Pondering with a Purpose - Love Thyself

This week's topic for Brenda Youngerman's Pondering with a Purpose is Love Thyself: Do you love yourself?

This is a question in which the answer changes not only day by day, but hour by hour.  And it can change with the flip of a switch, for any reason or for no reason.

I want to love myself.  Honestly, I do.  I know that there are so many good things about myself (as I talked about in my day 6 challenge).  I know that I have a big heart.  That I love my family and my friends and that I'll do anything for them.  I know that I can and will offer support to those in need, and I'll hug anyone given half a chance.  I know that I'm worthy of love and that I have enough people that love me to prove it.  I'm an amazing person, someone with depth and strength that I sometimes to recognize myself.  I deserve love, not only from those that know me well, but more importantly from myself.

The problem is the many years of self doubt, depression, and bad choices.  Most of my life, I've had problems with my own self-worth.  Teased through school because of my weight, my brain and my lack of money, it was hard for me to see anything worth loving.  After all, when you hear one boy tell another "Oh no, Amber's got a crush on you!  You better run now!" you start to think that there's something wrong with you.  So it is difficult to remind myself that a) youth is callow and cruel and b) their opinions really shouldn't have mattered.

The hardest thing for me to fight, in my need for self-worth, is the depression.  I'm getting better, thanks to my meds, but there are still days when I find myself berating myself because of something left undone.  Today, as I was driving to and from my physical therapy appointment, I found myself thinking negatively.  "Look at you.  You got such a great start on your daily challenges and your SparkPeople exercising, and now you've gone two days without typing anything.  You know that you're going to go home and just play on Facebook.  That's what you do.  You'll go home and sit in front of the computer getting nothing done, or you'll go upstairs and nap.  That's all that you can ever seem to do.  You don't follow through with anything.  You know that, right?  So why did you think this would be any different?"

This voice comes out at the oddest times, like today, sapping my mood and sapping my self-love.  It's taking me time to push past it.  Today, I realized that I was being self-defeating.  I realized that I was pushing myself toward the negativity.  And I had to remind myself that yes, I'd put things off for a few days.  But there was still a majority of the day left.  Yes, I've got to pick up Pete from PDO at 2, but I can get more things done afterwards.  There's always tomorrow, and there's always after Pete and I get home.  There's still time and it will get done.

So right now, I love myself but my depression doesn't.  We're in a war for control but I'm confident that, eventually, I will win.  Because I am stronger than my depression.  I wouldn't have been on this earth for almost 39 years if I weren't.

Pondering With a Purpose - History Before It's Gone

This week, Brenda asked us to ponder history - do you or don't you?  And most of today, I've been pondering what to say about the prompt.  And I decided to tell you why I give history a chance.
See, history was always my least favorite subject in school.  We learned dry facts and numbers and they only stayed long enough for the test before flitting out of my brain.  When I moved to Florida from New York, I found out that they did world history as sophomores in my new school, whereas my old school did world history over a course of two years - freshman and sophomore.  Do you think I told them that I'd really only had 1/2 of world history when they saw that I had a credit in it?  Heck no!  I was getting to stay away from that dreaded class.
My junior year, however, I needed to take American History.  And, me being me, I wanted to that the Advanced Placement or Honors class rather than the general class.  The AP would give me college credits, and that would be really good.  But in order to get into the class, I needed to talk to the teacher, Ms. Simmons.  And she took a chance on me based on my grades in my other classes.
Ms. Simmons didn't just teach dates and names and dry, dry facts.  No, she taught that history can be fun, that it can come alive and that learning history could be just as much fun as reading a book.  After all, history is a story.  It's the story of those who came before us and what they went through.  How, then, was it any different from fiction?  Especially if the stories from history are well-told?
And Ms. Simmons was an excellent storyteller.  When we started the class, she started us in 1974 rather than at the "beginning".  As she explained to us, this is history that we'd lived through.  We would remember and be able to relate to a lot of the things that we were talking about then.  She also went through the song "We Didn't Start the Fire" by Billy Joel point by point, telling us what each bit of the song meant.


