I'm hiring my own parade!

Sometimes you just have to take responsibity of patting yourself on the back. We all tend to be caught up in our own experiences, but it simply seems to be Murphy's Law that when you would like to be noticed, thanked, appreciated or just plain recognized as existing - there is no one to do it. This is when I've learned that I just have to extend my arm and reach around an pat my own back - no one else is going to. Most of my life, no one did. I used to make it mean that it was because I didn't deserve it, that if I had done a better job people would notice, people would like me enough to tell me. Then the dreaded thought - perhaps I just wasn't likeable enough - or at all - for anyone to bother to notice, or worst horror of all, to love. All this thinking is a sucky downward spiral into the toilet bowl of depression. Not a good place to go. There is no handsome Tidybowl man to pull me out, there is no cute yellow rubber ducky to buoy me up, it's clawing hand over hand through stuck, stubborn negative thoughts and looking for the truth in them, discarding the "crap" and keeping the facts for observation and re-evaluation. Not fun, but an invaluable experience if I can learn my lessons and then not repeat the downward mental dunk that got me in the first place.

Sometimes I can, sometimes I can't and spalsh, I'm in it again. The good news is that I am getting better at bringing my own applause and even better at letting go of all those who just can't wait to give me "helpful" suggestions to improve myself. Which I have realized, usually has more to do with them than me. I have alslo learned that to tell them this invites an argument concerning how ungrateful I am for not cherishing their wisdom and effort. So I would remind myself to celebrate my wins - no matter how small and to keep my mouth zipped when friends choose to "contribute" their wisdom to my life and just thank them for the "thought" and move on. Wouldn't it be nice if we could just take life for it's surface value - that everything said was meant, that everything meant was said, that everything promised arrived and trusts were never broken? In such a place we could, at all times, reliably step out of our own way and see the truth in every molicule of matter. Think how much less mental work we would have to do! I could flush the tank once and for all knowing it would never need plumbing again! So for today, I'm bringing my own applause. I can guarantee that tomorrow, or the day after or the week, month or year after that I'll need to call RotoRooter to get me out of a quagmire or two, but for today, I smile to myself - "Yahoo! Yippee, Hooray!"