Happy Thankful Thursday! This past week has had its up’s and down’s and down’s again. But fear not loves I still managed to find a few positive things that helped me get through the week! First off, it was a holiday weekend, and, in my job, I get a paid holiday off! That is one thing I love about my current place of employment. It’s always nice to get a day off especially in my job. It can get a bit stressful and sometimes one day can make all the difference. I used Monday to catch up on my self-care routine. I went to the gym, went to dance fitness, cooked, and wrote a couple of blog posts. I overall had a wonderful mental health day.
Second, on Monday, I made Chicken Teriyaki with Brown Rice and Vegetables. (Check out the recipe in Food!) I made plenty for Monday and two days after. I was happy I took this step to prepare my lunches, ahead of time, for at least two days out of the week. My goal is to continue to meal prep healthy meals and get my health under control. Who knows maybe I’ll even lose weight along the way! I will continue to look up healthy meal prep ideas and I may share these yummy recipes with you! Lastly, this past Saturday was Anthony’s birthday and we celebrated together with family and a group of friends. He wanted to go to the casino and out to eat. So together with both of our moms we went to Santa Ana Casino, gambled and ate at Cantina Rio. After leaving the casino, we went over to our friend Chris’ house and we had a bon fire. It’s the first year Anthony has wanted to celebrate his birthday and I am extremely grateful he was okay with celebrating. My week may have had its up’s and down’s, but I still managed to find things to be thankful for! See you next week for Thankful Thursday! Let me know what you are thankful for in the comments!
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I catch myself falling into the same routine. I seem fine and I feel as if I have my life together, then it spirals down in some way. For a while, the stresses of being accepted and feeling as if I am part of a team at work were messing with my mental health. I finally got the mental break I needed at work and I thought it was going to be smooth sailing from there, then my relationship started taking a turn in the wrong direction. Anthony recently got weekends off from work and made a lot of promises that weekends would be for us, but so far, his weekends have been dedicated to everyone else but me. I may sound selfish or territorial, but I truly felt hurt that he has yet to spend time with me on at least one of his days off. You may be thinking: "Andrea, you live together you see each other every day." Yes, we do live together, and I SEE him every day, but most days we are doing our own things and paying no attention to one another. Seeing someone and spending time with one another are two completely different things. I am a person who longs for attention. I want to feel important and I base that on the level of attention I receive from people. It’s not something I’m proud of but it is what I do. I constantly feel lonely and as if nobody understands me. I could be in a crowd full of people and still feel lonely. I desperately crave human interaction but hardly get it because I fear most social situations. I am not a person who suffers complete social anxiety, I am, however, a person who hates the unknown outcome of a situation. What triggers my anxiety is the fear of not knowing how a social situation will pan out for me. If a conversation doesn’t go as planned, rather than continue the conversation with something else, I stop and dwell on what just happened. I do this with my family, peers, and basically anybody I encounter. My desperate need for attention so I don’t feel lonely has me trying to make friends. I purposely joined Cushy with the hope of meeting people with the same interests as I and to make friends along the way. And, for a while, I felt as if I was a part of something great! That is, until Cushy shut down. The friendships I thought I gained, (one in particular,) made me realize that they were merely temporary. I’ve made countless attempts to talk to her and she doesn’t honestly seem to care. Initially, I was devastated and wondered what I did to her to be ignored this way. After some serious thought, (and a few crying sessions) I’ve come to realized that, yes, she may not communicate with me anymore, but it doesn’t necessarily mean she doesn’t care. She has an extremely busy life and a new addition to her family coming soon. I sent my final message to her thanking her for everything she did for me and that meeting her was truly a blessing, and maybe one day our paths can cross again. I had to come to the realization that not everybody is going to want me in their life. I’m slowly starting to accept that. The right people will come along one day. I just need to be patient. The next step in my journey of self-discovery is to learn how to be alone. I’ve never really knew how to be alone. Being alone is a fear of mine. I also decided to act in my relationship since my feelings were hurt by my partner. I decided to designate one day a month that is just for us. Any other day he can do whatever he wants. He was surprised and argued against it. He hasn’t yet agreed to my proposal. But I feel it’s what needs to be done so that way I won’t be hurt anymore with false promises. It will also help me take the step of learning to be alone. I’ve burnt a lot of bridges, some of which I don’t know how, but rather than sulk like I would normally do, I’m going to take this as my opportunity to heal and grow past it. In this journey of self-discovery my goal is to learn who I am, practice more self-care, gain the strength to learn alone time isn’t a bad thing, and accept that the past is the past. I will spend time exploring it, blogging about it, will you join me?
It’s that time of the week to be grateful for what we have. This week for Thankful Thursday, I had a few positive moments that made me smile. First, one of my clients recently got a job and like in most jobs he was required to pass a drug test and go do his fingerprints. Well, I had to take him to do his fingerprints and everybody who knows my client (including me) was worried he would get upset when they grab his fingers. Surprisingly, he did very well while getting this done. He was calm and mostly excited to see his fingerprint on the laptop in front of him. I was so proud of him I bought him a Snickers! Second, Anthony and I helped his parents paint their house this weekend. It was an eventful six hours of painting for us to run out of paint. That isn’t the positive thing I am highlighting from this event. What I am highlighting is that his mom told him that he better not lose me. Not many girls would take time out of their only day off to help their boyfriend’s parents paint their house. I am a keeper. Just hearing that she would share such kind words with her son about me made me smile. I’m used to the complete opposite from the parents of my partner so this was a great self-esteem booster Finally, I donated blood recently. I used to donate every four months but then my iron levels plummeted. I needed time to get my iron levels back up before I donated again. I got a call from Vitalant (formerly known as United Blood Services) and scheduled an appointment to donate whole blood. When I got there, I found out I had high enough iron levels to donate so for me I was ecstatic! Now, four days later, I got a text from Vitalant saying my blood and plasma donation helped saved someone’s life. Once again, that was a self-esteem booster. I enjoy helping others in any way I can, and I feel great knowing my donation helped someone in need. It’s truly the little things in life that make life worth it! Happy Thankful Thursday!
