially. Both my kids are in school and when they started, I thought, “Finally! I can do whatever I want all day!” There’s only so much daytime television I can watch. The house can only be so clean (okay, I don’t clean – quit judging me). Job hunting was going nowhere. My depression was starting to rear its ugly head. I needed something to make me get out of bed in the mornings.
So now, I spend my days reading, commenting, promoting, writing, and laughing. Oh, my Brains make me laugh. And cry. It’s like a secret club that anyone can join. Because we are none of us alone. We are all connected (in the great circle of life).
And, ’cause I’m not too proud to beg, and I know Aunt Becky hates to do it, go nominate us for a Bloggie. It’s a small thing that would mean so much to our AB. ‘Cause without her, The Band wouldn’t be here.
One of the weirder phobias I have–aside of my fear of tomatoes touching my food–is that I’m terrified of fish. I don’t mean that if I see an aquarium, I’m going to break out into a cold sweat and start crying, no, even I’m not THAT insane.
But since I can remember, my parents have been taking us to tropical places–I know, poor baby, right?–and along with tropical places = snorkeling.
When I was 4 or 5, my parents bravely took us to Mexico and in a stunning fit of idiocy on their part, they left my brother and I to swim alone while they leisurely relaxed in a cliff-type thing above us. Out of sight, out of mind, I think, was the idea. Having three kids of my own, I understand the urge. But I’m still unsure what the fuck they were thinking to leave a 14 year old in charge of a 4 year old in the ocean.
Because my brother promptly ditched me to go and strut his lack of muscles in front of a couple of bikini clad babes.
I could swim, though, so I just waded into the water.
What happened next has been replayed over and over in my mind for the next 24 years.
The fish, accustomed to friendly humans who might feed them delicious treaties, swarmed me. Since I wasn’t underwater myself, I couldn’t see their beautiful swirling colorful fins. Instead, I saw a bunch of black THINGS just swarm me.
I screamed so loudly that pretty much everyone at the beach–including my lazy parents– came running. Maybe they thought I’d been half eaten by a Jaws-like shark, or perhaps I caught sight of a fat hairy dude in a Speedo. Who knows.
All that I do know is that for years after this, I had to force myself to go into the ocean, shaking and terrified, every time we went on vacation. The fear would subside the moment I was under the crystal blue water, but up until that point, I’d be silently shaking in my swimsuit.
Our last family vacation happened in 2000. My brother–recovering from a nasty divorce and full-on taking every bad feeling out on me–was 30, I was 20. My parents made the grave error of leaving us alone to share a room where we fought like it was 1999.
This is likely WHY this was our last vacation as a family.
One of the days that we were there in Cozumel, we went to some renowned beach to get some snorkeling done and generally laze about the beach. By this age, I can assure you, I wasn’t upset that my parents didn’t watch me swim. In fact, I welcomed the opportunity to get the fuck away from everyone else and have some relative solitude in the waves.
I’m a decent swimmer, so once I got past the rocks and coral at the mouth of the beach–where, of course, in my normal good gracefulness, I fell and cut the shit out of my foot–I got pretty far away from the lip of the beach where I could get in and out of the water. This beach wasn’t really full of sand, you see. It was more the coral and other stuff that will cut a bitch (like me) up.
But I relished the soft whooshing of the ocean in my ears as I snorkeled about, following a family of yellow and blue fish around and trying to forget the hysterics of the morning. My brother had called me a worthless piece of shit for the 437th time that hour and I crumpled into a pile of tears outside of our villa. The 5,000 feral cats who’d been following me about swarmed me as I cried. It was strangely comforting.
It was wonderful to feel so free. There’s something so comforting about the soft lull of the waves, the ability to be a voyeur into another world, and after my initial fear, I am always reluctant to get out of the water.
Out of nowhere, as I was admiring a particularly delightful looking puffer fish, my body caught fire. I was electrified, my body searing in pain and I began to hyperventilate.
I popped my head above water to see if I’d run into some electrified fence (I was in pain and terrified. I know how dumb that sounds now), nothing. I forced my face down under the water to see what I’d obviously run into. If it were a school of jelly fish, then I’d do well to make sure to swim AWAY from it rather than into the swarm. Still, I could see nothing.
I swam choppily back toward shore, hyperventilating and panicking, now noticing just how fucking far away I was from the beach. I looked down at my arms and legs and saw with horror that I was now a mess of criss-crossed red welts, from my legs to my arms and my chest.
Finally, after what had to be at least two hours (read: 3 minutes), I grabbed hold of a ladder and hoisted myself shakily up to the beach. I sat at the edge of the cliff-type, surveying the damage and trying to catch my breath, crying heavily. I was breathing so shallowly that I was starting to white out, and using the last bit of my common senseI crawled back away from the edge, lest I fall to my watery death below. This time, I really could have used a chaperone.
I passed out for I don’t know how long, and when I woke up, the welts had turned to bleeding blisters and I had uncontrollable goose bumps without being cold and a good case of the shakes. I was now officially fucked up.
Eventually, my mother found me and helped me back to a towel and gave me a medicinal Pina Colada. The rest of the vacation–including the following day which was a snorkeling boat cruise sort of thing–was uneventful by comparison. If that horse bucks you and all that good boo-yang, right?
—————
What’s attacked YOU, Internet whom I love beyond compare?
One of the weirder phobias I have–aside of my fear of tomatoes touching my food–is that I’m terrified of fish. I don’t mean that if I see an aquarium, I’m going to break out into a cold sweat and start crying, no, even I’m not THAT insane.