Since my last post (3 months ago) I have been dealing with a lot of negative emotions. I don’t know if starting therapy in March unearthed some things I need to deal with, if these feelings and thoughts stem from my MS and its constant battle against my body or what spurred this episode. I have really been struggling to find joy in the every day things. Jeremy and I have both been at our wit’s end trying to navigate these stormy waters. The average person has over 6,000 thoughts a day. I would say 75% of my thoughts have been negative or focused on my health. Jeremy asked me to get in touch with our PCP and get back on an antidepressant. I fought this hard and felt like a failure in my journey needing them. However, these negative thoughts and feelings were drowning me, so I acquiesced.
However, before beginning the medication, Jeremy and I had the opportunity to spend three nights and two full days with friends seeing one of our favorite bands — Phish. A Phish show is not for everyone, but everyone is definitely welcome. For me, it has always been a place of complete acceptance and love. As Jeremy and I walk around, we are greeted with smiles, high fives, fist bumps and there is a general joviality in the air. Of course, people are happy and excited to be at a concert, but Phish is more then just a concert – it’s an experience. I won a lottery to get into the pit for the first show and later found out that Jeremy and I would be 3rd and 4th in line to enter pit and pick our spots. We ended up front row, center and I could not contain my excitement. I didn’t stop smiling the entire weekend. I hardly thought about my disease and had close to zero negative thoughts. That adrenaline and happiness lasted throughout most of the next week. I hadn’t felt this feeling in a while and when I had, it had been fleeting and those old demons would quickly rear their ugly heads and bring me back down. I started to analyze why I was able to go through an entire weekend and half the week with very few negative thoughts. Especially considering my mental state prior to that weekend. I came to realize that the combination of love, friendship, fellowship and music had filled my bucket to overflowing.
I had never heard the term “fill your bucket” until my kids entered elementary school. My youngest son had a teacher in second grade who would have the kids write kind notes to their classmates and literally put them in a bucket for the classmate to spread positivity, cooperation and lift the kids’ spirits. I thought this was a really cute idea at the time – it encouraged the kids to write and I loved the look on my son’s face when he read the notes he had received from his friends. He would light up and smile from ear to ear. It always made him happy and feel good about himself. And that is the point of bucket filling, “each person carries with them an invisible bucket and when that bucket is full, the person is feeling happy, confident, secure, calm and content. On the other hand, if a person is carrying an empty bucket, they are feeling upset, down, dissatisfied and unhappy.”(https://teachingbrave.com/bucket-filling/) He not only got joy from receiving kind notes, he also would spend a lot of time thinking of nice things to write to his classmates. He loved to fill other people’s buckets and didn’t even realize that by doing so he was inadvertently filling his own.
It’s important for ALL of us to be able to fill our own buckets. In other words, do the thing that brings you joy and lifts your spirits. Not only will you feel more happiness, but it’s easier to add to others’ buckets when your own is overflowing. It seems so easy, but often times life takes our joy faster than we can replenish it. There are the everyday stressors – work, family, bills, etc. And sometimes (hopefully not often) there are things that will turn your bucket upside down – illness, death, accidents, etc. When these things occur, we might need a little extra help filling our bucket back up. That is where I am in this healing journey – learning to fill my own bucket. If you read my last blog, Toxic Positivity, you know that because of my health situation I was having trouble righting my bucket, let alone filling it. Therapy and meditation have really been helping me with that. I have been able to release many of the negative emotions without repressing or suppressing them. Now that I know how to “use the lid” on my bucket, I can work on filling it. “The concept of using a ‘lid’ refers to placing a mental shield over things that might dip in and take from your bucket. It is said that a person can train themselves to deal with negative situations immediately so that the positivity inside the bucket isn’t reduced.” (https://teachingbrave.com/bucket-filling/)
Obviously, life is not always going to be rainbows and butterflies – I have never expected that. While I may not be able to control all of the events that take place in my life, I can control how I react to them. In the past, I have been quick to react to and judge every encounter or situation without thinking about its effect on me or those around me. I am learning to stop, take a deep breath and analyze situations. MS has forced me to slow down physically, and I am training myself to slow down inwardly. I began taking the antidepressant that was prescribed because quite frankly I was scared of some of the thoughts ruminating in my head. That has taken the edge off, righting my bucket, and now I can focus my energy on those things in my life that will fill my bucket, like my family, friends, music, nature, etc. When I fill myself with love and bliss, I have so much more to give to those around me. If everyone focused on bringing more happiness and love into their own lives, they would have more to share with other people. That is why stewardesses will tell people to put on their own oxygen mask first before helping anyone else. It’s impossible to save the world if you can’t save yourself.