3 days down: Check yourself before you wreck yourself

I feel like this months challenge is going to be based around a lot of inspirational hip hop quotes.

My parents are in town. For two weeks. Yes. Two. In my experience there comes a time in your life where the universe switches the roles of parents 'child minding' to the children 'parent minding'. Sort of as a karmic retribution for you sitting in the back seat as a 9 year old, spilling Skittles everywhere and switching between every Little Mermaid song and asking repeatedly 'are we there yet?'. Now its me going; are they comfortable in their room? did they get enough sleep? do they like their food? where have they wondered off to? oh dear god, I've lost them at LA Pride and I turned their data roaming off! I get it universe, and I'll play along but man oh man this challenge just got trickier. It's good though. I tell ya, if I can get through half of this challenge with family time 24/7, I will be a certified zen master at the end of this.

It's been an interesting few days. By no means was I cool, calm and collected all the time but I did manage to check myself when heading into a negative space. I might have gone there, but I managed not to dwell there. Big difference.

On Saturday we were all jet lagged and hungry and I picked a busy, noisy food market in Downtown LA to eat at. We couldn't find parking, It was too loud, we couldn't agree on where to sit or what to eat. I just wanted to leave them all there and go eat my vegan ramen on bench somewhere, alone, sulking. I might also have hung up on the boyfriend a few times as he kept calling me as he looked for parking just to reiterate how much he hated Downtown cause he couldn't find parking. I took it personally. So I hung up. I wondered off, away from my indecisive parent's who didn't seem thrilled to sit down at some patio furniture with Daddy Yankee's 'Gasolina' booming from the nearest taco truck. Maybe I misjudged my audience. I stood in line for the vegan ramen and cursed my decision to bring them here as well as them for not loving it. The boyfriend finally found parking and was looking for me all over the place as I kept hanging up on him when he called. 'Why don't you all just go to a fancy ass restaurant somewhere else and I'll just eat my ramen in peace and maybe get murdered on Skid Row afterwards'. This isn't verbatim but that was my general vibe at the time. I finally saw the boyfriend searching aimlessly for me in the crowd and almost decided to just let him keep going. But my better self caught up with me and I chased him down as he kept searching, now moving away from me. I checked myself, shook it off, (and if you knew me you'd know how hard that is for me), sat down with him and my parents and Daddy Yankee and ate my delicious vegan ramen with my family. Sans sulking. I just brushed it off, and eventually I felt no need to pick it back up. See that's the thing with so many things we might harp on about or dwell on in a negative way. So many of them are so inconsequential but seem so important to drag through the mud over and over again at the time. I'm gonna try and think of these instances like water off a ducks back rather than a permanent tattoo you can't seem to laser off. But also maybe don't take your jet lagged parents to a loud and smokey food market with blasting reggaeton at 9.30 at night. We we're all just hangry to be honest. Once we got some food in us, we became decent humans again.

hungry+angry = hangry.

H

#positivity #change #patience