I saw something called shadow work journaling online (I have no idea what I was searching for) and decided to give it a shot. I used to have a therapist whom I loved, but she dropped me after I missed three appointments, which kind of irked me because I was seeing her for major depressive disorder and ADHD. Missing/forgetting/canceling appointments tends to happen with those disorders. It was right after my brother died, too, so that was really helpful 😒.
Anyway, I want to try the journaling here so I can pretend there is an audience and maybe stick to doing it. No promises! I’ll be using some prompts I found online, although I have the worst memory and the prompts concentrate on the past and memories, so I don’t know how that will go. Seeking Serotonin seems like a great resource and I’m going to start with the 30-day Mindset Journal Challenge. That being said, I started this post two weeks ago 😂.
Day 1: Gratitude
What am I grateful for today?
Today’s prompt is an easy one. I am overwhelmingly grateful for my husband. This guy survived a nightmare of a childhood full of violence and neglect, and he is one of the sweetest, most caring people I’ve ever had the privilege of knowing. Mom was not wrong when she called him a Godsend. He has always said that it was love at first sight when he saw me. I challenged this claim because I’ve never really believed in such a thing, but we dug my senior yearbook out, and in his note he left in the back pages, he wrote, “I will always love you.” Well, color me wrong!
We knew each other for a school year of lunch periods — I was a senior when he was a freshman — and then reconnected nine years later on MySpace (I wasn’t a fan of Facebook). In school, he was just my friend’s dorky little brother; I was the same age as my friend, whom I had a bit of a crush on. Mom was thrilled when Adam started coming around in 2009 because he made me happy and made me laugh so much, which Mom said she had not heard in a long time. For four-and-a-half years, I was Adam’s and Mom’s world, which was pretty awesome.
Now, I can walk through the living room with a basket of clothes or a package that was delivered and this man won’t notice me walking by him. However, just today, I was getting ready to take a shower, so I turned the exhaust fan on in the bathroom, then left the bathroom to get towels, and Adam was walking through the living room with towels for me because he heard me turn the fan on. He turns the air on when he hears me get in the shower because I don’t like getting sweaty after I get out of the shower, which I tend to do.
Due to my AuDHD, shows and movies can confuse me, and I don’t want to get invested if I know I won’t understand what’s going on. Since Adam knows me better than I know myself, I ask him to watch it first to see if it’s too complicated. It may not be his cup of tea, but he will watch it and tell me his opinion. The same goes with comedies. I don’t like the F-word or movies that are too raunchy. He’ll watch them and let me know how “bad” they are. Just recently, I asked him to watch No Hard Feelings, as I really like Jennifer Lawrence but the movie was marketed as a raunchy comedy.
I could go on forever, but I suppose I won’t. I don’t know how I got so lucky. He’s a wonderful father to our kiddies and I love seeing this self-professed dog person being so sweet and loving towards our cats. Our youngest, Willow, is his girl, and she recently got in trouble for lying on my keyboard and hitting the keys on purpose even though I moved the keyboard out of the way like I always do with them. He lightly swatted her butt and told her “no” because I couldn’t get her to listen, and tears were in his eyes after he scolded her and she ran away. I mean, come on!
As always, I’m grateful for my mom. Thanks to her planning and always thinking of her children, I have a home and an acre of land that are paid off. The house taxes suck, but I would rather have those than a rent or mortgage payment each month. Considering I can barely work, my income is a joke and I would be homeless without Mom’s house. We had her car, too, until some jerkface mechanic broke it. I will be forever grateful for her and Adam.
Cari R Esta 