Tag Archives: mindfulness

Recovering Control Freak

Posted on August 5, 2016 by Christy Barongan

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So in addition to all of the books I’m reading about God, I am also reading Rick Springfield’s memoir, Late, Late at Night. Because Rick Springfield was my first love. It’s funny, because some of my friends scoffed at how I could love someone I didn’t know, but it turns out that Rick and I (hopefully he doesn’t mind if I call him Rick) are actually very similar: we both struggled with depression since high school, have both named the part of ourselves that is always telling us that we suck. Mine is the Inner Critic. His is Darkness. So perhaps it is possible to sense the darkness in others, whether we know them well or not.

One of the ways people cope with self-hatred is to try to have control over things that they don’t actually have control over. And since this is a futile strategy, it tends to exacerbate one’s suffering.

I am intimately familiar with this strategy. My Inner Critic demands that I control every aspect of my life. That’s why I had straight A’s. Why I’ve never used drugs. Why I had to start a blog to let people know what I’m really like–because my “confessions” reveal just how imperfect I am. I’ve also tried to control other people–particularly the ones I’ve dated. I haven’t quite figured out how to stop doing that, so for now I’ve just decided not to be in a relationship at all.

One of the best things about practicing mindfulness is that it teaches me how not to listen to my Inner Critic. People don’t practice mindfulness because they’re afraid they’ll do it wrong, when in reality there is no right way. There is no particular result you’re aiming for. No specific amount of time you must be focused. I compare it to Weather on the 8’s on the Weather Channel: you’re just checking in with yourself, seeing what’s going on in there. There’s no expectation about what the dew point should be.

When you practice mindfulness, you begin to realize how much of your thoughts are not your own. Random stuff just pops into your head. You can’t stop it from happening. You begin to realize that just because you have a thought–like you suck–that doesn’t mean it’s true. It doesn’t mean that it came from you. And since it’s just one of the hundreds of thoughts that will enter your mind while you meditate, you can just observe it and let it go, just like you do with all the other thoughts.

As I begin to let go of all of the things I can’t control–which are far more numerous than I thought–I realize there is one thing I can control. I can choose my intentions. I can choose to be kind to myself, kind to others. I can choose to live mindfully, to be fully present. And when I become seduced by my Inner Critic once again, I can recommit to my intentions again.

And I have to say, I like myself a lot better this way.

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Being Present

Posted on May 16, 2016 by Christy Barongan

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Every year the student group that I advise, Active Minds, hosts a mental health panel in which students with a mental illness share their stories. A few years ago, during the Q and A portion of the program, I asked the students to say what other people can do to be helpful to someone who is in pain.

I have written often about how, in our attempts to be helpful, we say unhelpful things. We give unwanted advice. Tell people to push through. To look on the bright side. To count their blessings. Or perhaps we are so afraid that we will say the wrong thing that we say nothing at all. Pretend that we don’t see their suffering.

Occasionally students will make an appointment to ask for advice on how to help someone in pain. And the advice that I usually give is to ask the person what they can do to be helpful. But often we don’t know what will be helpful because we are so unaccustomed to caring for ourselves, to practicing self-compassion. So I was genuinely curious about what the students on the panel had to say about what they found most helpful.

All of the students essentially gave the same answer: the thing that they found the most helpful was to have someone be fully present. To listen. To let them be sad, anxious, angry, or whatever else they were feeling. So seemingly simple, yet difficult to do.

I teach clients how to practice mindfulness and self-compassion because we can’t control whether other people will be fully present, but we can always choose to be present with ourselves. And until we are able to sit with our own feelings, we cannot bear witness to other people’s pain.

Although it was not my conscious intent to use my blog for this purpose, often my posts are my attempts to practice being present with my pain. I keep a journal where I do the same thing. I read books on mindfulness and compassion. I meditate regularly. Nevertheless, when I wake up to another day of feeling anxious or depressed, or whatever crappy feeling I’m experiencing, I just want it to go away, just like everybody else.

I have started reading Wisdom and Compassion in Psychotherapy, and today’s chapter was on mindful presence. Tara Brach suggested that, whenever we are feeling something painful, we whisper to ourselves, “I consent.”

I have to admit, my first response when I read this was, what the? I consent? That’s a little more inviting than what I was going for in trying to be fully present. But it’s true that there’s this resistance that I feel in my mind and body when I don’t want to face something painful. This instinctive response to brace myself against it. And today while I was meditating I caught myself doing it and remembered to allow myself to feel the pain, and it did help.

