It Is Well (With My Soul)

Greetings, y'all! 👋😊

In my last post, I talked a little about Toby Keith's passing and how the news made me feel. This isn't going to be a "Toby Keith tribute post", but his death brought some thoughts to the surface that I've had over the past 2 or 3 years, about grief and grieving.

The subject of death and dying isn't usually discussed in "polite company". It's uncomfortable. For some, the notion is terrifying. For others, it's a far-future "someday, maybe" thing that isn't important right now, so let's talk about something else. 

Death can't be hidden away in the corner of a closet. It demands to be acknowledged; it walks right up and gets in your face.  

Dying isn't something that was taboo to discuss in my family growing up. One of my earliest memories is looking down into a casket and seeing an older lady (Mrs. Pace)  laying there. I remember that she was wearing a reddish-orange jacket and a white blouse. She was the wife of an older couple that my mom and dad were friends with. My mom and I were talking one day, many years later, and I asked her how old I was when Mrs. Pace died, and she said I was close to 2 years old (she told me that the reason for the perspective in my memory is because my dad was holding me in his arms next to the casket). She said that she felt that making death scary for or a secret to be kept from children was doing a disservice to kids, because eventually, everyone will have to face it.

A lot of my extended family were in the older generations, and between the ages of 2 and 13, I attended a lot of funerals. Most died as old people, some with cancer, some with other "old people" ailments. One cousin was killed testing a new race car he'd built, and he was "young" at age 45. Three of my 4 grandparents died between 1985 and 1987, with both my grandfathers dying within 6 months of each other. My mom's sister, who was my "second mom" died in 1988. 

While all of these deaths were heartbreaking, being allowed and encouraged to talk about it made it a lot less frightening, and it made room for grieving to be a part in healing.

Grieving and grief are different for everyone, and there's no timeline or map to follow. Grief is not something you "get over", and grieving is not something that has an end date. It's not linear. It's uncomfortable to witness, and it can seem to be overwhelming to experience, because it can be so isolating. 

It's encouraging to see that more people are being open about their grief and their journey through the grieving process. I follow 2 people on Facebook who lost their respective spouses about a year ago. One is a friend, the other is a celebrity, but both have been very open with what their day-to-day looks like, including the "ugly" days. Their posts have been enlightening, and in addition to connecting with others who are on the same journey, they give us "bystanders" a clue on how we can be supportive to them, as well as some things we may experience in the future. Is it uncomfortable? Absolutely. For both sides. But it's necessary to confront our discomfort and turn it into compassion.

We keep our loved ones alive in our hearts and minds by talking about them, sharing who they are with others. Whether they are a "regular person", or a superstar, they walked among us; they lived, they loved, and they were (and are) loved in return. ✌💓🙏

Be blessed, and be a blessing!

Megan

I Love This Bar (It's My Kind of Place)

Greetings, y'all! 👋😄

Don't let the title fool you. I won't be talking about a bar in this post. 😉 To be honest, I will probably talk about a little of this and a little of that, and maybe it'll all tie in together somehow. More'n likely, though, it'll probably look like this:

I had a birthday Monday. 🎉🥳 I began my last year in my 40s, and I'm actually pretty happy about it. 😊 I've never been one to lie about my age. I've never said, "Oh, I'm 29 and holding." or "Forever 39!" or "I'm 21 and change!" I'll proudly shout, "I'M 588 MONTHS OLD!" (I bet you didn't expect to have to do math. 😉) Overall, I had a good birthday, and I'm looking forward to what this year brings. 😊

Tuesday morning, scrolling through Facebook (as I do), I was punched in the gut seeing this post:

That he died on my birthday just made the hit that much harder. 

I became a fan of Toby Keith's around 2005, when his "Honkytonk University" album came out. I was aware of him and had heard a few of his older songs (and seen those 10-10-220 commercials he was in with Terry Bradshaw 😄), but I wasn't really "into" country music at the time. I don't know what it was about him and his music, but when I started paying attention, I was hooked. There haven't been many artists that I've felt compelled to buy their back catalog to "catch up", but TK was one of the very few whose music resonated with me to that extent. I never got to see him live in concert, but I don't feel like I really needed to. He was a great songwriter, he had a terrific sense of humor, and he came across as real. He's gone on to his reward, but his music will keep him alive in the hearts of his fans.

