Gratitude Log: Strength

In a recent session, I asked J to provide me with a writing prompt. She assigned me another list. Lists are her speciality, if you didn’t know. This one was about gratitude. Why am I grateful for my positive qualities? How have they served me? My goal is to use this prompt as a new self-love challenge, by creating a post for as many of the reasons I listed in this post as possible.  

This is going to be the final post of my gratitude log. At this point, I feel like I’ve hit all the most important reasons from my original list and I’m comfortable leaving it at this. I’ve got so much written, so many examples of the good stored within me. So much evidence of how the person I am has served me in positive ways. I hope that being able to go back and read these will give me strength when it’s more difficult to see the good.

Fittingly, that’s what this post is all about. Strength.

I’m a strong person. Maybe not so much physically, but emotionally. Sometimes it’s difficult to give myself credit for that. I assume the presence of extremely intense negative emotions means I’m not strong, that strength would mean the ability to avoid them. But maybe strength just means the ability to withstand them. I’m grateful for my strength in that it helps me sail my ship through the storms, of which there are so many.

I’m grateful for my strength because it helps me set my pain aside sometimes to help others or to just be kind to them. It helps me focus on something I can control and fix, someone whose day I can change if only by a fraction. When H has a bad day at school, when my friend is having boy troubles, or when I see another blogger struggling, I can put my emotions on a shelf and be a comfort for them, a source of support.

I’m strong. Strong enough to push through pain. Strong enough to take a simple prompt given to me by my therapist and write 13 posts on it as a means of fighting back against minions who only have negative things to say. I’m grateful for my strength because it gives me those words to use as ammunition. It has helped me write so many posts of self-love.

I’m grateful for my strength because it helps me find joy even amidst the trying days. To laugh at a funny movie. To admire a beautiful day. To smile at a stranger and strike up a conversation. It’s what makes me willing to even try looking for the sunshine beyond the clouds. I’m having deja vu, so perhaps I’ve discussed joy before, in relation to another positive quality of mine, but it feels important to address here as well.

I’m grateful for my strength because it keeps me here. Despite every awful feeling that courses through my veins, despite every mistake of the past, I’m still here. Still alive.

I’m grateful. Period. For so much more than I ever realized until now.

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Gratitude Log: Learning from Mistakes

In a recent session, I asked J to provide me with a writing prompt. She assigned me another list. Lists are her speciality, if you didn’t know. This one was about gratitude. Why am I grateful for my positive qualities? How have they served me? My goal is to use this prompt as a new self-love challenge, by creating a post for as many of the reasons I listed in this post as possible.  

Mistakes. We all make them, or at least that’s what J likes to tell me all the time. I am quite the perfectionist, so I don’t sit well with the knowledge that I’ve messed up. That’s a work in progress for me. What I am really good at is being accountable for the mistake and then learning my lesson.

I’m grateful for my ability to learn from my mistakes because it expands and reaffirms my skill base. For every error I made on a report at my internship, I learned a better way to phrase a sentence or to frame the information. From my recent fight with a friend, the lesson I learned was not to make assumptions about other people’s actions. In my most recent conflict with J, my lesson was that I communicate best given space to let my intense emotions deflate. None of these things were new to me, they’d all been a discussion with my supervisor or a friend or my therapist before. But I needed the experience of failing to really drive the lesson home.

I’m grateful for the ability to learn from my mistakes because it keeps my relationships solid. If you call me out on something and I’m actually guilty of it, I’m very likely to genuinely apologize for what I’ve done. I’ll even seek you out on my own to try to rectify the situation. Then I will do my best not to repeat the mistake. Just about this time last year, I really screwed up. While out for a friend’s birthday, I got way too drunk, almost blacked out, and then lost it on my very good friend when she tried to get me home safely. This was not the first time these drunk antics had occurred, but when I sobered up I realized that I wanted it to be the last.  I sent her a long, honest message with an apology and a note that I’d really try to do better. And I have; I haven’t had that happen since. This was also right around the time I’d been diagnosed with BPD, so I finally understood the root of why I’d acted the way I had and was able to work on fixing it. As much as my friend is a great person, I could tell this was nearly the last straw. Me being able to learn from that mistake gave us the opportunity to rebuild and now we’re in a good place.