And it didn't end there.  As we went through the years, we were given a chance to creatively present a certain topic in the history of the US.  One group did a video "news" report.  Another did a newspaper.  Our group set up stations outside, taking people through the "typical" day of someone travelling westward.  When we were learning about the 20s, she came in on roller skates, wearing a flapper dress and holding a long cigarette holder.  The next week, when we learned about the Great Depression, she came in wearing rags.  She put a sign on her desk and brought out apples.  The sign said, "Apples 5 Cents".  We got to watch The Maltese Falcon and got to learn which jelly beans to eat together to get a different flavor.  By the end of the year, it had become the one class I couldn't wait to get to.  I mean, I loved my music classes (choral and electronic music) and my math classes (I was a math geek), but those classes didn't offer the possibilities that American History did.  Every day, I wondered, "How is Ms. Simmons going to make history fun today?"
Now, over 20 years later, I've forgotten a lot of the facts that I knew then.  (I'd done well enough to get a 3 on the AP exam, which meant I got college credit for it.)  But what I can't forget is the way Ms. Simmons made me feel when it came to learning about history. And that, I think, was the most important thing about the class.  The facts will always be there.  I can look it up in any history text book, check the internet, whatever.  But the experiences that I had while learning from Ms. Simmons is something I'll never be able to forget.

Catching Up on Memes - Pondering with a Purpose - Practical or Not?

This Thursday's Pondering with a Purpose (hosted by the wonderful Brenda Youngerman) is putting forth the phrase to ponder
Practical or Not?
My house is filled with things that aren't practical but which, at one time, I hoped would be the answer to problems I was having.  Crates to store things in that just end up holding a variety of odds and ends.  A dozen large lidded bins that were supposed to hold things to go into storage but instead held things that went into storage and never came out or have become a home for ten million and three toys that we're just trying to keep off the living room floor rather than being put away where they belong.
 The biggest on the list are the dry erase boards that I bought for the boys' To-Do/Chore lists.

Teddy's board, written on by him

Pete's board, written on by Teddy

I put the boards low enough that the boys could reach them and erase what they'd done every day.  I thought it would help make things fun for them, give them a chance to take responsibility for their chores, let them see things go away rather than add to it.  Instead, it gave Pete a place to make a mess.
Within a day, Peter had erased everything that I'd written, then scribble all over not only the board itself by also on the cork board that I'd been planning on pinning important information to for him (as you can see in the picture above).  Now, I'm thinking that instead of putting it on the inside of a door that I can't close (since it's door to the pantry and inside the pantry is where we have our cat's litter box) I should have put it inside another door that I could close so Pete wouldn't see it as a drawing location.  Unfortunately, I also know myself.  If I were to move it to such a location, it would be out of sight, out of mind and it wouldn't get used.
Then again, it's not getting used now.
So was it a practical thing for me to have put up?  I've still got hope that it will get used.  Maybe I can put another dry-erase surface that I'll let Pete color on himself.  But for the moment, it's not as practical as I'd like.  And I need to work on changing that.

Pondering with a Purpose - Wandering

Before I get into this meme, I want to thank Wayne W. Smith at  for participating (and hosting) so many great memes.  I'm trying to get back into the blogging scene, and I've been finding something new to write every day thanks to him. :) And it's not just that he participates in a lot of great memes, but he always has something interesting to write.  Check him out!
Now, back to this meme.  Pondering with a purpose is hosted by Brenda Youngerman.  Each Thursday, she gives a topic to ponder and then gives the opportunity to link back.  This week, the topic is "wandering".
There are two sides of my being.  One side is the part that is shy, nervous, in need of the familiar.  It is the part that needs routines and touchstones.  It's the part that has me call my husband several times a day, touching base and knowing that he is ok, which lets me know that, by some small extension, I am also ok.  It is the part of me that checks on my kids at night.  That freezes when I need to make a phone call to someone or somewhere new.  The part that lives my life day after day.
But the other side is the one longing for change.  The side that isn't happy with the status quo and desires change.  This is the side of me that will turn onto an unfamiliar road just to see what I pass.  The will walk up a set of stairs I've seen but never explored.  The part that allows my brain to move from one idea to the next, wondering and waiting to see what I will uncover with these thoughts.  It is my spontaneity, my need for the unknown and the unexpected, my need for surprise.
But this duality should come as no surprise.  After all, I'm a Pisces.