The rest of Tuesday didn't really improve, as I had to continue attempting to help a family member handle some business that has been a thorn for the past 2 years. I used up all my "polite" and "professional" on that task, and by the end of the day, the problem still wasn't resolved. 😒 And I only got about 2 hours of paid work done. It's been a long time since I've felt so defeated and just DONE. 😢 

This morning (Wednesday), I felt a little better, and I managed to do some actual work. The other business will have to wait a day or 2, though, because I have to focus on my job...

Sometimes I have a whole post in me in one sitting, and sometimes I lose the thread and have to set it aside for a while. 🤷

It's currently just after 1 a.m. on Sunday, February 11th. 

Thursday was relatively productive, and I managed to get more actual work done. Thursday night was miserable, and I got no sleep at all. I logged in to work at 4 a.m. Friday morning instead of tossing and turning like a rotisserie chicken, and I got a bit accomplished before I had to take an important phone call at 8 a.m. Another important phone call was supposed to happen at 10 a.m., but for unknown reasons, it didn't happen until 2:30 p.m. Both calls went well, and a couple things that had been back-burnered for way too long are now handled and quite a weight has been lifted from my shoulders. 🙌

I'm glad that the week is over, to be honest. Here's hoping that next week will be better. ✌💓🙏😊

Be blessed, and be a blessing!

Megan

It's Never Too Late (To Learn a New Thing)

Greetings, y'all! 👋😄

It's the end of another weekend, and nearly the end of January! I hope this month has treated y'all well. 😊

Work is going well. I'm finally finding my groove, and the quality of my deliverables is improving (not that they weren't decent quality to begin with, but there's always room for improvement 😉). I'm still struggling a bit with meeting deadlines, but even that is getting better. 

My healthcare provider and I met again recently to discuss how the ADHD meds are working out. At my previous appointment, we changed meds, and I found the new one had fewer side effects and seemed to be more suited to my needs. I felt that the dosage needed adjusting, though. It was "almost just right". At this latest appointment, my provider agreed and prescribed a different dosage for me to try for a month. I've been on the new dosage for almost a week, and I think this will be "just right". 🙌 

Earlier in 2023, the State of Louisiana, through the Louisiana Workforce Commission, partnered with Coursera to offer residents the opportunity to learn new skills and even get professional certifications through Coursera, at no cost, through the state's "Tech Ready Louisiana" program. I had seen commercials for the program, but hadn't looked into it until a coworker in Brazil talked about a Coursera course he was completing. The conversation reminded me about the commercials, so I looked up the program, and was delighted when I saw what was available. I signed up for the program and started browsing the course catalog to find courses that I thought would help me with my current job, as well as increase my chances of getting a better job in the future.

I started with a Microsoft Office 365 course to "get my feet wet" and upskill from what I already knew. My next course covered Excel, from basic to advanced, which really helped me understand how Excel can be used for more than just accounting. 

For my third course, I chose Google's Project Management course, which is a professional certificate course. I'm not sure what I was expecting from this one, but it's the first one that I've felt "meh" about. I'm not sure if it's because I don't find the material engaging enough, or if I'm just not feeling "project manager-y". I started the course in November, and I got through the first module, but with Thanksgiving and Christmas, plus the changes at work, I put it on the back burner and only went back to reset my deadlines. I decided yesterday to get back to it, since the holidays are past and things at work have calmed down some. I'm still feeling rather "meh" about it, but I'm committing to finish it.

While I was in Coursera, I decided to see if I could enroll in more than one course at a time, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that I could, so I went to my saved courses and enrolled in another Google professional certificate course: Data Analytics. 

This course seems to be more suited to my interests and learning style, and I'm excited to get started on it. 😊 

I started taking these courses before I started treatment for ADHD, so I'm curious to find out if I have an easier time learning and completing the graded assessments. In the previous courses, I did fairly well, but I struggled a bit with the Excel course's more advanced modules. I figured out early on that the problem was information retrieval, but without any kind of medication, all I could do was push through and hope for the best. Now that I'm getting treatment, I'm hoping to see a big improvement.  😊🤞

Now that 2024 is well underway, I feel good about the possibilities. 😊 I'm always optimistic about the future, though. 😄

Be blessed, and be a blessing! 😊

Megan

You Don't Have to Be Crazy to Work Here (But it Helps)

Greetings, y'all! 👋😄

It's the weekend again! 🎉🥳 I know I'm glad the week is over! 😌

I talked a bit about my job in a previous post, along with new responsibilities and more work. As we move into the third week of 2024, things are going a lot smoother. There are still a few wrinkles that need to be ironed out, but for the most part, my plan seems to be working out okay. 

Being an independent contractor and working from home has been interesting. There are many advantages - short commute, no dress code, I can pretty much set my own schedule, and I don't have to put on my "customer service" face. 

