The Cup

Sometimes in life, the cup is half-empty, sometimes it is half-full, sometimes it runneth-over, and sometimes it is bone dry. I’d like to say it is all in a person’s perspective, but I don’t really believe that. I do, however, believe that sometimes, life hands a person a set of circumstances and those circumstances define themselves and all the person can do is deal with the cup they are dealt. That is not always a negative thing, but it is not always positive either. It all depends on what is in the cup and what you do with it.

Tag: love

  • Post #10: 8/7/25

    Post #10: 8/7/25

    Cup Status: Filling Up, But Confused About Why

    So, I’ve really been thinking lately about why I feel more comfortable and like myself when I am busy and have deadlines and am, for lack of a better word, stressed. Why is it that I seem to thrive on stress? Why is my baseline for normal filled with a racing heart, shallow breathing, a pounding headache, and reminders to just breathe? The closer I get to the start of school, the closer I get to all of the deadlines, the more alive I feel. This just feels weird. I was in a therapy session recently and my therapist gave me a deck of cards that had different words that represent needs on them such as “valued” and “loved” and “respected” and others such as “creative” and “financial security”. He asked me to organize them however I wanted to in order to categorize them to show where those needs are currently being met, at least according to me. I decided on three categories: family/home, friends, and work. I started putting cards in piles and it soon became apparent that I have most of my needs met at work. When I looked closer at the needs that are being met at work, I realized that many of them could, and probably should, be met in different ways in my personal life, if only I let them. But then, I hear my therapist saying, don’t should all over your life. So instead, I will say, that I will be finding other ways to meet the needs that work is currently the only place that is meeting them. For example, “creativity.” I used to love scrapbooking, but I haven’t done it in 15 years despite having all of the supplies to enjoy the hobby. “Growth” is another need that gets met at work, but at home, I am not sure where I can grow at home. I am looking for ways to do this, besides literally growing food in my garden. The problem is, shifting my mindset and trying to live this different way seems impossible. I don’t even know where to start or how to do this. So, I do what I do best and I start researching. As a starting point, here is what I have found so far thanks to the article “CALM IS A CHOICE – STRESS IS A CHOICE”(https://martawilson.com/calm-is-a-choice/), “The brain chemicals that generate enthusiasm for a challenge are different from those that generate fear of a threat. And in many cases, whether we experience enthusiasm or fear is a matter of choice. We can choose attitudes that challenge, motivate and mobilize us, and that bring out the best in us. In other words, we can circumvent the fight or flight impulse by choosing to feel neither. How? By changing how we think.” It’s that idea of choosing how to think that confuses me. We can choose a new attitude. But, sometimes when we are in the middle of the stressful situation or the challenge facing us is so daunting, that can seem impossible. It is, however, something that I am going to actively try because I hope to get to where this next portion describes, “Eventually, we learn how to choose so our bodies don’t click into a fight or flight response at all. When we take responsibility for our assumptions, we begin to break the cycle of stress and become free to face seeming threats with energy and enthusiasm. What’s required is a conscious mental shift in how we view our world. What’s required is a change in attitude.” Not everything requires fight or flight. I need to remember that. A challenge can be exciting. It doesn’t have to soul crushing or migraine inducing, right? This will definitely be an uphill climb, but I am going to try to begin it with a positive attitude.