I’m grateful for the ability to learn from my mistakes because it helps me teach others how to effectively learn from theirs. Like I said, I’ve made lots of mistakes. I’m kind of a mistake connoisseur at this point, and I have a lot of practice admitting to my error and working to resolve it. Since I work with kids, who seem to recoil at the thought of taking responsibility for an error because of the associated discomfort, it’s important that I can convey this skill. Whether it’s teaching a child how to apologize effectively or asking for something in a more polite way, I have the power to help them manage a difficult situation in a tolerable way.  Just recently, I was driving H & S home from the pool when chaos erupted in the back seat. S hadn’t been listening to a story H was excited to tell, so H retaliated by taking the exact thing S wanted to play with. Calmly, I helped S see how her actions hurt her sister’s feelings and we discussed how she could practice being a better listener (eyes on H, asking relevant questions). Once she’d done this to H’s satisfaction, I was able to coax H to share the toy. It was all done in a matter of about five minutes, but that skill took me years to learn. I’m thankful for it, because it taught both girls a worthwhile lesson and saved me a headache.

You can’t get through life without messing up hear and there, it simply isn’t possible. It’s whether or not you can develop insight from your mistakes to avoid them in the future that’s important. Learning about my mistakes has made be a better person. Mistakes keep me humble. because I know there are others around me to learn from. They keep me motivated to be better, because I know there’s always room to improve. They keep me thinking, in search of a more effective way to live.

So as much as I despise them, I’m grateful for them for keeping me in the process of going forward.

Resolutions

As my Thursday session rolls around, I find myself increasingly anxious and unsure of reading what I’ve written to J. On my drive there, I worry that I might chicken out, but am determined not to. I practice what I think I might say to her to preface the letter and hope desperately that it all goes well.

I don’t have to wait long when I arrive, which is a blessing. Sometimes, the session before mine runs over by five or so minutes. I always get that time back, but tonight I’m itching to just get this conversation over with.

We sit and she asks how I am. I tell her I’m okay and we speak briefly about some trivial topic that I can no longer even remember. When silence appears, I find the courage to start the conversation. I tell her that I’m sitting with a lot of unresolved feelings from our last session and that I feel that conversation is unfinished. I ask her if I can read her what I’ve written and then we can go back and dissect it.

She’s on board for this, so I read it to her. I wish that I could look up at her while I do it and gauge her reaction, but it’s taking everything in me to just keep reading so I pour all my effort into that.

When I’m finished, J tells me that her very first reaction to what I’ve written is that she is glad I listed the parts of our discussion from Monday that had been helpful. She confesses to me that she’s also been sitting with a lot of feelings. We’ve spent a lot of time working together in the last couple months, working hard going through some challenging topics. To find out I had been feeling unsafe, and then see me react so strongly and negatively to what she’d tried to say on Monday, had taken her aback. She could see, obviously, that I was upset but she didn’t know how else to respond.

J had tried to articulate this to me on Monday, but it hadn’t come out that way. Instead, what she’d said was that she was frustrated that despite all the time we’d spent together, I was still feeling the way I expressed to her. So in that moment, I locked in on the word frustrated and what I’d heard was: Aren’t I doing enough for you? What more could you possibly want?

When she explained those same feelings on Thursday, she didn’t use the word frustrated. She used the word helpless.

That was what she’d been struggling with. Not what else I could want from her, but what else could she do to help me? 

I apologize to her, not because I am sorry for any wrongdoing but because I feel for her. It’s not fun to be in a helping position without any clue of how to help. And I think it’s easy to forget that she can be affected by our interactions like that. I assume that even when there’s tension between us, she just sheds that like a sweater at the end of the hour and heads home feeling perfectly fine.

So anyway, J is glad and grateful –and maybe relieved– that I was able to see Monday’s session from a bigger picture. She doesn’t say she’s relieved, but I feel it. I’ve given her something that we could work with by telling her explicitly what I needed and what would help.

J asks me to remember that she’s human, not a robot. So she’s not perfect, and can’t always respond exactly how I need her to. I can respect that. Despite that, she assures me she will try to remember what I’ve told her: validate first, show me that I’ve been heard. Because I’ve noticed the second I feel that I’m not understood, that’s when I tend to shut down entirely.

J tells me that’s good insight.

After that, we go back through each of the things I’d said in my letter that require further addressing.