So I’m going to try to give this strategy a shot. No matter what I’m feeling, I’m going to consent to it. Allow it to be heard and felt. I’ll let you know if anything interesting happens.

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On the Road to Enlightenment, Part 2

Posted on April 11, 2016 by Christy Barongan

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So I finished reading “Lovingkindness,” and I’ve concluded that people who dedicate their lives to meditation must not have mental illnesses. This is not to say that I did not get anything out of the book. I loved the book, and I have recommended it to several clients. It’s just that I think you have to have a certain level of mental stability to become enlightened.

When I went to this conference on trauma, Ron Siegel, another mindfulness guru, practically said the same thing. He said that you need to be fairly mentally stable to go on a silent retreat because you realize how much your mood is affected much more by random thoughts than anything that is going on in the external world. When you’re depressed and anxious, those random thoughts can be fairly persecutory, so to be left alone with them without anyone to tell you that they’re not real could be a major mental health hazard.

I’ve been feeling depressed this past week. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, because this is what happens at the end of every term. I should be used to it by now. But how do you get used to the pain? To your brain telling you all of these things that aren’t true? Every time feels like the first time. Maybe that’s why it takes so long for me to admit it’s depression. I keep thinking it’s something else. Something real. Something that might go away if only this thing happens. Or this thing. Why are these things not helping? Oh. It’s because I’m depressed and nothing helps. Nothing stops the pain.

I played tennis today and even that didn’t help. However, it was an unusually frustrating experience because it was so windy. You think you can go out there and do your thing like you always do, but no. The wind has other ideas. The wind is like, you think you have a good serve? See if you can get the ball over the net if I’m in you’re face. You’re not strong enough. I bet you thought that ball was going to be 2 feet out, didn’t you? WRONG! You lose the point. So we ended up stopping early.

I told my friend I needed to write a blog post and she said I should write one about the wind. How it can be a metaphor for something. And the wind actually is a pretty good metaphor for depression. It makes you feel like you suck. Like you don’t know how to play tennis at all. All of your strengths are stripped away from you, and no matter how hard you try to overcome it, you cannot play your game. And during that 2 hours while I was playing in the wind, that’s exactly how I felt about being depressed. I was trying to be in moment, out in the sun, spending time with my friends. I was trying to enjoy myself, be thankful, focus on nothing but the ball. All things that come natural to me when I’m not depressed. But my demons, like the wind, just kept telling me how much I sucked.

There really is so little you can do to stop the pain in the moment when you’re feeling depressed, so I tried to practice self-compassion. To be kind to myself. I ate lunch. I read old journal entries, because I find them hilarious and prophetic. I wrote in my journal. Tried to watch tennis. And then finally I took half an Ativan and took a nap. And now I’m writing a blog post. And I do feel a little better.

I guess if practicing lovingkindness and self-compassion can at least help me battle my demons, that in itself makes it worth the effort.

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I’m In Between Shoes Right Now

Posted on March 7, 2016 by Christy Barongan
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Today I woke up happy because I had a good day yesterday. My tennis team won, my other team almost won, I got to play, and a bunch of my friends went out to eat afterwards–which is always my favorite part. And even though I lost my match, I played well and we split sets. The last time I played with my partner we had a set point but we blew it, and this time we closed the set out, so this match was an improvement. My friend told me that I am always looking for the silver lining. I know some people don’t believe in small victories, but I think you’re a lot happier if you do.

I was watching this commercial the other day about these athletes who were giving this guy’s daughter advice about life. David Robinson gave her positive advice, but I can’t remember what it was. This other guy who was supposed to be some loser said, “remember–success is just failure that hasn’t happened yet.” Which I thought was freaking hilarious. That’s a good illustration of what life is like when you don’t look for the silver lining.

My tennis partner gives me a hard time because he says I’m setting my sights too low and I don’t have enough faith in myself. And it’s true that I’m happy as long as we don’t get killed, but I prefer to think of it as being easily made happy about the small things. Like hitting a good forehand, since that’s my weakest shot. Or free pie on Wednesdays.

