Welcome to the next episode of a Life in Color. I spent the morning outside of my deck today. I may have mentioned before, I have a little infestation of the cutest, tiniest frogs You can imagine they don't look real. They look like if you bought a tiny little like charm for a necklace and it was shaped like a frog. They live in the flower pots on my deck, which honestly inspires endless creativity in my head. I won't go off about that, but I wanna write like a series of children's books about this. What is it like to live under all of those tiny plants in the flower pods? There's like a whole world we can't even see it. Anyway, so I was out on my deck this morning and I was. Looking for the frogs. I didn't find any. I think they hide in the morning and there was like a slight chill in the air. the leaves on the trees are starting to change color. Some of them are turning red, which is changing color for fall. Some of them are turning brown, which might just be because it's been so dry. But when there's a breeze. It kind of rustles through the leaves and it sounds a little bit like fall, like when the leaves are drier and they bump into each other and they make that familiar fall windy day sound. And that was there this morning and it just put me in a mood of fall. Whenever fall is approaching and we're only a few days out, I just wanna turn inward and. Fold into myself a little bit, grab a shawl and wrap it around my shoulders and I don't know, feel a little bit cozier. Start to think about slowing down emotionally a little bit. Even though every time we come to September, I feel the back to school energy still, even though I've been outta school for 20 years or more. I always feel like, okay, time to get back to work, time to get back to routines. But something happens that first morning, you walk outside and it's chilly and you hear the sounds of fall and the light starts to change a little bit and you can just tell it's coming. I can tell it's coming That happened this morning and it makes me want hot tea and make soup for dinner and light a fire in the fireplace. Also it's mid-September still. I live in Virginia and it is still 80 degrees outside or higher, it's very much not fall weather yet, which is frustrating at this time of year. Every single year I want it to be fall and it will be, but it's not quite yet. But I'm starting to get in the mood for that. and I feel like my garden is starting to wilt a little bit. It's a little overgrown. Things are almost ready to harvest. I'm growing potatoes I tried them in the ground this year, but the deer ate all the leaves. I don't think we're gonna have any potatoes, but I have some regular potatoes and pots. I'm going sweet potatoes this year. They're almost ready. Everything seems to know that the growing season for those summer vegetables is almost done, and I'm planting some seeds for my fall garden for those plants that not just can handle the colder weather, but prefer it. So we're talking about, lettuce and spinach, which really can't handle summer at all, and also beets and carrots. I'm gonna add some more rosemary.'cause I don't think you can ever have enough of that and it'll survive the winter. So yeah, I'm just thinking about planting seeds in my garden, and also trying to plant some seeds for myself inside of myself. I think this has been a difficult year certainly for my family. Certainly for me, and certainly for the world, it's just been a hard year so far. The last nine months have been tough. Really. I think the last 12 months have been tough and it's really easy for me to get caught up in the kind of the swirl online and in the news and the constant onslaught of more and more. Bad things happening in the world and the vitriol that people express online and all the negativity. It's so easy to fall into the mindset of this is just a really negative time and things are only gonna get worse. And that creates this mindset of scarcity for me, which can really color every aspect of my life. If I fall into that and I start to think. Ooh, I really just gotta, I gotta shore things up for myself in every direction and take care of my family. And it starts to create this feeling that there are threats that aren't really there. It's just like an energy that something's coming and you need to be worried all the time. And hyper vigilance, which is something that I struggle with anyway. And just that feeling that I need to be aware all the time and ready for anything, and it really is the fastest way to pull me out of myself. This is something that I'm really working on. Spending less time online, less time looking at my phone, less time reading the news. I wanna be aware of it. I don't wanna swim in it. I know people, my parents, I love you guys. If you're listening, they're great. I love them so much. They always have the news on a hundred percent of the time at their house. The TV is on and the news is making noise it's not news when it's like that. It's just a constant set of people who just go off on these diatribes about how they feel about what's happening and what they think is gonna happen next, and why everything is not going the way that it should. because of that, my parents are Sort of fixated on the state of the world, which we all live in the world. We make up the world, right? But if we are all in a state of dysregulation, if our nervous systems are raw and fried, and