We talk about the “checking in” need. J says she is open to checking in about suicide and self-harm, but she wants to know how I think we could build it in to our sessions. Do I want her to just simply ask “Have you self-harmed” or “Have you been suicidal” at the beginning of each session? Certainly, she can’t ask it at the end. That’s why she wants my opinion. Put like that, finally I understand what she’d been saying about structure and why she’d been wary of it. It does seem very narrow and restrictive.

At the same time, I feel like she finally understands where I was coming from. She explains that the reason she doesn’t ask those questions and instead asks a very general “how are you” at the beginning of session is to give me the space to bring up whatever I need. She has always hoped I could indicate when I am in a tough place, but that she is now coming to understand it is not always that easy to just bring up something as serious as suicide.

I appreciate that she recognizes that.

At some point, and I’m not sure if it was right after this or later, I tell her again that part of the reason I always waver before talking about the suicidal thoughts is because I feel like I’m being dramatic. I keep saying that I want to kill myself, but I haven’t, so why would she believe me?

J says she does believe me. She says it firmly. She knows that when I say things like I feel like I’m going to end up doing it sooner or later, that I really mean it.

I appreciate that too.

She wants to know if she should be doing something differently? Should she be acting on what I’m telling her? She doesn’t believe that I would benefit from a higher level of care right now, and I actually agree with her. I’ll admit that I could benefit from a psychiatrist, and that maybe it’s finally time to revisit medication after my last bout with it went so poorly. J was pretty insistent on that during our Monday session. She wants me to add someone to the support team, because she feels like I’m doing a lot of hard work and not reaping the benefits as much as I should be.

But anyway, I’m off track. The point is, she wants to know what she could do differently so I might genuinely feel like she believes me. In talking about that, I even share with her the sentiment I’d expressed in my post about communicating my pain, where I admitted that part of my urge in self-harming is that it conveys to her how deeply I’m hurting. She thinks this is interesting, and similarly asks me how she could respond when I talked about self-harm urges so that I know she understands the severity of how I was feeling.

It is an honest question. Not a rhetorical what do you want from me, but searching for a solution. I’m still working on a response to that.

We talk about the time she’d rolled her eyes at me when I’d asked for a hug, something I’d long been holding onto and which had been feeding the fears that she was bothered by my attachment needs. Long story short, we resolve that issue.

We talk about the letter I’d asked for. I am so prepared for her to say no that it catches me completely off guard when she mentions casually that I will be getting the letter. What?! Turns out, yes, she’s going to do it for me. J says that she is still trying to figure out how to lay out what she wants to say, but that it’s coming. She also says that she could have followed up with me about that, that maybe she should have. Wow, that was also really nice of her to admit.

At this point, I am feeling very calm. J is hearing me. She is really hearing what I am saying. Validating it. And I am hearing her, not feeling rejected or hurt. We seemed to be finally understanding each other and it felt really good.

The last thing we talk about is the attachment stuff. I had wanted to know what she meant when she had said that her seeming uncomfortable might be for different reasons that I assumed. She explains that with any topic, I might be reading her behavior and assuming it’s about me when It might just be that she’s having a bad day or that the topic is challenging.

She starts to say, “My reaction isn’t necessarily because..” and the pauses, trying to find the right words.

“–because I’m annoying you or my problems are a burden?” I finish for her.

“Definitely not that,” she assures me. “I guess that’s how you feel then.”

Yup, pretty much.

She continues by saying some topics are uncomfortable by nature. Me wanting to take my own life, for example. That will never not be a scary concept. Again, she’s human. It doesn’t mean she doesn’t want me to talk about it.

J requests that if I’m sensing a change of tone or body language, it’s important that I bring it to her attention, since she isn’t always aware of it. I need to practice voicing those concerns in the moment instead of letting them build.

She’s right and I know that. I don’t think it’s going to get any easier to talk about attachment, and I would be lying if I was saying I was completely assured that doing so isn’t a burden to her, but I’m willing to try.

At this point, we are near the end of session. J asks me how I am feeling about things between us now, and I tell her I felt much better. It’s such a relief to have that weight off my shoulder. I tell her that I care about her and our relationship a lot. I am glad we’d worked things out. She smiles at me and responds by saying she feels the same way and she hopes I can see that.

I do see it, and I tell her as much. I tell her that I stockpile evidence that she cares about me to fight the minions.