  • Post #9: 8/4/25

    Post #9: 8/4/25

    Cup Status: It’s Complicated

    As the summer winds down and the days pass faster and faster, I see the beginning of another school year looming closer and closer. It isn’t that I am not excited for another year. It isn’t that I don’t want to meet my new students. It is just that this summer has been so weird for me and I am finally getting to a point where I am feeling like myself. You see, most teachers will tell you that it takes weeks before they can fully relax. The “I should be grading or planning something” reflex doesn’t just turn off like flipping a switch when I left the building for the summer. Then, we were still getting settled into our house, so I spent time working on that. Unpacking the last of the boxes and working on the yard in between crazy rainfalls. I wanted to take the kids to fun places and have a staycation of sorts, but I just couldn’t seem to get myself to follow through on any of the ideas that I came up with. I couldn’t seem to muster the energy. When we did go somewhere, I found myself having a panic attack or feeling so overwhelmed that I couldn’t enjoy myself. I am not sure if it was suppressed emotions surfacing from March and all that happened when my husband nearly died or if it was just the stresses of the school year winding down and surfacing. I don’t know if it was just the general struggles of life. I don’t know if it was all of it combined. But, this summer has felt like me walking through a fog and not being able to enjoy myself. But, now that my days of “freedom” are almost over, I am finally finding a way to enjoy the little things. Walking in my neighborhood, the beautiful weather, yoga, grilling, writing these blog entries, finding a treasure in a thrift shop. It seems like, I don’t feel fully present until I have no time left. It is a procrastination of joy. It is as if I can’t enjoy life unless there is some kind of timeline telling me when. I don’t know if I even know how to live my life without stress and deadlines in it. It is almost as if the lack of them, takes away part of my joy and that seems so wrong and backwards. I am less productive when I have more time even though accomplishing tasks usually brings me joy, the joy of a job well done. I am less energetic when I am getting more sleep and I find it near impossible to wake up early, even with setting multiple alarms. I find that I eat less healthy when I have all the time to devote to healthy eating. The same goes for physical activity. I love to walk and hike and do yoga, but this summer, I could barely make myself take a step outside. When school is in session, I find that I eat healthier because I meal prep and snack prep and can only eat what I bring with me to work or have ready. I walk after school at the park on the days when I don’t have meetings. I get up early on Saturday and hike at the park when I am able to. I have less time, so I get projects done on the weekends or at night in between making dinner or getting outfits ready for the next day, etc. I may be tired from getting up early and working all day and then being a mom when I get home, but I sleep well and feel pretty energetic. The funny thing is, I have the highest levels of stress and busyness of the full year, yet I feel the most alive and the most accomplished and dare I say…the happiest. There clearly must be something wrong with me if I feel happiest when I am at my least relaxed, right? When I am relaxed, I feel lost and confused. I don’t even recognize myself in the summer, but I do wonder if maybe she is the side of me who I need to discover more. Who is this relaxed person? How can I be more comfortable in her skin? How can I feel more alive when I am her? My goals going into this school year, for myself, are to deep breathe, continue yoga, continue these blog posts, get quality sleep, and make sure that I am taking time to relax whenever possible. I want to do my best to embrace relaxation. To be as low stress as possible. Daily would be the dream. On my laptop, I have a sticker that says, “If not now, when?” That is going to be my mantra, spoken kindly to myself and with minimal pressure. But for now, I am entering the home stretch. The phase I call “school nesting” where I finish as many projects as I can and meal prep as much as I can and wash all of the clothes and linens that I can and basically make sure that my home is in as much order as it can be before the crazy time starts. On the school side, I am prepared. I am always prepared for that, but it is so much harder to prepare your home and family for the inevitable transition back to school. But, ready or not, here it comes.

    *The photo is my classroom on the first day back this summer before school starts. Before any of the boxes are unpacked or any of the drawers in my desk are refilled with supplies.

  • Post #2: 7/27/25

    Post #2: 7/27/25

    Cup Status: Runneth Over

    There are some people who enter our lives for a short period of time, a chapter if you will. Then there are those who are there for a lifetime, an epic poem, a series of novels that you never want to end. This is the case with my group of friends. We have been friends since roughly 2000. With some forming the core earlier and some joining slightly later. But the reality is that we have been friends for 25 years. That is amazing. We have seen each other through transitioning from high school to college. Our fledgling steps into adulthood when we learned and failed and learned some more how to pay bills and cook and date and fall in love and heal from heartbreak and hangovers and bad haircuts and dye jobs. We made midnight runs to Walmart and 3:00 am runs to Krispy Kreme doughnuts 3 hours away because that was the closest one. We shared so many firsts with each other in our 20’s and then our 30’s and now our 40’s. To say that I love this group of women is an understatement. They are my people. I never have to explain myself to them. I can be myself around them. I can say whatever I need to without a preface or an apology that diminishes me. They see me and understand me and get me. They always have my back. This weekend I got to enjoy a few hours with my people. It was exactly what I needed. It filled my cup.