not able to recenter themselves and not able to come at things from a place of calm and consideration. It is very difficult to see how we could possibly solve a lot of these really big problems that we're having. So I think it is vitally important for each of us as individuals to do the things that center us, that fill our cut back up, that make us feel like ourselves again, so that we can approach the really hard things that are happening in the world. I think it's hard to hold onto your, your values and your principles and your integrity if you are just scared all the time and angry. If you're feeling angry. I mean, you look around at the world right now I'm not talking about look around online, go out into the world, go out into a busy place, and just look at how people are interacting with each other in general. And compare it to, I don't know, 10, 20, I don't know how old you are. Compare it to some time ago and think about is it different? I think it is a little bit different right now. People just seem stressed and tired and they're not sure who to trust, and they kind of feel like everybody's out to get them. This is how it seems, right? And so it's a little bit harder to get people to smile, and it's harder to get people to just basic kindnesses, like hold the door open for the person behind you when you're walking into a building, or try not to bump into everybody when you're walking through a busy street or a busy hallway, or, I don't know These common courtesies have gone out the window, in some places. I'm not saying everywhere. These aren't bad people. We are not meant to be carrying as much as we're carrying right now, emotionally and mentally Schedules have gotten so busy. Work is so hard and so busy, and we are burdened with all of the different headlines from across the world and knowledge of all of these different groups of people all over the world who are suffering or who are misbehaving or doing something you might disagree with, and it's too much. It's too much to carry. And so in order to maintain our own sanity and so to work towards the sanity of the world around us, because we create that world. We have got to do the things that make us happy. So for me, I like to ride my bike in the middle of the day. I, okay, I hope my work isn't listening. I love nothing more than to do something that I'm not supposed to be doing that during work. I was like this at school too. Not in like a bad way, during the workday and I have a gap between meetings, I love to go for a bike ride to step away from the computer and step away from all the meetings and just clear my head, and I love it. The time I love it the most is in the fall, it's a little cooler. You don't have to sweat immediately. You get on your bike and I start to change the playlist that I'm listening to. I feel like in the summer, the music tends to be pretty intense. Kind of pushing myself and listening to music that is, I don't know, gives me energy and will keep me going. And then in fall, I just wanna go on a little joy ride pretend that I'm in the sound of music or something and hop on my bike and I put on something like. The soundtrack from the Little Women from the nineties, as my kids would say, the 1990s, in the 19 hundreds, Thomas Newman's soundtrack for the Little Women Movie. it is my favorite because somehow it conjures colder weather and calmer times, and it takes me on an emotional journey. Because I've seen the movie a million times by the time you get to Beth's Secret song, I wanna cry every time. So it gets me into my body, right? It gets me out of the stress of the workday, out of the stress of the headlines and the news. I can't stare at my phone while I'm on my bike. I have to just disconnect and look around me and just breathe. I'm so lucky to live in a neighborhood that has a lot of bike paths and trees and ponds that you can ride around. And so that's what I do and I put on this music and I just pretend that I'm, you know. Pretend that I'm in a different season and pretend that I'm literally in a different season in the weather and in a different season of my life where things are calmer and, a little less hectic and I can just let my mind wander. And often, especially if there is some sort of a, a problem I've been trying to solve or a work task that I haven't been able to figure out or, a parenting challenge or my husband and I had some kind of a conversation that I'm trying to process, whatever it is. Often, if I can shut my mind down for a little while and get into my body and just help myself feel something, answers will come. It gets a little clearer in my head how I feel about things, what I think, and the way forward. I just can't recommend this enough. It won't be the bike for everybody. Maybe you like to paint or write, or maybe you like to sit and drink coffee on your front porch, or maybe you wanna dance and move. I don't know. It's different for everybody. It's different for me at different times of the year. Whatever it is. I feel like it is so important that you figure out. What you can do that will fill up your cup, that will silence the noise from everybody else, the external noise, and help you hear your own voice. Again, this has been a big revelation for me actually over the last few years. I, I'm trying to figure out how to explain this the right way, I think since I was a little kid, I know since I was a little kid, I