Recovering Girl

Oh, my darling peoples, I don't know what I'd do without you.  Your kind words never fail to make me feel better.  I love you all for taking the time to leave comments, most especially when I'm feeling tender (like I have been lately).  Your good words are helping me get through my rough patches and I wish I could express just how much that means to me...much more than even a blabber mouth like me can say.

To be truthful, I'm still feeling tender.  Someone at work today asked if I was feeling ok because I was so pale.  I love my emotions (at last), but they seem to be taking a toll on me.  I am really looking forward to Thanksgiving because I'll get a four-day weekend...I'm so, so ready for a four-day weekend.  I plan to sleep...and possibly make homemade sugar cookies with colorful icing...and then eat all of said sugar cookies by myself...but I'm also lazy, so maybe just the sleep part will prevail.  Sleep and art...yeah, that sounds like a winner...

I made another page in my Gregg journal.  At first I thought it was another depressing one...but I was staring at it for a while this morning and decided that it's actually more encouraging than I first gave it credit for:

She's more than just an injured girl.

I realized that there are a lot of things in this spread that look hopeful to me...subconscious hope is happening.  I realized that I painted the background green...green is my favorite color...I wouldn't put so much blatant green into something sad, because green is a happy color for me.  Then the flowers...stylized flowers in full bloom...another happy thing for me.  And even though the poor girl has some kind of brain injury, it's being treated.  She doesn't have some horrible, gaping wound (I don't know that I could draw a horrible, gaping wound...even if I wanted to...), she's starting to heal.

Looking at this recovering girl, I started thinking about all the things in my life I'm happy about.  I blame Deborah Weber for making me remember to be glad about good things...she's spending the month doing an abecedarium (which is a big word for an alphabetical list...I love big words...) on different aspects of gratitude.  You can read her blog HERE.  

While I mentally fight with myself about using the word "gratitude" (it's a long story), I have no qualms about taking the time to think about things in my life that I feel happy to experience.  Since I've felt so negative lately, I thought maybe it would be good to share a few of the positives too...gotta make sure to keep the balance, right?

Today's happy thoughts:

• Sugar cookies with colorful icing...ok, delicious cookies in general...
• which leads me to delicious food in general...Sunday, my husband and I made Oven Stew...I'm glad about Oven Stew...I'd be even more glad if there had been left-overs...but I digress...
• Big, fancy words...
• I'm glad to have art and other creative things in my life...that's an every single day glad thing for me.
• I'm happy to have met wonderful and supportive people who share my love of creative things.
• I'm glad to have the internet...which is really a creative tool for me...it gives me inspiration from others, lets me find out how to do things (tutorials/patterns), lets me veg out when I need to...let's me share my art and my words with people who care about the same things...people who make me feel special...I really love the internet...
• I'm glad to have four-day weekends...especially now that I have a job that actually pays me for them!
• I'm really happy that some stranger left a really great dog at my house for no reason...Fusco (or as he is affectionately known now Fuss-butt) is too awesome...I'll never understand why they left him, but I'll always be happy that they did.
• I'm happy about milk.  I don't know what it is with me recently, but I've been drinking milk like nobody's business.  I swear I could drink my weight in milk every day if I didn't restrain myself...right now I'm going through a gallon every two-three days.  I don't know why I want it so bad, but egads, am I happy about milk right now.
• I'm happy I've felt truly loved by good people, in the past and currently.
• I'm happy about music...that's another every day happy thing...
• I'm glad I've got my brain...it's weird and random, completely fun and completely terrifying...(occasionally those two things at the same time!)...I like that I don't always think how other people think.

That's not the whole list, but it's a good start for sure...I guess another thing I should add to the list is that I'm happy I have so many things to be genuinely happy about....yes, I really am GENUINELY happy about milk right now!  Despite the fact that I'm tender and sad and angry, I can still see so many positives.  It's not all doom and gloom.  Sure there's some mushy stuff rolling around in my brain, but it's got a lot of competition from bright, shiny, fantastic things, little things and big things too.  

What about you?  What are you happy to have in your life today?