    We gathered together at one of the friend’s houses and ate snacks and talked. It was heavy talk at first. Several of us are going through some things. We talked about one of us moving away soon. That is going to be a difficult transition even though we are so happy for her. We talked about the beauty and sadness of preparing to send your only child off to her first year of college. The what if’s of the future and the free time in the fall that is to come. We talked about our various childhoods and the concerns we have over our aging parents, one of us in particular worried about next steps in daily care. We talked about the stresses of our jobs and wishing we could come up with a better way for things to run, but we came up short. And I talked about my recent panic attack. I had never had one before that I knew of, but I had one the night before and it struck me hard. It started with heart palpitations (I have been having them a few times a week for a month now). Then my arms and legs started going numb. Then I felt light-headed. But, I checked my pulse and my oxygen level and everything was normal, so I sat down and told myself that this was temporary. I counted five things I could see, four things I could touch, etc. until my heart rate returned to normal and the crying stopped. I sat there after it ended and felt exhausted and rung out. The weird thing is that before it started, I had been sitting down, watching my current distraction, Grey’s Anatomy and working on curriculum for the school year when it began. I had not felt stressed or anxious or worried about anything. Actually, it was quite the opposite. I was coming up with a creative idea for the lesson that I was writing and it was really exciting. But then, bam. I was panicking. What was the cause? I didn’t know.

    My people understood. They were there with words of comfort and suggestions to help when another one happens because it probably will. I don’t know what has brought on the anxiety recently, but my girls had some ideas and we talked through them for the next little bit. I feel like, without them, I would be lost. Those moments of connection and understanding and most importantly, no judgement, are everything to me. We ended the night at a restaurant eating chips and salsa and enjoying margaritas and laughing until we cried tears of joy. I will never look at chimpanzees and vultures or the Great Wall of China the same again, but that is why I love these girls. They are my people and they fill my cup when it is bone dry. My wish for everyone is that they too will find their people or at least their person who can do the same for them.

  • Post #1: 6/9/25

    Post #1: 6/9/25

    Status: Cup is half-full

    I went walking today for the first time in months. I love to walk. Around tracks at the park. Along trails in the woods. On the streets of my neighborhood. By waterways. I love walking. When I am walking, I feel like I find myself. I do my best thinking while walking. My best epiphanies happen. Best comeback lines. Best first lines of chapters of novels I may never write. But, for the past few months  I haven’t gone walking. For the past few months instead of finding myself, I have been losing myself. Slowly, but surely. I was there and then I wasn’t. It was such a gradual change that I didn’t even realize it was happening until one day, I found myself picking up a book to read and I just didn’t care about it. This is strange for me because I love to read. Or, at least, I used to. I used to devour books. I could sit down all day and read a book from cover to cover. But recently, I would read a few pages and then lay the book down and stare off at nothing. I love to plan. I love to plan a party. A vacation. An organization project. Anything. But, lately, I would start the planning phase of the project and lose interest before I had even gathered my notebook and pen. I used to love to menu plan and try new recipes, but…you see where this is going. What happened to me? Where have I gone? These have been the questions circling around in my mind for the last few months and I am no closer to answering them now than I was then. A lot has happened in my life recently, and that has contributed to these feelings, but I need to get back on track. 

    So, what has happened? 

    March 31st. I woke up and got the kids ready for school. Everything was going according to plan except that my husband was sick. He was staying home from work and had been planning on going to Urgent Care later that day. We thought he might have bronchitis because his coworker had it the week before. However, when I went to say bye to him before leaving for work, I couldn’t wake him up. This was the single most terrifying moment of my life. I shook him. I yelled his name. That’s when I noticed he had thrown up. He was sweating profusely. And, as I shook him, his breathing became very labored. He opened his eye-lids slightly and that’s when I saw how yellow the whites of his eyes were and that his eyes were rolled back in his head. I yelled for my oldest son to bring me my phone because it was in the other room. I panicked and my first thought was, “Call school because you will need a sub today.”  Ok. Full stop. My husband was unresponsive and my first thought was, “I need to call work.” What is wrong with me? Why was that my first thought? I had even opened my phone app and pulled up the school’s number before I shook my head and said out loud to myself, “No, Call 911 first.” The irony is that my student’s were currently reading Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and I had never more identified with the character of Gregor than I did at that moment. No, I had not turned into a human-sized bug, but when Gregor woke up completely transformed, his first thought was that he had missed the train to work and that he was going to miss the next one as well. He completely overlooked the fact that he was a freaking human-sized bug…with an exoskeleton and antennae, and a million legs…I feel like that would be the thing I would be worried about before work. Yet, here I was, staring at my version of a human-sized bug and all I could think about was work. At a later time, when things were more stable, I wondered what that says about us and about the conditioning that humans have undergone over the years that in our most emotionally vulnerable state, we think, not of ourselves, but of our jobs. Don’t get me wrong, I love my career. I love where I work. I’m a teacher. Are there days I question the choices of my 18 year old self? Yes. But that would be true of any career choice I had made. Are there days when I want to yell at my high school students, “Please, just trust me on this one! You will see that I am right, one of these days.” Yes, but I don’t. 