One disadvantage (aside from being responsible for all the employment taxes) is that it can be somewhat isolating working from home. Don't get me wrong, I'm not champing at the bit to start working in some office somewhere, but when your coworkers are scattered all over the globe, "socializing" is a bit more difficult.

Thankfully, my coworkers and I have Teams available to chat - I mean, collaborate. 😉 We do actually collaborate on tasks when it's necessary, but we also engage in "water cooler chat", and I've met some great people from all over the world. I have coworkers in Brazil, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Philippines, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mexico, and various places across the US, as well. I've also worked with folks in India, Sweden, and Myanmar. Not everyone is a chatterbox, but it's been nice to find out about other countries and cultures. I also get opportunities to share south Louisiana's culture (which even in the US can seem foreign 😄). 

Troy Landry from "Swamp People"

I've been blessed to have coworkers who aren't about workplace drama. Some of them have had the unfortunate experience of being subjected to bullying and outright hostility in the workplace, and they make it a point to try to foster a friendly, welcoming environment where disagreements are handled in a constructive manner. For the most part, it's been a success. 😊 It probably helps that we're all in our individual spaces and can just hit the X in the upper right corner of the screen if we get annoyed. 😉

My coworkers are some of the best people I've never met. 😄 We've been through a lot together these past few years, and we've shared our ups and downs with each other. We celebrate each others' victories, and we mourn each others' losses. We've made a pretty tight-knit team, and I'm thankful for each and every one of them.

Working from home is not for everyone, and not all work-from-home jobs offer the flexibility that mine does. I don't have to stay chained to my desk all day and look like I'm being productive (whether I am or not), and I have some freedom to work in a way that works best for me. I do still have some work to do on my time management skills (maybe if I didn't SOCIALIZE so much...), but that's improving with medication. 😄 I don't know if I'll always work from home, but I'll do it for as long as I possibly can.

Be blessed, and be a blessing! 😊   

Megan

  

Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)

Greetings, y'all! 👋😄

I'm going back in time with this post; back to when I was young and didn't have bills to pay, when $5 was gas money, and when MTV still played music videos.

When I was in early elementary school, I was a straight-A student, and by late elementary school, I was still making mostly As, with the occasional B grade on my report card (but they were very few and far between). I wasn't one of those kids who never had to study, but I didn't struggle to make good grades. I read well above my grade level, and I was really good at spelling. 😄 At that point, we were learning the very basics of math, and back then we learned "math facts" mostly by memorization. Once I got the math facts down, I did pretty well in that subject, too. 

By the time I got to high school, I was still making pretty good grades in everything but math (I got my first F, ever, on my report card in algebra, and I barely passed geometry). It was during this time that I discovered I might have ADHD.  

My reasoning for bringing this up is not to brag about how smart I was in school, but to highlight the fact that back then, a lot of kids who were struggling with ADHD fell through the cracks because they weren't disruptive in class, and they made good grades. Additionally, ADHD was thought of as a "boys' disorder", which meant that a lot of girls went untested and untreated. My younger brother displayed all the "classic" signs of ADHD by the time he was in 2nd grade, and the school recommended that my parents have him tested. He was diagnosed and started on medication, and the difference was night and day (he has other issues that weren't diagnosed until he was an adult, but that's a topic for another day). As it turned out, I was one of the "smart girl" kids who fell through the cracks due to the medical consensus at the time.

I didn't know it then, but by the time I reached adulthood, I figured out that my struggles with the more advanced math had very little to do with my intelligence, and a whole lot to do with my ability to organize, in my mind, the information I was being given.

Imagine a filing cabinet stuffed full of folders with papers sticking out here and there. There's some semblance of order, in that each folder's contents match the label on the folder, but there's no real organization in each folder. Each time you're given papers to file, you put them in the correct folder, but not necessarily in the correct order. Later on, when it's time to retrieve those papers, you know which folder to look in, but you have to sift through all the papers to find the ones you need, and by the time you finally find all the correct papers, you're given more papers to file, and the cycle continues. 

This is what I mean when I talk about the "noise" in my mind - all the information is there, but there's very little order, and I have to sift through all the random bits that are somewhat related before I can get to the important parts, and I need that information sorted and collated and ready now. An illustration:

It gets exhausting. 