grew up in a family with some very strong personalities, and it became very clear to me from a young, young age that I was good at figuring out what everybody else wanted. I was very good at not just predicting what they wanted, but helping to calm down a situation or make things happen. And so I spent all of my energy. Doing that. Like what could I become that would make everybody else super happy? What could I help create as a situation in the family that would make other people happy? That followed me to school, that followed me into work. And it's been very valuable skill for me. Like it's been something that has, I think, helped me tremendously in a lot of different situations. It helps me in parenting and my marriage of course, because I can, help keep the peace and make everybody happy as I'm sure you know where this is going. That is not a healthy role for me, for anybody to be playing because what happened was I lost touch with my own voice and my own opinions and thoughts, and I can walk into a room and so very clearly. Intuit everybody else's feelings and thoughts and opinions. And if you ask me what I want, it's so easy for me to filter that through. What does everybody else want? I'll put my vote in for that piece of it. What isn't easy for me is if you ask me what do I want? Outside of everybody else, what is it that I want? It's not that it's hard for me to say it because I don't wanna hurt anybody's feelings or upset anybody. It's literally I can't hear it anymore. I couldn't hear what my own opinion was for so many years. I just lost it. And so this concept of I like, I want this, I am going to do this. I feel this way. Of course I said it all the time. Of course, I was a thing that was present in my life. But the concept of really that I can be a person separate from everybody else, that I can have opinions and feelings that matter separate from everybody else, and I can assert those feelings and opinions and take up space and that I will still hold value in a group of people. That is something that I have had to work on. For years and years. I'm still working on that. Honestly. I married a very decisive man and he knows me very well, and that's helpful sort of, except now I kind of, I can lean on him sometimes, so we'll be like. What do you want for dinner? And I'll be like, Ugh, what do you think I want? And they'll be like, you mentioned the other day that you wanted this, and so maybe we should order honey grow or whatever. And, and I'll be like, oh yeah, that sounds good. Because it's just still a connection that's not very strong. It's like frayed between. My thoughts and myself, and I am really working to explore this and figure out what myself is, where is that within me? And that's tough. That's a hard thing to do when. You are, you're trying to break a habit of many, many years, and I wonder how many of, how many people are out there that relate to me, or am I on an island on this? Did I just go way too far in this direction? But this is my people pleasing self because I know exactly what everybody else wants me to do or say at any given time. I know I can feel it, and I also know that. If I push in a different direction, I know what the reaction's gonna be. It's like all of this noise, all of this calculation is happening in the back of my head all the time, and it's just I have to quiet that down and get in touch with me and myself, and it's almost impossible for me to do that around other people. I have to go. Be by myself somewhere in order for that voice to resurface I had a really interesting experience in therapy one time where my amazing therapist, his name is Julian, he was really great at doing these exercises with me where he would ask me to close my eyes and ground me. In my body, we would do breathing exercises, and I feel like I would almost get into a meditative state, and then he would have me ask myself questions and then just say the first answer that occurred to me. It was really effective if I could get out of my head, which was not always easy. We got into doing a lot of inner child exercises. We worked off of the theory that a lot of these challenges that I was experiencing stemmed from the fact that I had kind of suppressed my inner child at some point. So, long story short, we did this exercise where I had been imagining at some point we came up with this visualization of my inner child was locked away within me. She was behind this iron exoskeleton that I had imagined, like iron rib cage around her. And I had been so focused on strength and toughness and not on play and freedom and rest. And so he wanted me to open the ribs up, let her out. And so we did this whole visualization exercise and this meditative state and he tells me like, okay, I want you to let her out. Imagine that you're physically opening the door and letting her out. See what she does. And I had imagined that she would be sad and crying or so excited to come out into the sun. What is the name of that story? Oh, there's the story where the little boy is obsessed with sunshine and they live in a world where the sun only comes out once every. several hundred years or something like that. So no one's ever seen the sun, but he did all this research and he's all excited about it, and everybody's making fun of him because he's so passionate about it and he's expressing that passion and they are just relentlessly making fun