Changing and Staying the Same

What is one thing you would change about yourself?

Today’s prompt is the question you see above; what is one thing you would change about yourself.

My immediate thought was that i would change my flexible joints. They are a part of who I am, and enable me to squish my hand into a tiny fist, but also cause quite a bit of pain.

Today though, I’m thinking about anxiety.

My imagination works quite well, and with that comes a fair amount of anxiety. I would lessen my anxiety, although it has helped me to have success in school and work.

This weekend, we are heading to Indianapolis to celebrate my son’s graduation from law school. This has taken a bit longer than anticipated, due to an illness he had during fall semester of last year.

You have a few goals when you have kids, and one of them is to launch them.

I went to grad school immediately following undergrad as well. We were ridiculously poor, and the future income of a mental health therapist is not as high as I would have liked for it to be.

We knew, as I was accumulating loans, that paying them back was going to be tough. My husband was in retail at that time, which was not a high paying role for him. I studied, worked at a group home for boys, and spent a lot of time entertaining myself with very little income.

He worked approximately 70 hours per week. He was an assistant manager at a Footlocker, which was similar to Finish Line. He taught me about multiple sales, and I taught him about some of the traumas that the boys had experienced where I worked.

We have been together since we were 20/21 (me being the older one), and have been with each other all of that time. We worked together through our poverty, and have lived through more than one recession.

Our children were born on the same day, but currently have a lot of differences between them. One of them has worked since graduating from college in 2020, and the other is completing law school and will be joining the workforce in September.

I am looking forward to his graduation dinner, but am also fairly anxious. I can’t wait to celebrate him, and our accomplishment in having a child who is launching from school to a career feels good as a parent. I get overstimulated fairly easily, so having a dinner at a restaurant with 19 family members feels a little overwhelming.

I find myself talking about him to people I know OK well. I tell them about the upcoming job that has been offered to him.

They congratulate me, and I smile and indicate happiness to them.

I would change my anxiety about a trip filled with excitement and family to just looking forward to getting together.

One thing I’ve noticed, since working in the mental health field prior to and during COVID, is that anxiety drives a lot of us.

We want to do well in school, and study hard to get the positive reinforcement that good grades bring.

We want to follow rules, and trying to figure out which rules we were wanting to follow caused quite a bit of stress to a lot of people during COVID and continuing to today.

One of the diagnoses that I work with is anxiety in others. We work together to come up with positive ways to decrease their anxiety and to have some results that lower their feelings of angst.

I encourage each of you to enjoy this holiday season as much as you can. It can be tough, with members of our families who used to be with us missing family gatherings for multiple reasons.

Whether our family members are missing due to death or a change in holiday traditions, it can be hard as we celebrate the holiday season.

I hope you find something to enjoy today and as we get closer to Christmas and the New Year.