lately...

in words and photos

It’s been a while since I’ve been in this space, I know.

I have been taking many walks and finding peace in nature.

I have been baking. Hazelnut chocolate brownies. It is impossible not to eat just one.

Lots of reading. I am currently on a Sherlock Holmes kick which has made for an interesting read.

My children are out of school for the summer. We have watched Alice in Wonderland, Tangled and The Lego Batman Movie so far.

I have been to the community swimming pool and remembered what it feels like to float.

And I have been trying to take each day as it comes.

April marked the one-year anniversary of my father’s passing. On top of that, other personal things transpired which brought in deeply troubling waves of anxiety that I could not get a handle on at the time. April turned into May and I celebrated another trip around the sun, but the anxiety was there hovering in the background like a low-grade hum.

It is now June and I am in a better place than I was. There are several things that I have been doing to get back to more of a semblance of baseline; I won’t go into all of them here but one of the things that I kept remembering was something I read about the word “alongside”. Whatever post I was reading, the person talked about their chronic illness and having to learn to live alongside of it. Their illness wasn’t going anywhere, nor could they keep pretending everything was fine when it wasn’t. It was there. They had to accept it. They had to learn to live alongside it.

The more I tried to push away my anxiety, the more and more it kept taking root. I had to really adjust my thinking and understand, okay it’s here, I know why I am anxious, I can’t control the outcomes of life, how can I move forward alongside of all this?

This was not an overnight magical thing by any stretch, but every day when a wave of anxiety would come, I just kept repeating to myself “alongside”. Alongside, alongside, alongside. Like I said, there were several other things that I had to commit to, to get to where I am now, but this was one of them.

And prayer. So much prayer.

Apologies for the inadvertent radio silence, it wasn’t planned, but we are here now :) It is nice to be back on Substack although my writing will still be a bit sporadic here simply because it is summer and my kids are out of school right now. I want to be more IRL and not on my laptop or phone so much. I will still post on here during the summer months, just not to a specific schedule. Once school starts up again in the fall, I can get back to a schedule that is more conducive.

Hope you are all doing well friends! I have missed our chats. How have you been doing? I look forward to hearing from you 😊