Living

My air conditioner lost its cool this week. It blew room temperature air and not cold air for the whole week until someone could come out and fix it.

For a Fibro sufferer, the temp around them can really affect how they feel. For me, heat is a no-no. It saps my energy quicker than anything. So I spent the whole week devising ways to keep cool in my own house.

Thankfully, it is fixed now, and I am back to living in a cooler house.

But with an extra two days off this week due to the July 4th holiday, I spent a lot of time in my house just trying to stay cool. There was a lot of reading and contemplating because both of those require minimal movement and I would stay cooler that way.

Some of that contemplating was because I just lost a friend. I think when you go through a loss like that, you look at that person’s life, and you think about your own life too. It is almost a forced reflection.

This week also included meeting up with friends and chatting. A memorial event where I saw people I haven’t seen in 20-25 years. And lots and lots of talking about the loss and the life of my friend.

So, while I was sitting in my house trying to stay cool, I was reflecting on all of that.

It was hard to think of my friend because he lived life so fully, and I often feel like I am not really living my life fully. I will often stay away from events because of crowds or traffic. Even today, I am trying to convince myself to go to a football game, even though the seats won’t be great, the traffic will be crazy, and there will be a large crowd. Because I love college football and I really do enjoy watching it. But it is taking some convincing for sure.

I just really started thinking about how I live my life and what makes me happy over these last few days.

I realized a few things.

1. Familiarity is what makes us comfortable. If I think back to how I was when I was growing up, I spent a lot of time alone. I often played alone because there weren’t a lot of kids in my neighborhood. I learned to love books in the fourth grade and would spend days alone reading. It made me very comfortable being alone. So now, I love spending time alone. Spending a day by myself reading a book makes me happy.
2. Living your best life doesn’t mean you have to be doing something all the time. I don’t have to be going to tailgate parties or concerts all the time to be living my best life. My best life might include a trip to a cabin for the weekend to just disconnect or might just be watching a kiddo enjoy the heck out of themselves while playing a game. Or, it might just be sitting on my patio watching the dragonflies in the evening. Everything I do doesn’t need to include a Facebook post with pictures of what just happened.
3. Comparison lies to me. This is really the truth. When I start comparing my life to other people’s lives, I lose. Because my life will never be their life. There are so many different circumstances in everyone’s life that I should never be comparing what I am doing to what others are doing. This is the hardest thing for me to do, especially with social media, but I find that if I don’t compare, I am happier.

So, I made a decision to do things that make me happy in my life. This will be how I live my life to the fullest. Even if it means I just read three books in a weekend, I am living my life in a way that makes me happy, and that is all I can do. I am going to stop beating myself up for not doing all the things I see people doing on Facebook or Instagram. I will be a work in progress, but I am going to try very hard just to be me.

I hope that you too will figure out what helps you just to be you and be happy. Go, do those things! I wish you all the happiness in the world. 🙂