She tells me to keep fighting them. Not just to prove to myself that she cares, but to keep myself alive.

Before I leave, I ask for a hug. No eye roll from her this time. She is happy to give it. Another reminder that she cares for the list. I am grateful for the moment where we embrace because it really solidifies the connection I was feeling with her.

I’ve detailed this whole session for myself so that the next time there are lingering feelings of hurt or anger, the next time I feel like our relationship is perched precariously on a cliff, I can remember how we’ve worked through difficult times before. There will be a next time, because there always is. This is the concrete evidence that things can feel better after they’ve felt rotten. I felt rejected and then supported, unheard and then understood.

I think this was a big hurdle for our working relationship, but we survived it. Now we can move forward with me feeling safe again. I’m so happy for that, because there’s plenty coming up in my life that I need her for.

And I know she’ll be right there, ready to help.

One Year on WordPress

On this day a year ago, I was fresh off of a conversation with J about borderline personality disorder.

I had gone into my session feeling anxious and conflicted. The previous time we’d met, things between us had been tense and fueled by anger (on my part), to the point that I’d walked out of her office and slammed the door to the waiting room. I’d felt misunderstood, as per usual.

I’ve spoken about this next part before. Following that session, I was feeling so alone with my feelings towards my therapist. It’s not like I had any friends that could commiserate with therapist issues. So I went online and tried to find some website that could give me some insight on my situation. I found just that from some blogs dedicated to discussing experiences with BPD.

At first, I thought that it had to be a coincidence that these bloggers who were describing their experiences in therapy by using the thoughts and feelings from my own mind had BPD, because there was no way in hell I did. Or so I thought, until I read more about it. Then I realized it was exactly what I had. It explained so much, even beyond the intense anger that I’d felt towards J in our last session.

When J and I spoke next, I shared this her, wondering what she’d think. To my surprise, she agreed, but had been trying to decide whether or not bringing the BPD term to my attention was a good idea. In the end, I beat her to it.

That diagnosis has changed the whole course of my work with her. It opened me up to a whole slew of people feeling the same feelings and thinking the same thoughts. Before that, I thought that I was an anomaly, completely alone. Now, I felt like there was real hope. Other people were living with this disorder, so could I.

All of that, because of the blogs.

So when I left my session that day, I went home and make a WordPress account. The next day, I wrote my first ever post.  I don’t really know what possessed me to do it, considering I hadn’t been doing much writing for months in the journal I had in my room. But as I sat down, the words just flowed out. It felt natural.

I’m not sure if I thought writing about my experiences would somehow help others or if I was just looking for someone who could tell me I wasn’t alone. Maybe a little bit of both. I think I just wanted to be part of the community too.

I wondered if anyone would ever read what I’d written.  And I didn’t even know if I’d stick with writing, since I’d never stuck with it before. Maybe it would be just a phase.

It wasn’t a phase. Here we are, one year later. 195 posts. 209 followers. I never could have imagined that so many people would find my story worth their time. I could never have predicted that people would care about my journey enough to like my posts, comment or follow.

Writing can be challenging for me sometimes. Yet what I have found is that doing so is always worth it.  I’ve shared things with all of you that I’d never dream of saying to friends or family. I’ve had eye-opening conversations with so many of you that gave me insight, help, and comfort.

In a way, I’ve developed a different type of family from the WP community, one I’m so grateful for.

So to every one of you who I’ve corresponded with, to each of you who has taken even a moment out of your day to send me a word of support when I needed it, thank you. There are too many to list, but you know who you are. You have been part of my healing process. You’ve contributed to my growth.

Without you, there’s no way I’d still be so invested in this blog after so much time. I look forward to seeing where the next year takes me.

 

 

Gratitude Log: Running Towards Fear

In a recent session, I asked J to provide me with a writing prompt. She assigned me another list. Lists are her speciality, if you didn’t know. This one was about gratitude. Why am I grateful for my positive qualities? How have they served me? My goal is to use this prompt as a new self-love challenge, by creating a post for as many of the reasons I listed in this post as possible.  

 

I used these .gifs in my first post because well, I love Friends and also it was completely relevant.

Ever been afraid of doing something? I’m sure you have! We all are afraid of things. For me, a lot of tasks in daily living that others approach with ease are tainted with a layer of fear. Being with a group of friends, making a phone call, going to a certain meeting at work. My heart races, my blood pulsing, and I feel ridden with anxiety. Yet for all of this fear, you rarely see me wrapped up in a blanket avoiding the world. I get up each day and run right into it.

