Friday, March 11, 2011

sucking out the juice - upper downer

I was writing a letter to a friend and I used this phrase to explain how I thought we both like to experience life... we both want to suck the juice out of life. Regrettably it doesn't always happen the way we want it to and we whine just as much as anybody about the unfairness of it all. ... but overall we both enjoy life. I think we all go through phases of being happy with our lives and being disheartened by them.

(I like this musician - Joshua Radin... & this is a great song/video)

So what do you do when you're feeling down and traumatized by life? I started writing this entry about a week ago when I was feeling high off of life. But now I've come full circle and I'd started feeling blue. But today I'm back to "normal" again. Not high and not low. Even keel. Which is good. I noticed when I started feeling differently and I've been trying to pay attention to what it is that's making my emotions change. I've noticed that as I've gotten older I can pinpoint changes in my body as well as my mood. My body is starting to stabilize (finally! it's been feeling like a teenager for years!!!) ... I can't say the same for my mood though. I don't think it's capable of stabilizing.

So after paying attention to my changing mood I think I pinpointed a couple things...
1. a few of my close friends have been feeling blue lately & maybe it rubbed off a bit 
2. i'm mad that my job isn't doing a better job of training me & it's making me feel useless
3. money. of course.
4. during my CASA training sessions I'm feeling like people don't value my input

I think that all of these combined (except for $) is keeping me from having a genuine connection with another person. In my classes & training we're learning about Active Listening, Motivational Interviewing, and Successful Communication Techniques... Ok... the point is to make sure the other person feels heard. I think I do that pretty darn well. But I've been feeling like no one is hearing ME. And every time I bring up something in my training or class sessions it seems like I get blown off. I need someone to listen to me. So what happens is after a few times of being cut off I just shut down and don't offer any input at all because no one's listening. Which in turn makes me feel crummy, but I'm not one to butt into something if no one is paying attention to me. 

So that's WHY I've been feeling like that. But last night during work I had a nice chat with one of the overnight girls. She was very nice and is also still pretty new like me, so we had some fun griping about all the things that we think are going wrong in our job :) It was nice because we both listened to each other, especially nice that she listened to me. I felt heard and valued, and I hope that she did too. 

I think it's important to figure out WHY you feel bad when you do. How can you get around it if you don't know what it is? And if it's something that you can't do anything about, at least you know it and can work on accepting it. So that's my big advice. 

What I need to know is... if what you need is something from someone else how do you get that? How do you get someone to give you what you need? Like a listening ear, without outright telling them "HEY! I need you to listen to me!"