Things That Made Me Happy In 2017

2017 is nearly over, so it's time to do what everyone does at the end of the year: Reflect on what I've accomplished, evaluate where I've been unsuccessful, and make a plan for next year. Every year, I make a list of goals, and every year, I fail at most of them. Three years ago, I made a goal that I actually managed to accomplish. I decided I needed to get healthy, and I lost a total of 35 pounds. Now, I have fallen off of the wagon a couple of times (the holidays completely wreck all sense of willpower) and put a few pounds back on, but I manage to shed them once I start eating healthy again and the Spring season at the garden center kicks my butt. This is one of those very few New Year's Resolutions I consider a win.

This past year, I had a list of things I wanted to do. I failed to complete the majority of that list, as usual. BUT, the number one thing on my "need" list, written in all caps, was to FIND MY JOY. My first approach was taking on the Complaint-Free World challenge. That involved wearing a bracelet and switching it to the other wrist every time I complained about something/someone. The goal was to make it 21 days straight without moving the bracelet. I was not successful with this challenge. Like, didn't even make it more than 2 days in a row. However, it did make me work harder to stop complaining. Through January, while the country seemed to be in a tailspin of despair (I can't help thinking of a certain Hee-Haw sketch when I hear the words "gloom" or "despair"), I struggled to keep my head above water. One day, I thought about all of the small details that had cheered me up throughout the day. My mood seemed to improve. I decided I would practice writing down these little gems every day for a month. Thus, the Things That Made Me Happy Today project began in February. In 2017, I have journaled every day since February 1st. I've filled up two books, and part of another. I also found an article on bullet journaling about how to chart your mood daily. There was a handful of days that I forgot to document, so I had to go back and guess, but I have a color-coded chart for the entire year. This practice has dramatically changed how I perceive my day. It has helped me to let go of anger or frustration I felt about something that may have happened to me, and put it all into perspective when I list the positive things about my day. I'm more likely to consider the day "good" or "ok" instead of a total wash because of a couple of bad incidents. I've spent the day reading all of my happy lists from this year. Here's my Top 20 Things That Made Me Happy in 2017. Of course, there were LOTS of other things that made my lists throughout the year, but these topics showed up the most consistently. They are listed in no particular order.  

There are things I wish I'd been able to add more often, and others I wish didn't have as much prominence. I'll be working to change that in 2018. 

Actions besides journaling that I took in an effort to find my joy:

• I dropped a couple of activities that were bringing me more stress than happiness.
• I found an alternate route home from work so that I avoid the interstate completely. That has made a WORLD of difference in my mood during the afternoon commute.  
• Tim and I made an effort to fit in a date night every week (usually Sunday nights). We also scheduled 3 weekend get-aways instead of taking one vacation for just the two of us. We aimed for 4, but it was a little too difficult with my work schedule.

Has the practice of journaling turned me into a 24/7 happy person? Absolutely not. There were still days that filled me with sorrow and angst in 2017. Trying to adjust to parenting an adult with autism and facing all of the uncertainty that comes with the territory has been difficult, to say the very least. Raising a teenager is lots of fun but also quite terrifying and, at times, aggravating. Cutting out some activities has given me more time at home with Tim and the kids, and that has been wonderful. In doing so, however, I now feel disconnected and isolated from friends and church family. Have I misled you on social media and painted a rosy picture? I certainly hope not, and I don't believe I have. We've had some struggles this year, and I feel like I've been honest about that. If your perception of me and my family is that we are completely carefree, I apologize. I never want to sugar-coat a situation or deliver a false reality. On the other hand, there are NUMEROUS frustrations that I could've told you about and chose not to. I've seen these negative posts on social media, and, while they may allow the person posting to vent, it also whips their followers into a furious mob: "Yeah, I HATE that, too!!!" "If I were you, I'd have handled that with *insert with angry retort or violent reaction here*!!!" The poster may feel vindicated, but lots of their followers are angry, sometimes for no good reason. Instead, I tried (and many days I had to try harder than others) to share the positive in my life. I mainly wanted to stop myself from knee-jerk responses to those daily annoyances that happen to all of us. I am truly humbled by the comments I've gotten from so many of you. I've been told that my happy posts make YOU happy; that you look forward to seeing them on Facebook or Instagram. Those reactions are Things That Make Me Happy Today, too.

Some statements during a recent sermon have stuck with me: "We like to be around hopeful people. We want to be around people who stand for hope and possibility." If you find your friend group shrinking, "What do you exude? What are you pouring into people? Joy? Encouragement? Hope?" Before I get comments about it, I'm obviously not talking to people that are struggling with a mental illness right now. Your brain is literally unable to see things in a positive light. Trust me, I know. For the rest of you out there, you can't choose how you feel, but you CAN choose how you react. I love the quote, "Promote what you love instead of bashing what you hate" (origin unknown). I am challenging you in your daily social media interactions, heck, even in your face-to-face interactions. Before you spew about the jerk that cut you off in traffic, or rant about the horrible customer service you just received, or tear down the latest celebrity that's done something shocking, or whine about something frustrating that your spouse or kids did, or share that political meme as a way of shaming those who voted differently than you, pause for just a moment and think about what you are "pouring into people". It is extremely hard to positively interact on social media all of the time. But I think we ALL can do a better job. Joy is choice. Negativity is choice. May we all choose wisely. I hope all of you will join me in my challenge to document the Things That Made Me Happy Today. I already have a new journal, one that has enough pages to last me all of 2018, and two new packs of colorful markers (also pictured is a new planner and an instructional book for a new hobby I want to try).