    But, my husband was dying in front of me, and all I could think of was work. This is partly when I began to realize that I had lost myself. When the ambulance arrived, I comforted my son, called my mother-in-law, called my mom or my sister (I can’t remember which was first), I messaged my group of best friends, and I texted my in-laws’ church prayer group. I needed my village around me because I was starting to realize that I wasn’t strong enough on my own. This was another sign that I was lost. I could always weather any storm. I am strong. I am enough. I can do anything on my own. But, I couldn’t do this. I watched as the paramedics tried to get a response from my husband. I waited anxiously with my mother-in-law and son for updates as they stabilized and prepped him in the ambulance for transport. I held it together as best I could. Like a true Hufflepuff, I got my mother-in-law a sweater. I got her coffee. I soothed my son. I answered texts and calls. People asked what I needed, as if I knew. My husband might be dead any minute. I had no idea what I needed. Usually I have all of the answers. But, I didn’t right then. And I didn’t for the next two weeks. Thankfully, my mom, dad, sisters, and brother knew what I needed more than I did. So did several members of my in-laws’ church and my best friends. Within hours, as my husband was eventually air-lifted to a hospital much further away, I was surrounded by family and friends, while more friends and family were taking care of my kiddos, and within days so many people had come together to help us with food and financial donations. I was overwhelmed with grief at the unstable status of my husband, overwhelmed with gratitude at the outpouring of love we were receiving, and overwhelmed at what the future would hold. I am not one to ask for help, so this was really hard to receive and accept, but that was another part of losing myself. 

    You see, my parents divorced when I was 9 and I took on quite a bit of responsibility around the house at a young age. I am not blaming or shaming them here; I understand now, as a parent, that they were doing the best they could with what they had at the time. But, this did teach me to be responsible and to be self-sufficient, sometimes to a fault. I will often, finagle things to work out in the short term (without having to ask for help) even if it is not the best idea in the long run…here’s looking at you pay-day loan that I got in my 20’s…So, when Jamie, my husband, was unresponsive, I went numb. I couldn’t function. I didn’t know what to do. You can’t finagle this. All I could do was wait and I am not a patient person. 

    The other reason that asking for help was so difficult is because many of the people who were so generous and giving were from my in-laws’ church. I could say from my church or Jamie’s church, but that is no longer true. Jamie went to that church from before he was born up until 2021. I know that I am the reason he no longer goes. I went with him from the time we started dating until 2021, for a total of 15 years. We hadn’t attended that church, or any church, since November of 2021. I had been trying to step away for personal reasons for quite some time and it was around my birthday in 2021, that I decided it was time. For my sake, I had to make the split. If anyone from that church reads this, I miss the people (well, most of the people) so much, but church and God and I are not on the best of terms. I won’t go into it more here, because that is a whole series of separate posts for the future, I’m sure. But, receiving help from wonderful people, who our absence had confused and hurt, was difficult and humbling. This also caused me to lose some of myself, my pride. I needed help. I accepted it. I didn’t know how to say thank you for it. I couldn’t adequately express my thankfulness. I still can’t months later. 

    Through this difficult process of my husband’s hospitalization, I’ve come to realize that in losing parts of myself, I’m gaining a wiser version of me. I can loosen the tie to work where it is so all-encompassing in my thoughts. I thought that I had a good work-life balance, but I think it is still a bit out of whack. I can lose some of my control and admit that I don’t know what I need and let others take the reins from time to time (here’s looking at you, Elizabeth, my amazing student teacher during this trying time). It is ok to not be in control all the time. I can lose some of my pride and ask for and receive help. I can also lose some clarity and realize that I am still a work in progress. If the vision of myself in the mirror isn’t always clear, that’s ok too, because I am an ever-growing, ever-changing person. I am continuing to battle loss of interest, but I did begin writing and I walked three miles today, so the cup is half full. Tomorrow, we will see. 

    BTW: Jamie was in a coma for a week. He had a perfect storm of symptoms that caused him to have heart failure, but after two weeks in the hospital and keeping up with doctor’s visits and medication, he is on the long road to recovery.