Nevertheless, I still get that sense of foreboding joy that Brene Brown talks about in her book “Daring Greatly.” I still worry about when the other shoe will drop. Sometimes after something good happens I’ll even switch to worrying about death or bodily injury, thanks to my anxiety disorder.

I just looked up the origin of that phrase, because why would it be so terrible to drop a shoe? Apparently it has its origins in NYC. In the late 19th and early 20th century, apartments were built so that the bedrooms were on top of each other, so it was common to hear when your upstairs neighbor took their shoes off. So the phrase refers to that maddening feeling of when you’re waiting for something that is inevitably going to happen. Last night on 60 Minutes they had a feature on this guy on death row who asked to be executed as quickly as possible for that very reason; he just wanted to get it over with, even though he didn’t want to die.

Most of the time I hear people say it after something good has happened and they know this means that something bad is going to happen soon and ruin everything. However, when we are feeling down, we don’t wait for the other shoe to drop; we think we’re going to feel bad forever.

When clients express this fear, I tell them to think about both positive and negative feelings as things that ebb and flow, even if we do nothing. So it’s true that when something good happens, something bad will follow at some point. But it’s equally true that when something bad happens, something good will eventually follow. The key to happiness is to be able to savor that moment, in between shoes, even though you know that at some point you won’t be happy. This works for negative feelings, too; in this moment you may be sad, anxious, or angry, but at some point you will be happy again.

So while I know that the next post you read may well be one in which I say I’m feeling depressed or anxious, in this moment I am happy, and I’m going to let myself enjoy this moment for as long as I can.

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Just An Ordinary Day

Posted on August 14, 2015 by Christy Barongan

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Sometimes I think God tries to help me wake up with text messages. And by having to pee every hour after 6 a.m.

Even though I keep my phone on vibrate at night, I still wake up when I get a text. Am I that light of a sleeper that I can hear the buzz? Am I so happy to get a message that I can sense it in my sleep?

Whatever the reason, for me, the typical pattern in the morning is to wake up, check my phone, go to the bathroom, and go back to sleep. Repeat every hour until I finally get out of bed. Which is usually several hours later.

Even in this state between sleep and wakefulness, my inner critic is hard at work. Right before I look at my phone, it says no one gives a crap about you. Which kind of hurts my feelings. I guess it’s trying to be helpful by mentally preparing me for the disappointment of not seeing a message. As I have mentioned in several blog posts, not having anyone to check in with in the morning is one of the hardest parts of being single.

Yesterday, however, I woke up to several texts. (Take that, inner critic!) One of them was from a friend who asked me if I had gotten the paper. For people who keep up with the news on a daily basis, their first association would probably be to the newspaper. But since I am not one of those people, I had no idea what she was talking about.

Like my inner critic, my anxiety was also wide awake and coming up with catastrophic situations that this mysterious paper might be referring to. Did I mess something up? Was there a 9/11 type attack going on? Was there some kind of tennis emergency?

Luckily, she was referring to an editorial about a former NFL player who struggled with bipolar disorder but did not know it until much later in life. Whew! I mean, I felt bad that the guy had to suffer, and I was glad that he was making the public aware of the importance of funding for mental health issues, but I was also glad that the world wasn’t coming to an end.

Even in this half-asleep/half-awake state, it made me think about how much we take for granted that ordinariness can be a good thing. When something bad happens, we are acutely aware of how in a moment’s notice, our lives can be turned upside down. An illness. An accident. An affair.

I’m not trying to be morbid or anything. In fact, I was genuinely happy that, in that moment, my life was exactly the same as it had been when I had gone to bed. Ordinarily I would have felt bad about waking up at noon, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s really not that big of a deal. It was par for the course. Just an ordinary day.

Thank God for ordinary days.

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I’m Bored

Posted on August 1, 2015 by Christy Barongan

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Of all of the feelings I’ve written about, I’ve conveniently avoided describing boredom in detail. Because boredom is perhaps the hardest one of all for me to tolerate. And it’s the hardest one to write about when I’m experiencing it because I have no motivation to do anything.

I think of the way my niece Sadie says she’s bored. A fleeting feeling at a party where she’s been riding go carts, dancing, and playing with her cousins all day because, at the moment, she’s not doing anything exciting. So then she’ll ask me to play with her and she is no longer bored. Problem solved.