I’m grateful for the ability to run towards fear. It shows me that I can tolerate difficult feelings. This is an affirmation that I repeat to myself all the time lately. I can tolerate fear. I can tolerate anxiety. Sometimes I have trouble believing the affirmation, but when I actually run towards that fear and survive it, it is concrete evidence that I can tolerate the difficult feeling. I was drowning in anxiety before my first job interview, but I did it and proved to myself I could survive it. I was overwhelmed with worry before sharing my issues with J the other day, but I  proved to myself I could get through it. There’s evidence all around me that I can handle myself even when anxiety takes hold.

My ability to run towards the things that scare me has given me a lot of the other positive qualities I’ve already discussed. It helps me be kind to myself, even when kindness feels scary because I don’t believe I deserve it. It helps me be responsible and complete even the scariest of tasks. It helps me keep moving toward, persisting in the face of every terrifying obstacle that has made me want to give up. It helps me advocate for myself, even when I fear what the response will be to my needs. Facing my fears has helped me obtain kindness, responsibility, persistence, self-advocacy, and hard work. I’m thankful for that.

I’m grateful for the ability to run towards fear because it has helped me heal. Everything that has seemed scary so far, I have overcome by charging right at it. If I couldn’t run towards fear, I wouldn’t be in therapy. I wouldn’t have a job. I wouldn’t be going on dates with people I’m meeting on line. I wouldn’t be trying to go to the beach by myself this week so that I can finally have a summer day by the ocean.

Running towards fear has also expanded my knowledge of the world. Some big things, some small. Externship was scary, but I learned how to case manage and ways to consider culture when interacting with parents. Relationships are scary but I discovered my favorite restaurant on a date. Being in therapy taught me about DBT and gave me insight about myself. Doing the frightening things keeps you learning about the world instead of sitting comfortably in a stagnant place.

I’m grateful that I can do things I’m afraid of because it helps me live my life and work towards my goals. It gives me hope that things like marriage and traveling and children are not beyond the realm of possible for me. If I’ve achieved everything scary before, I can weather the fear that’s standing in my path now.

I’ve just got to get a running start.

Gratitude Log: Honesty

In a recent session, I asked J to provide me with a writing prompt. She assigned me another list. Lists are her speciality, if you didn’t know. This one was about gratitude. Why am I grateful for my positive qualities? How have they served me? My goal is to use this prompt as a new self-love challenge, by creating a post for as many of the reasons I listed in this post as possible.  

Honest to a fault. That’s the line I use in my dating profiles. I’m not sure where it came from, but I’ve always been a “whole truth and nothing but the truth” kind of person. Lying, or lying by omission, does not come very easily to me with anyone. Not my parents, teachers, or even my therapist. It pains me to do it, because I feel that strong moral code pressing back at me. My face contorts into this weird look and I pretty much give myself away immediately. It’s better off to just be up front.

I am grateful for my honesty because it helps me stay true to myself as a person. I’ve long struggled with what the ultimate “truth” is in any situation, but I typically know very firmly what my truth is. If something is bothering me, if I really like something, or if I don’t agree with someone, these are things that I will voice to those around me. For example, I recently admitted to a friend that I’d felt isolated when she and her friend kept talking about their mutual history that I knew nothing about around me. It doesn’t always work out for me, I usually make the choice to share my truth, because I don’t like concealing who I am as a person.

My need to be honest also teaches me to respect myself. As I said, my truths are not always received well, but the fact that I am willing to communicate my opinions and my values means that I respect myself enough to risk it. Because I know I deserve to be heard. Case in point, my grandfather and I often go back and forth on political opinions. I know it’s never going to be a harmonious conversation, because we just don’t agree, but I respect myself enough to keep sharing my perspective. Doing so has helped me see that I have as much right to being honest about how I feel as he does and that we can survive differing beliefs.

I am grateful for my honesty because it makes accountable. When I do screw up or make a mistake, I will usually own up to it pretty quickly. Once, I was working for a family and I dropped the iron on the floor. Of course, the light began to flicker and I worried that I’d broken it. No one was home, so I could have easily shoved in back on the shelf and pretended to be ignorant to what happened. But I had to be honest to the mother about it. My conscious wouldn’t accept anything else. It would have eaten away at me. As much as that sucks, I am grateful for the push to be honest, because it helps me maintain an integrity I’m proud of.

