12 for growth

january 21st was national hug day. if you missed it, i suggest dropping what you are doing and go make up for lost time (in a COVID safe way, that is). a family therapist once said, we need 4 hugs a day for survival, 8 for maintenance and 12 for growth. i am not near the correct threshold but consider myself lucky regarding the caliber of huggers i've encountered in my lifetime. next to my mom and my child who are both naturally gifted in this area, i list (in no particular order) my beloved geener, my beloved lizzie, my beloved uncle megan, my beloved trashley, my beloved kellie, my beloved tracy, my beloved annie, my beloved brigit, my beloved josh, my beloved kenny, the list goes on and on, really. thinking about this got me thinking about just the quality of friendships i have had from all different walks of life, enthusiastic hugger or avoidant hugger alike and just damn, i was born under a lucky star.

then all this loving positivity got me thinking about my own friendship with myself and well, insert record scratch here. yeaaaaahhhhh...gonna need some work there. never mind, let me just download a bunch of memes instead. alright fine. i'll work on myself. it is the year of the great selenie after all. truthfully, i've been in therapy for a long time because mama is an anxious, tightly wound, flighty little bird. but this week, we're kicking it up a notch by starting EMDR. EMDR stands for eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing and is useful in managing PTSD. really it's just a fancy way of saying, i'm retraining my brain and body to respond to stress in a healthy way, instead of crying excessively in the shower which is apparently frowned upon and also getting expensive. as part of my preparation for this next step, i was tasked to come up with 4 resource team members to recall when the emotions become too much: a peaceful place, a wisdom figure, a protective figure, and a nurturing figure. and while my dog fury checks all the boxes for the last three resources, i think i will just imagine myself hugging my friends and that should get me through it.

you know what else will get me through it? music. oh man, i love music so much. i know spotify has its issues but i'm going to be a good little capitalist right now and ignore those issues to say how much i appreciate and am mystified by their predictive algorithms. they predicted i would enjoy a random japanese jazz band named jizue. and holy smokes, i do. then, after listening to jizue obsessively for the past two days, another japanese band was suggested and now i've been listening to them pretty much non-stop since midnight last night. they have an unfortunate name, toe. that's it. just, toe. but one of their album titles is fire: the book about my idle plot on a vague anxiety. incredible, right? my kind of people. it just makes me wish i could read japanese to know the other titles. but their drummer, kashikura takashi, might be inching his way into my top 10, maybe even top 5. and i am more motivated than ever to practice my drumming - on muted practice pads, of course. we have a small house, there's not room to set up my actual kit. but someday we will miraculously make space and then, hoo boy. watch me (please don't, i have incredible stage fright. avert your eyes, I SAID AVERT!)

with that i leave you a song,





and your found item of the day:

well, i feel attacked.