As a child, I experienced boredom in the same way. But as an adult, boredom has become much more sinister. It feels personal. Like I have failed at something. Like I am the only loser who is sitting here at home doing absolutely nothing while other people are getting sunshine or being productive or having fun. Which doesn’t make any sense, because I know that at some point I will be motivated to get sunshine and be productive and have fun. But in this moment, I feel trapped in this endless nothingness.

Actually, nothingness doesn’t seem to capture the intensity of how I experience boredom. It is actually some agitated state. Some less extreme hybrid of depression and anxiety combined with paralysis of will. Yes, I could go read my book. Or knit. Or call someone. Or write. Or anything, really. Except I can’t. Boredom has me in its grip, and it won’t release me.

Last week I was having lunch at the lake with some friends, and I asked one of them if she was enjoying retirement. To my surprise, she said no. She was having a hard time with the quietness of lake life. She missed the city. Missed activity and excitement. And she’s been retired for 2 years. That’s a long time to be bored. I felt bad for her, but in a way it was a relief to know that boredom feels as terrible to other people as it does to me.

I know that’s why some people are workaholics. Why some people don’t take vacations and don’t want to retire. Plus there’s a kind of pride in being stressed, even if it’s not enjoyable. It’s almost like a contest. I bet I’ve had less sleep than you! I bet I can juggle way more than you can! Whereas there is nothing to be proud of when you’re bored. No one brags about how they slept 15 hours because they had nothing better to do.

Perhaps boredom is necessary in order to feel excitement. Sort of the way ordinariness is necessary in order to experience something extraordinary. Or how paradise cannot exist without living in some place that you want to escape from. The whole yin yang thing. No one likes darkness, but without it, there can be no light.

Do you think Adam and Eve would have gotten bored in the Garden of Eden eventually, even if they hadn’t eaten from the Tree of Knowledge? Maybe they were already getting bored. Maybe they were like, it might be nice to try some different fruit for a change, just to spice things up.

Maybe boredom is inevitable, even when you live in paradise.

I’m trying to treat boredom the way I treat any other feeling. I remind myself that it’s just a feeling. Nothing to be alarmed about. Everyone experiences boredom. And it will pass eventually. You might even feel better later today.

And you know what? I do feel less bored than I was when I started this post.

Although I still might take a nap.

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What Goes Up…

Posted on June 30, 2015 by Christy Barongan

Remember how I was still riding the high from my trip to Europe in my last post? Well it’s gone now. Now it’s back to boredom, sadness, anxiety, and loneliness. Interspersed with tennis and dinner with friends, thank goodness. But still. It was nice to be free from random anxiety attacks. From my drill sergeant making up chores for me to do to make my existence seem worthwhile. From figuring out what to do on days when I was not going to have any human interaction.

I guess that’s one of the disadvantages of experiencing something so wonderful: its extraordinariness is only possible when juxtaposed next to the ordinariness of your every day life.

This weekend I had no evening plans so I decided to watch “Still Alice.” I don’t know what I was thinking. I knew it was going to be depressing. Maybe my inner critic made me watch it as a way to shame me out of my sadness: At least you don’t have Early Onset Alzheimer’s, so stop moping around! And I have to say, it was effective in putting my pain in perspective.

The whole time I watched, I was bracing myself for the agony of watching Alice’s cognitive decline. And it was painful, but it was also beautiful, in a way. I was moved by how courageous and mindful Alice was about the process of losing her memory. How determined she was to stay connected to the person she was and to the people she loved.

There is a scene where Alice gives a speech at an Alzheimer’s conference about her personal experience with the disease. She tells the audience that even though she may forget this experience tomorrow, she treasures it in this moment, because speaking in front of them allows her to feel like her old ambitious self: an expert in linguistics who was fascinated with communication.

My other favorite scene is when Alice explains to her daughter why she wears a butterfly necklace. As a child she was distraught when she found out that butterflies had such a short life. Her mother reassured her that although their lives are short, butterflies have a beautiful life.

Alice’s mother and sister died in a car accident. Alice also has a short but beautiful life. She was intelligent and successful, with a great job and a loving family. In one moment, we can be on top of the world, celebrating how great our lives are. In the next moment, everything can change.

It made me think about how all of the wonderful things in our lives are gifts, and no gift lasts forever. And we don’t know when the expiration date is. The most we can do is to fully enjoy them and appreciate them while we have them.