ASMR. Have you heard of this abbreviation? Do you know what it is? The technical definition is Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response. It’s the feeling of tingling euphoric relaxation. Someone can experience this sensation while watching videos or hearing certain sounds. ASMR videos can be used to relax enough to sleep. My first encounter with ASMR was on an episode of Carpool Karaoke with guest star Cardi B. Her definition of ASMR was “mouth noises” that just relax her and make her feel good. James Corden tried to make ASMR noises and just weirded Cardi out. After watching that, I decided to check it out for myself.
I went to YouTube, typed in the search box, “ASMR” and so many videos popped up: ASMR Chewing, ASMR Food, ASMR whispering, ASMR for single people, the list goes on and on. There was one that caught my attention and it was titled, “ASMR: After a bad day.” It was a 20+ minute video of a girl helping a “friend” (the viewer) out after a bad day. She does a lot of whispering, tapping, light scratching, and after I watched it, I felt surprisingly relaxed. I was curious to see what else these videos had to offer so, I decided to watch more. My results came to 50% like and dislike. I didn’t care for the videos that involved chewing, lip smacking, and the videos for single people. Those videos made me feel extremely uncomfortable. I’m not hating, but they are not videos for me. I did like some of the whispering and tapping videos, but NOT ALL OF THEM! Since I had mixed emotions about ASMR I took it to Facebook and asked the question: “Opinions on ASMR. Do you like it? Dislike it? Do you even know what it is?" I asked this to see what others thought about it, I got a lot of different responses from Facebook and Instagram. (Unfortunately, I forgot to save my responses from Instagram so I cannot share those). Here are some of the responses I received from Facebook: Kaitlynn M.:” I listen to ASMR while I sleep because I have tinnitus and it blocks out the ringing it’s the best. Pink noise is where it’s at." Sunnie A.: “I honestly can't stand it lol😂” After I asked why she responded: “Hmm it's just annoying. I just think "why do you have to whisper? Speak up!" For example, the ASMR commercial during Superbowl drove me nuts😅” Jessica G.: “Are you talking about the eating videos? I oddly like them 🙈. I’ve really only seen the eating ones. And I don’t even know why I like them that’s why I say I oddly do LOL people in person bug me chewing loudly. But the videos suck me in. The crunching. My favorite are the candied strawberry ones 😂 I also like the “oddly satisfying” videos I always see on Snapchat. Cutting soap or squishing foam.” Daisy M.: “Paul uses it to sleep but I noticed he talks in he’s sleep now. I am skeptical about things like this because of signals and the brain. Feels like black magic to me. Anything that influences you through the unconscious can be scary.” Netta G.: “NO! I mean, 100% hard NO! ASMR sounds drive me bananas! Especially the whispering ones.” I asked her if it was just a pet peeve and she responded: “No, it’s an actual sound irritation. I don’t find anything satisfying about it. I also don’t appreciate that something intended for soothing/comforting stimuli, or even a method that may be considered therapeutic on some level is associated with sexualized visuals. YouTube ASMR videos typically depict attractive women (rarely men), wearing revealing clothing performing “sexy” sounds, and I don’t think that’s appropriate. Especially when young, impressionable kids are drawn to it. I am in no way saying that it would be ok if men were more often represented in this way. It leads me to believe that it’s less about comfort and more about sex or gaining popularity based on physical images. Shouldn’t we be more evolved at this point? If others interpret it in a similar way as I do, then the ASMR label is fraudulent. I believe it has the ability to send the wrong message and do more harm than good. It’s not fair for someone that is genuinely dealing with anxiety or another need to believe they can gain the right support from something that negatively exploits women. You’re better off listening to positive affirmations and nature sounds.” It seems that my findings from my mini poll on Facebook and Instagram were like my personal results. It was about 50/50. So, I decided, I cannot choose a side. I like some videos because they make me relax but the others make me cringe. ASMR isn’t for everybody, and if you’re like me and never experienced it, why not give it a try? Also, let me know in the comments how you feel about ASMR. See you soon my loves, Xoxo Drea. About a month ago I decided to ask my fellow Cushies to help me figure out what to write for the blog. I’ve been suffering writers block lately and needed help. These lovely women gave me multiple ideas that you may see come up sooner or later. 😉 For this new segment, I will talk about is positive things that happened during the week. It’s just a weekly reminder to be grateful. Since this is the start of Thankful Thursday, I want to start it off with three positive things! The first positive thing that happened to me was I managed my anxiety well. I haven’t gone to therapy in three weeks and these every day stressors have been taking a toll on me. But I am proud to say I managed my anxiety and stayed calm. The second positive thing that happened to me was my Monday wasn’t a typical Monday. It was actually a great Monday! I haven’t had a great Monday in quite some time. I honestly anticipated it being a horrible day because of who I had to work with but thank goodness it went the opposite of expectations. Finally, my supervisor thanked me for being a great worker. Sometimes it just feels good to be appreciated. Her kind gesture definitely made my day. See you all next week for Thankful Thursday! Let me know what positive things happened to you all in the comments or tweet me @my_s2_nm!
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