Finally, I am grateful for my honesty because it helps me make ethical decisions. At my job, I practice within the scope of my competence. I don’t use assessment tools I don’t know or give parents data I’m not confident about. Doing so would be dishonest, reflecting my role in the school in an inaccurate way. I stick to doing what I’m trained to do, using the information and skills at my disposal.

Share your truths, people. Honesty shows that you value yourself and others. It’s a pain in the ass, and sometimes requires a lot of effort, but it pays off for you in the long run.

Gratitude Log: Enthusiasm

In a recent session, I asked J to provide me with a writing prompt. She assigned me another list. Lists are her speciality, if you didn’t know. This one was about gratitude. Why am I grateful for my positive qualities? How have they served me? My goal is to use this prompt as a new self-love challenge, by creating a post for as many of the reasons I listed in this post as possible.  

There are a lot of beautiful things in life, a lot of things that create wonder. Things to enjoy as you cross paths with them. Things to look forward to.

Although you might not know it, I can be an incredibly enthusiastic person. As I often do before I start one of these posts, I looked up the definition of enthusiasm. Intense and eager enjoyment. Intense. Well, of course. I do everything with intensity. I feel it all at the deepest parts of my soul. It’s not always a bad thing, sometimes it’s a healing thing.

I am grateful for my enthusiasm because I believe it is what makes me dive head first into any project I take on. My new job. Therapy. The initiative I discussed in my last post is a piece in the puzzle; it guides me towards that project, but being excitable and eager it what makes me take the leap. My enthusiasm, when it strikes just right, can temporarily suppress the anxiety I feel about a challenge. Like the first time I counseled a group of kids. It was terrifying and I wondered if I could do it, but I also got lost in the process of selecting activities for them. Because in that moment, being a counselor felt exciting and rewarding and think of all the possibilities. 

I am grateful for my enthusiasm because one day it will make me a good parent. The parent who goes all in to every holiday and birthday with a Christmas tree that’s perhaps overdecorated or a balloon avalanche greeting them in the morning. In fact, it makes me a fun person for kids to be around now, because I am very careful to try to find as many reasons to laugh with them. I’m super grateful for that one, considering that’s a huge part of my job is working with kids.

I am grateful to be an enthusiastic individual because it brings joy, to me and to others. For me, it really takes very little. A particularly sunny day. A dog that I see when I’m out on a walk. Stopping at the bakery for a cookie. The newest episode of my favorite show. These things bring me bursts of happiness, a feeling that is unmatched by most others I experience. I love that it does not take very much to bring that feeling on. And I’m grateful for it, because the reminder that it can exist is what keeps me going when the bad feelings come on.

My joy can flood to others too. The other day, when I was out on a date, we went to a nearby farm. There was a patch of rabbits hopping about and I just about lost my shit. I was so excited to see those little furballs. I giggled and talked to them and even threatened to steal them (they were unimpressed by my threat). No matter where on the farm we went, I kept straying back to the bunnies. It brought me joy, but my date seemed to perk up too. He was enjoying how much I was loving the rabbits. Laughing and smiling. Enthusiasm is contagious in that way and I’m grateful I have it to spread.

I am grateful that I am enthusiastic because it can help me really appreciate a beautiful moment when it’s in front of me. I think that it’s because I’ve struggled so much that I hang on so hard to the good when it appears, I try so hard to absorb that feeling. When I’m in the middle of an experience that I’ve yearned for, sometimes I struggle to exist in that moment. But not always, and lately I’ve been working at being more present. Recently, I went with a friend to the hot air balloon festival that’s held annually. We stood and watched as each balloon lifted off and pass overhead. It was breathtaking. So much so that I was bouncing up and down, pointing and calling out as each new one left the ground. I felt like a little kid, but I just couldn’t contain how excited I felt. It was a really nice moment and I was completely aware of it. I thank my enthusiasm for helping me store that feeling in the memory bank.

Life is painful. I know that beyond the shadow of a doubt. Yet all around me there are moments that overpower the pain, even if it’s just for a little while. Beautiful moments of laughter and excitement so great that I’m literally bouncing in place. I’m grateful that I have that ability. It keeps me sane.