Over the years, I've tried different strategies to manage my ADHD. Some have worked well, such as making a schedule and sticking to it. Others, like making lists, not so much. I've tried several "natural supplements" that claim to help you focus and deal with distractions - "herbal Ritalin" so to speak, but they didn't do a thing for me except lighten my wallet. What I found that does work for me is actual Ritalin, and since I've started taking it, it has made a big difference in how I feel and how my brain processes, stores, and retrieves information. My care provider and I are fine-tuning the dosage, but I feel like we're very close to what I call "just right".   

Be blessed, and be a blessing!

Megan

 

How'd I end up *here*, and how do I get *back*? (✨The Side Quest✨)

Greetings, y'all! 👋😁

In a previous post, I mentioned that I was almost caught by ✨The Side Quest✨ (yes, the sparkles are necessary), and how it's the main culprit in my poor time management issues. I wanted to expand on that a bit more here. 😊

Maybe you've heard someone say, "I fell down the rabbit hole." or "I followed a rabbit trail, and now I don't remember where I started." when talking about starting out on one thing and during the course of whatever it is they're doing, their attention moves to something else they see, so they follow that, and then something else grabs their attention so they follow that other thing, and so forth. 

If you've found yourself scrolling social media, and hours later you're on some obscure website that's totally unrelated to what you started out viewing, or if you're having a conversation with someone and find yourself going off on a tangent, congratulations! You've been hijacked by ✨The Side Quest✨! 

With the internet, it's very easy to start off in one place and follow links here and there until you're reading (or watching) something you may not even have known existed, or you've gotten a glimpse into the life of your best friend's cousin's sister's third ex husband's fourth wife's boyfriend's ex-father-in-law's cousin's youngest grandchild's aunt on his mother's side.

✨The Side Quest✨ has led me down some interesting paths online, and I've learned a lot of things (some of them useful) that I otherwise wouldn't have, had I not followed the rabbit trails. I've also had some really cool conversations (and met some really cool people) following conversational tangents. 😊 Unfortunately, there's a dark side to ✨The Side Quest✨ that takes a bit of shine off the sparkles; it can be a massive time suck. 😑

It's very frustrating to take the time to plan out a project and begin working on it, only to get sidetracked. What happens to me most often is that I'll think of something that is "project-adjacent" and jump to that, and then the cycle continues until I have a string of unfinished tasks behind me, and I've lost track of what I'd planned to do to begin with. My train of thought jumps the tracks a lot. 😑

In my work, I have defined tasks and deadlines, so I can't go wandering off with ✨The Side Quest✨ too far, but it still catches me now and then. For instance, I may be looking for a particular file, and I'll notice that the file directory is disorganized. Instead of getting the file I was after, I'll make new folders and organize the directory. Since it's shared, I have to notify others that the files are now in new folders. After that's done, then I'll see a message or two that I missed, so I'll catch up on messages, and by this time, an hour has passed, and I still haven't gotten the file I needed for the task I was on originally (whatever that was). Calgon, take me away! 😱

Since I've been on medication to treat my ADHD, ✨The Side Quest✨ hasn't been able to hijack me as often, but I've been able to recognize it sooner when it does, so it's a little easier to get back on task. My healthcare professional and I are still working out which medication and dosage is the most effective to manage the symptoms without overmedicating. I feel like we're very close to the "sweet spot". 

For so many years, I struggled and tried to cope with ADHD, figuring it was too late to do anything about it, since I'm not a kid or a teen (or even a young adult) any more. It wasn't until I read personal stories from people around my age (and a few who are older) who sought a diagnosis and treatment, and got it, that I saw a glimmer of hope that maybe it wasn't too late. And here we are today. 😊

Be blessed, and be a blessing! 😊

Megan

Out With the Old (And In With the New)

Greetings, y'all! 👋😄 

As I write this, it's 10 minutes until midnight on December 31, 2023. We decided to spend New Year's Eve at home this year instead of going out. None of us are really in a "party" mood, and it's cheaper to stay home than it is to go out. 😉 

Looking back on 2023, I can say that we had a pretty good year (for the most part). We definitely had more ups than downs, and after back-to-back years with major hurricanes hitting Louisiana, it was a welcome relief when no storms threatened us this year. 🙌 Our youngest child turned 21 this year, and hubby and I marked 30 years of marriage. 👰🤵💞 

I'm looking forward to what 2024 brings. 😊 I'm sure there will be highs and lows, just like every other year. My prayer for 2024 is that whatever storms (literal or figurative) come our way, we'll weather them and emerge on the other side with the strength to keep going forward, and that I am able to continue to make personal progress in the areas of my life that need improvement. 🙏 

Out with the old, in with the new! Happy New Year! 

Be blessed, and be a blessing! 😊