At some level, I think I hoped that practicing mindfulness would somehow protect me from pain, like some kind of psychological talisman. But it doesn’t. Saying good-bye to vacations, to memories, and to aspects of my identity that I hold dear still terrifies me, despite my attempts to blog, meditate, and be in the moment.

But I practice mindfulness anyway, because being fully present allows me to extract all of the joy out of every experience that I possibly can. I guess that’s the most that any of us can hope for.

Photo courtesy of Allison Gentry Szuba

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Beginnings and Endings, Part 3

Posted on June 23, 2015 by Christy Barongan
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Interlaken, Switzerland

You know how I said I’m not good with beginnings and endings? Well I think I’m getting better at it!

After obsessing about it for seven months, I finally decided to go on a trip to Germany and Switzerland because I wanted to stop worrying about money and start living with no regrets. But I was still wasn’t excited about the trip until the day we left because, as with the meditation retreat in California, I was consumed by seemingly insignificant details. Things like:

What kind of clothes should I pack? Will I be able to wear anything other than tennis shoes? How cold do I need to dress for the glacier?

Which luggage should I bring? Is there any way I can weigh my luggage without having to get on a scale? Because that might depress me.

What should I do about my snoring? I can’t pack my GERD pillow. Should I go to my dentist and get one of those mouth guards?

Should I try to get cell service? Would that make me obsess about my tennis teams the whole time? Can I go 10 days without texting?

Will I get along with my roommate? Will I feel like an outsider, since everyone else has some kind of German connection? Will I go crazy without having any alone time?

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My fearless travel companions

While my travel companions were excitedly researching our hotels and itinerary, I could barely name two cities we were visiting. Which my friends thought was weird. Which brought up those feelings of not being normal. But I tried to practice self-acceptance and reminded myself that this is who I am. I obsess about all of the things I have to do before I can look forward to any trip. At some point, I would know what city I was in. Hopefully.

And luckily, once I was there, I was fully present. I got a few emails about tennis but didn’t try to fix everything as I normally would. I didn’t obsess about my sleep cycle, even though I got very little sleep. I wasn’t anxious at all on the trip–which is astounding. I didn’t worry about how much I was eating or whether I looked fat in pictures. I just enjoyed the experience of being in another country.

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Mountains and Glaciers

The trip exceeded my expectations in so many ways. Switzerland was breathtaking. The scenery was so beautiful it almost hurt to look at it. No wonder Federer lives there! I tried to take in every detail and store it in memory for future reference. So that when I need an image to make me feel calm, I can close my eyes and remember how it felt to be in the presence of so much beauty.

I got to feel like I was in my early 20’s again, which was an unexpected gift. I sang and danced in the rain, stalked band members, and took hundreds of pictures of stuffed animals. Sometimes when I look at happy family pictures on Facebook, I feel this envy and uncertainty about how I live my life. It doesn’t seem very adult-like. But the feeling of euphoria I had on this trip would not have been possible unless my life were exactly as it is.

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Even riding on the train was fun!

Even though I only knew one person in the group, I felt at home with my travel companions. No moments of insecurity about being accepted. About saying the wrong thing or embarrassing myself. I even blew out all of the power in our hotel with my hairdryer and no one held it against me!

And on my way home I wasn’t sad, even though I would never be able to repeat this experience again. And I wasn’t anxious about returning to the stress of tennis drama, boredom, and loneliness. Today, four days after the trip, I still feel happy when I remember how much fun I had. But I also feel happy about returning to my life of playing tennis and eating out with my friends.

I’m sure at some point this dream-like state will fade, but for now I will allow myself to enjoy this feeling for as long as it lasts.

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Waddles, our trip mascot, getting shot from a cannon at Hohenzollern Castle

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In This Moment

Posted on March 10, 2015 by Christy Barongan

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I’ve always been reluctant to tell people what kind of music I like, because it’s pretty mainstream. In fact, I’ll make that #11 on my list–my preference for Top 40. Some of my friends have criticized me for what they consider my poor taste in music: it’s so unoriginal. So superficial.

And it’s true that the lyrics usually aren’t profound, but sometimes they still touch upon universal feelings. That’s why even the sappiest of love songs can be appealing when you have a broken heart.

Yesterday on my drive home the song “Daylight,” by Maroon 5, came on the radio. Every time I hear this song I think of one of the long distance relationships I was in during high school. My boyfriend went to college 5 hours away, so we didn’t see each other often. And when we did see each other, I was so anxious by Saturday about him leaving on Sunday that I couldn’t enjoy our time together. No amount of reasoning could stop me from obsessing.

