Samantha Lyons

I’ve been doing a ton of thinking about getting out of the sludge.

If you didn’t read my last blog, “the sludge” is when you’re just bogged
down and exhausted and irritated by the seemingly unavoidable annoyances that
life throws at us. (I’m sure I haven’t lost you yet.)

But, here’s the thing, every single day we have decisions to make for
ourselves that either make us feel good or make us feel like crap.

A few months ago, I went to the doctor for an annual visit. Doctor comes in.
She’s like, “How are you? How is everything going?”

I said, “I’m good! Everything’s great! But, I did want to ask you about
a few things… I’ve been getting more anxious lately. I find myself more on
edge. I’m having headaches almost every day, too. I know they say not to
google, but basically I either need to medicate for anxiety or I’ve got six
months to live.”

So she goes, “Hmmm… what’s your day-to-day like?”

So I unload all of the absolute chaos of my everyday life. Between work
emails and grocery shopping and phone calls and laundry and playing with my
kids and making sure bills get paid and getting everyone where they need to go
and texting people back and planning what to freaking eat.

So she says, “Sounds like anyone would be stressed. Most people I see
every day are saying the same exact types of things. What are you doing for
you?”

…

…

UH, you mean in all my available free time?

Long story short, I went to my car, I wept, and I decided I REJECT feeling
this way.

So I immediately went to the drawing board.

Which is when I had this hysterical thought that helps me, and I hope you
can get something from it, too.

You are an adult now.

You are the one who decides how this is gonna go.

Want to stay up late and drink vodka cranberries and sleep in until noon?
You’ve got the green light.

Want to watch netflix for 7 hours straight and skip work? Party on.

Do you want to be the miserable person everyone dreads dealing with at work?
You can be that!

It’s frightening because we are the gate-keepers to the kind of life we are
going to have. We get opportunities to make choices that are for us or against
us.

What a profound thought that we get to choose what we do with this one
miraculously beautiful life we’ve been given.

Okay, so rewind. I’m in the car outside the doctor’s office weeping and I’m
about to decide to make radical changes.

I have four kids, so there are shoes everywhere, juice boxes, dirt from the
soccer field caked into the carpet of my mini van. Clutter stresses me out, so
I’m looking around about to throw the car in drive and watch as it plummets off
a cliff.

Then I looked at my passenger seat, and I saw  a drawing my son Hudson made at school. It was our family. Six little smiling circle heads with straight lines coming
straight out from the bottom of the circles for legs. Red hearts all over.

Then by my feet I noticed my husband’s flip flops were there. He drove my car
all weekend, and he must have forgotten them when we got home late from the
soccer tournament we spent the weekend enjoying.

You see, the shoes, the juice boxes, the dirt grinded into my carpet? That’s
because I GET TO spend weekends with my family, in the sun, watching little
kids kick soccer balls. It’s the life I chose, that I would choose over and
over again.

It’s all about perspective. Whatever season your in. You get a compilation of what you choose day to day.

I can choose to look around and let the mess make me physically itchy until
I’m sensory overload and grumpy as hell or I can consciously remember what an
absolute gift it is that I chose this world that came with four sons, and I get
to live in it, and the package deal is DIRT- and lots of it.

There are always going to be parts of the deal that aren’t sweet, but when
we are choosing what feels good for us over and over again, we wind up in a
spot where the crappy parts can be pardoned because we wrote the story.

And so, in my filthy mini van, in that moment, it clicked to me. I do not
have to be every single thing every single moment. I am a FREAKING adult, and I
get to decide what I’m okay with and where I am going to draw lines for myself.

I drove along the road with Tracy Chapman, “Fast Car” blasting and I mentally
made some decisions.

Because I am an ADULT, and I get to choose.

The next day, my alarm went off at 5 am. I drank water with lemon. I spent time with my husband. I meditated. I wrote in my journal. I worked out. I had breakfast with my kids. And then I did all the normal stuff I would have typically done right
away- the mundane. And then I did that again and again and again.

I decided I’m a grown up now, and I have one life to live. I reject the
notion that I will work from sun up to sun down and be annoyed by people to the
point of hair loss.

And do you know what? Ever since I made this decision,

The sky is bluer. The song birds are chirping when I open my front door. People are smiling at me. The soccer field dirt is more tolerable.

Maybe you’re beaming and ready to knock off your own sludge or maybe you’re
cringing at the impossibility of pure contentment and joy.

You’re an adult now, mate!

You can choose.