(My Not Kidding Face after a night shift)
I don’t consider reading people one of my gifts. When I need to, I can really tune in – and as a nurse, I have to tune into my patients in order to figure out things they won’t or can’t tell me with words.
With friends and acquaintances, I pull it together for conversation as often as I can. But I find this type of interpretation exhausting.
Sometimes, especially when I am tired or distracted, I can’t muster the energy needed to read folks and so I wind up feeling like I’ve missed something, without knowing quite what. I can sense a disruption in the Force, so to speak, but can’t tell what is causing it.
That happened this morning.
Why is it easier to respond graciously to criticism when the person dispensing it isn’t close to us?
The ones who are most qualified to criticize, and do it with our best interest in mind, aren’t those acquaintances and even strangers who feel the need to make known how they feel about us and the way we choose to live. They are our loved ones, and if it isn’t safe for them to speak up when we’re not doing something right, then it might be time to re-examine priorities.
After I logged out of FB for the last time in mid December, I had a growing feeling that it was for good. I had a few false starts, but the headlines about social media’s role in our culture confirmed what I knew – that FB and I needed to break up for good.
I had it all planned out.
I was going to log in one final time, download my archive, and delete my account. I even did a search ahead of time so I would know what I was doing and wouldn’t have to spend any more time than was necessary on my account.
When I look at that face, I don’t see the face of a warrior. A survivor, maybe.
I was going to share my birth stories here.
One of the ways I got ready for having my babies was reading other people’s stories. I especially enjoyed the ones where the woman would feel a little “off”, and then deliver a baby 15 minutes later.
(Photo Credit: Kimona Paramour Photography)
The end of our trip to Tobago was amazing. It’s easy to be adventurous when your time is limited. I can be up for anything with only 72 hours left to go. Until we have our plane tickets in hand for our next trip, which we hope to make in about a year, we can’t know for sure when we’ll be back.
Every chance we have to do something special needs to be grabbed and squeezed for all it’s worth. We can recover when we get home.