That’s what happens when you have an anxiety disorder. The things that other people find difficult, like saying good-bye, are intolerable. Adam Levine can still hold her close for one night, even if he’ll have to go in the daylight. I, on the other hand, would obsess about how sad I was going to be when that moment came and would end up ruining the whole evening.

Despite the intensity of my negative feelings, I have often chosen relationships that have been characterized by a high level of drama. Which doesn’t make any sense, I know. You would think that I wanted to be miserable. But love is like a drug–especially in the early stages–what with all the obsession and longing and all. Even though the cons outweigh the pros, you get addicted, anyway, because it’s not a rational process.

My relationships were like an addiction in that I craved connection, but no amount of contact was ever enough. And I would experience withdrawal during even the smallest periods of separation, yet I still preferred long-distance relationships.

That’s why I’m proud of myself for not being in a relationship. I’m learning how to tolerate my fear of being alone. And I’m learning how to live without the addiction of drama. And my behavior doesn’t seem as crazy and contradictory–in relationships, at least.

Other things have helped with my anxiety, too. I resisted meds for a long time, even though people begged me to take them for their sake, if not for mine. But I have to admit, even though I don’t like taking them, they make my anxiety bearable.

I also have a therapist who I can call when I’m freaking out. I meditate, which has helped me tolerate my feelings. And I practice mindfulness as often as possible.

One of my favorite mindfulness mantras is any sentence that begins with “in this moment.” In this moment, I am anxious. It’s hard to breathe. I am in pain. But in the next moment, I will feel differently.

And I always do.

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Turning Pain into Posts

Posted on November 18, 2014 by Christy Barongan

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Yesterday was not a good day.

Yesterday, for the first time in his 16 year career, Federer withdrew from a major tournament, and I had planned my entire day around watching the match. That may not sound like a big deal to most of you, but to a Federer fanatic like me, it’s downright traumatic.

Then I played tennis and lost to the same team for the 3rd time in a row. Plus my opponent accused me of making a bad call. Which would ordinarily make me worry about going to hell, but instead it just pissed me off.

Then my doubles partner thought it would be funny to insult Federer because he knows how much I love him. Which was the last straw. So I punched him in the arm. Hard. Twice. No, three times. Twice in his right arm, and then when he turned away from me in self-defense, I punched him in the left arm. Then I paid for his dinner because I felt guilty about my violent outburst. Although I still think he deserved it.

During dinner he gave me the same old advice that everyone gives whenever someone is upset. Something along the lines of how it’s all about your attitude and he doesn’t even let the big things bother him. Which pissed me off even more. But instead of hitting him again, I just told him he was lucky.

Sometimes I can tell myself to think about all those people whose lives suck more than mine does and it helps me put things in perspective. Like when I had to pay $1000 to replace my water heater and reminded myself that at least I don’t have Ebola.

When I’m depressed, it just makes me feel ashamed that I can’t think positive thoughts, count my blessings, and call to mind the less fortunate. What right do I have to be depressed, given that I have a good life?

When I’m anxious, these strategies just freak me out, because I start thinking about how someday someone that I love will be in poor health. Someone that I love will die. Someday I will be less fortunate than I am now. So then I start panicking about the passage of time and I have to take an Ativan.

And sometimes it just makes me mad. Because I’m a psychologist so it’s not like I’ve never thought of these strategies. In fact, I practice them all the time. They obviously haven’t been reading my blog! But then I feel guilty because they’re just trying to help. I’m just being too sensitive. And I can’t just go around punching people when they piss me off.

Last night I tried to tell myself that in the grand scheme of things, nothing that happened that day was a big deal. I counted my blessings. I thought of Ebola. Nothing worked. So finally, I gave up fighting it and told myself that it’s ok that I’m upset about Federer’s injury. About jokes that I find mean-spirited. About losing. Being called a cheater. Having to listen to unhelpful advice. About being in a bad mood in general. I reminded myself that at some point, I would not be upset anymore. Perhaps I would even feel differently in the morning.

I did feel better when I woke up. Not happy, but better. Then I remembered that pain makes for good blog posts. So I started writing, which finally gave me something to be happy about.

So when all else fails, there’s always blogging.

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