I am ridiculously happy about these new markers. They definitely made it onto a happy list. May you all have a very HAPPY New Year!

Never A Dull Moment

I don't have a single picture of our honeymoon. Why? I'm not sure, exactly. I owned a camera at the time, though it was pretty darn cheap. We were young, broke college kids. We'd been gifted a week of timeshare at a place in Lake Lure. In winter. I decided on a Christmas wedding, because after 2 1/2 years of dating we were, quite frankly, too anxious to wait until the following spring to get married (as we had originally planned), moving in together was definitely out of the question, and we knew we wouldn't have any more money in May than we had that December, so why wait another 6 months? Besides a candlelit tour of the Biltmore at Christmastime, there wasn't a lot of sightseeing on that honeymoon, therefore, hardly any scenery worthy of a photo. Sometimes I kick myself for not asking someone to take a picture of the two of us at dinner, or the place we stayed, or even the dang Biltmore House in all of its Christmas glory. 

As we approach our 24th wedding anniversary, I think of all those moments in our life that I failed to document. In 1993, we weren't equipped with camera phones, always prepared to capture life's most significant events. No one was there to snap a picture of Tim proposing to me in my dorm room, not that I would've wanted an audience, anyway. No elaborate, romantic, well-thought-out proposal. Just a 19-year-old kid, down on one knee, pretending to find something in my laundry bag, and trying to put the ring on my right hand instead of my left. Would I have wanted something more dramatic? Of course; I was a hopelessly romantic, 18-year-old girl. I did have my very own customized ring, though; Tim's stepdad, who happened to be a jeweler, designed my ring using a sapphire from my mother-in-law's first wedding ring and a couple of cubic zirconia stones (did I mention we were broke?).

There are other things from early in our relationship that I wish I'd documented in pictures:

-The cars Tim and I were driving when we were dating

-Tim (or both of us, actually) on his motorcycle

-The site of our first date 

-The dorm where Tim proposed to me

-Pictures from our time together at Clemson

-Our first apartment in Clemson

-The coffee table that Tim built using PVC pipe, and old mirror, and dark green spray paint

-The dryer we inherited that required a bungee cord wrapped around the door for it to work

-The couple of places I worked while Tim finished school (daycare, discount eyeglass place)

-The craptastic apartment we rented when we first moved to Nashville

We traveled back to our hometown recently for Thanksgiving. Tim and I grew up together, though we weren't really friends until the months before we started dating. There's a comfort that can't be explained knowing that, with the exception of the first 3 years or so of our lives, and the year Tim was at Clemson and I was still in high school, we've never lived more than a few miles apart. We shared some of the same elementary, middle, and high school teachers, though not at the same time, since Tim was a year older. We felt so very old driving around town and pointing out buildings and locations to our kids, saying, "That used to be a Blockbuster. The Fast Fare used to be right on that corner. We used to play with kids in this neighborhood. The lot where those apartments are used to be a giant field of kudzu." One of the first things that greeted us as we got off of the interstate, was the Bi-Lo grocery store on Reidville Road. Tim and I expressed surprise that it still exists, since so many other things have changed over the years. We told the kids that this was the place where our romance began. You see, one night, Tim had stopped at the Bi-Lo to cash his McDonald's paycheck. He managed to lock himself out of his truck. My family had stopped at the Bi-Lo to grab something (can't remember what) on our way home from church on a Wednesday night. When my parents got back in the car, I pointed out Tim McKay, a guy from my math class, and that he seemed to be locked out of his truck. Dad drove over and asked if he could help, but Tim said that his stepdad was already on his way. As we left, my mom asked me all kinds of questions about him and gushed over how cute she thought he was. Fast forward a month or so to prom season, and I was whining about not having a date. Mom suggested that I could ask that cute guy from the Bi-Lo parking lot if I REALLY wanted to go that badly. She kept pestering me, until I finally said I'd ask him (with little hope that he'd actually want to go with a geeky junior like myself). I passed him a note one day after class, because I was WAY too shy to ask him face to face; he called me that afternoon to accept. And here we were, driving past that same Bi-Lo more than 26 years after that encounter. Reagan suggested we get a picture. So on our way out of town, we drove into the parking lot, and I snapped this picture with my phone.

It wasn't until I had kids and became an avid scrapbooker that I realized the importance of documenting our life, for us and for future generations. The older I get, the more nostalgic I become. I want to savor every moment of time together, and I want to remember what we've shared. Every ordinary bit of it. The proposal was anything but grand, the wedding was simple but lovely, our beginnings were ever so humble. But this marriage continues to evolve, flourish, strengthen; it's a magnificent tapestry of beauty that might show some fraying in places, but is still being woven, and with new threads being added every day, it will not be unraveled. This boy that I fell head-over-heels in love with is the man with whom I still want to spend the rest of my days, whether they be mundane or full of adventure. And with each passing year, I'm learning that no part of our story is too dull to be photographed.