of him, and they're bullying him and they lock him in a closet to give him a hard time, and the sun is coming out later that day and they forget about him. The sun comes out and everybody just runs outside and it's just this joy, this absolute unleashed joy in everybody. They had no idea that it was gonna be so warm and so bright and so amazing, and they forget about him in the closet He doesn't actually get to see the sun. This thing that he has been obsessed with his whole life. I hate that story. It makes me really sad. And I can't remember the name of it. I will find out the name of it. But yeah, so I thought she would be like that. I thought that maybe she would be so thrilled to come out and just be allowed to. Direct things for a while. In my visualization though, as I'm in this meditative state and I imagine opening this door, I all of a sudden was overcome with these feelings of sarcasm and anger. So my answers as we would start to be I know this sounds super woowoo, this was actually a super incredible impactful experience for me, because I couldn't control it. I just all of a sudden just felt angry and so my answers were very sarcastic and kind of, mean. So Julian said to me after a couple of answers, is she angry? Because she sounds pissed and I let out a sob that lasted, I think five straight minutes of loud, messy, ugly crying. That was just yeah, she was angry. My inner child wanted to be let out and she was pissed that she had been in there for so long. And as we know, anger is almost always. A secondary emotion, a cover for something else that you're feeling. And so that anger and that sarcasm was coming out because she was devastated and so sad. I had to let all of that out that was living inside of me. After I had that cry, the release was immediate. It was so interesting to me and it was so much easier to let her out after that. I've been really trying to just keep her, This was years ago. I've been trying to keep that inner child at the table as I'm doing anything and make sure that she is able to express herself and have a voice. for those of you that have not gone down the therapy path, I'm sure that all of this sounds a little bit woo woo, but this has really worked so well for me. it has transformed the way that I have been living since then. This might have been the beginning of my realization that work and life was starting to feel super gray. That might have come from her because as soon as she came out, I had all of these desires to paint and to play and create things, and I can't do that 24 hours a day. I have other responsibilities and things that I'm supposed to be doing, but oftentimes when I'm sitting in a meeting or sitting at a parent teacher conference or on the sidelines of a soccer game or whatever. I get an urge to write or to paint or even just to be reading a book that I love and I can't do it, there's like an urgency inside of me to make up for lost time to play whenever I feel like I want to play. It's like I go back to being a child again. I have a 7-year-old and he is not. he is not always willing to just sit down and do what he's supposed to be doing. If there's something else he wants to do, he will let you know at every turn loudly and persistently until he's able to do whatever playing that he wants to be doing. and That can be really annoying for me and also good for him. I hope he doesn't stop doing that ever. And I think we should all give that voice more time and more energy throughout every day. So this is what's happening in my life today, and what I'm going to do and commit to doing over the next few weeks and really hopefully forever, is to give that inner child space at the table so that she can help think about how to center myself and keep myself grounded, and to continue to explore what myself actually means so that I'm not allowing all of the external voices of the world to dictate how I feel, how I think, and what I'm gonna do, and what my energy feels like. I think all of you have felt this way at some point, but when you get into the state of dysregulation and you're feeling stressed or nervous or I don't know, you're just off center. You have butterflies in your stomach and you're not in a good way every muscle in your body is tense, and then people are asking you maybe rapid fire questions, or you have to perform in some way that doesn't come naturally to you. I'm not able to do that very well in that state. I don't make good decisions. I lose my words. I forget the point of the conversation that I'm trying to have or the presentation I'm trying to give, and I just, it's just generally not my best work. Whereas if I'm centered and I am grounded and I have filled up my cup and I remember that there is more to life than just this one situation and this one group of people and this one scenario that I'm in, it's so much easier then to make better decisions or to push the boundaries or to perform, knowing that it won't be forever. It doesn't have to become me. It's just me in this moment. It all gets easier. It feels more balanced, so maybe that's what it is. I will commit to prioritizing balance in my life, and I hope you will do the same. All right, we'll leave with that today. I hope you all have an amazing rest of the day, and I really appreciate you coming back for this episode, and I hope you'll join us again for the next episode of a Life and Color. See you next time.