Do Something?

So I realize that it is has been AWHILE since I last blogged. The past three or so months have been a little bit of a whirl-wind, but I am devoted to keeping this thing up and running now.

I went back and re-read my other posts and found myself not necessarily agreeing with all of my "negative traits" anymore. But I am still going to continue on with the original plan of going over each of them in detail because 1. I am probably in some denial when I think that I am not those things anymore and 2. because I still find it to be something I need to acknowlege about myself no matter when I was feeling/acting those ways.

I find that being lazy and being unmotivated kind of come off to be the same thing. But not really. Yes, if you are unmotivated you are more than likely going to be more lazy. But we need motivation in tons of aspects of our lives. And for awhile I just had none of it. For anything. I wasn't active at all, I didn't want to clean up after myself ever, take care of myself as I should, get out of bed and go to work, go out and make more friends, take care of my pets as I should, pay my bills and save money, and yada yada yada.. the list could go on and on.

If I think back a few months, I am not really sure what has changed really that made me decide to go out and motivate myself more to do things. But I have. I have started playing volleyball again (twice a week to be exact), and that itself I have noticed has helped me loads in the past month or so. I can't wait until summer when I can spend four days a week playing that sport that I love so much :) Me and my boyfriend moved.. again. I say again because we have only been living on our own together for about a year and a half but have already moved three times :/ But our new apartment is my HAVEN. If I described it to you you would probably think "Wow, what is so special about a small one bedroom apartment in a small town above an animal feed mill?" But I absolutely LOVE it up there :) My boyfriend's mom and his cousin helped me clean the old apartment (which was a DISASTER zone) and then helped clean/spruce up the new place and unpack so that we could get off to a good start right away in our new place. We have lived there for about three weeks now and it is still neat and clean I am proud to say. Before I would have just let it get away from me right away probably and would have had another disaster zone on my hands within a couple of weeks. But now I find myself constantly making sure I put things away right away, do the dishes, DO MY LAUNDRY (lol which if you know me I used to just wash what I wanted to wear and leave the rest strewn about the apartment floor), clean my kitty litter boxes (which I was also pretty about doing before.. I am lucky I don't have two cats that piss all over the place), put away all of my makeup and hair stuff after I am done using them, and so on. I will say that I am very proud of myself now when it comes to keeping my living area neat and tidy. I guess I got sick of never wanting to have friends or people over because I was embarrassed of how dirty our apartment was. And I also just got sick of feeling SUFFOCATED every night when I got home from work and walked into the "ground zero" that was my apartment. It really is true that being in a clean environment just makes you more happy in general, and I definitely want to keep that up.

Going back to taking care of my pets better. I know that I do that much better now as well. I used to go through spurts where I would clean my litter boxes daily for liek a week or so and then I wouldn't for like a week (yeah I know that is horrible :( and I apologize to my kitties constantly for how bad of a mommy I was to them for awhile). But now, once again, since we've moved I have kept up with that as well. Which makes my cats happier too.. to have a clean "bathroom". I can already tell in how their personalities are changing again that they are much more happier in general now too because of how clean all of their surroundings are. And that makes my heart warm too, to know that they are happy. After all, they are my children :)



Paying my bills. Well, that I have gotten better about. Because I have surrendered control of that to my step dad, I just give him my money and he pays them for me. Otherwise I can't say that I would have really changed that pattern myself. And as for saving money.. no. I don't save any money. I know it is a horrible excuse and that there are people that would kill to have the little amount of left over money I do have to pay their bills, feed their kids, save for their futures, etc. But I usually use whatever money I have leftover after paying my bills/debts to go out and socialize on the weekends :/ I really do wish that I could just save that money and not go out and party and drink with my friends on the weekends but that is just where I am in my life right now. I am not going to make excuses and say that "well that is what EVERYONE my age is doing" or "there is nothing else to do on the weekends around here". I am going to be completely honest.. and just say that that is what I want to do right now. I want to go out and get out of my apartment on the weekends, I want to go to parties and bars with my friends and drink and have a good time, I want to eat out for every meal every weekend. That is just all stuff that I WANT to be doing. So I do it. It is pretty unresponsible and selfish, I do realize that. I should be saving more money so I can pay off more debts that I have and so that I can have some more security financially wise in my future, but I don't. And that is something that I am going to have to work on and get better at.. but when I want to. And NO that doesn't mean that I am going to go on in my life for the next forty years living as I do and then have nothing to show for it or be able to retire or anything like that. Twenty Two. That is my cut off for myself. I am giving myself until I am 22 years old to be selfish and self righteous about my money and what I want to do with it and my spare time. After that.. well then I am going to buckle down and start being more of a "grown up" :) about my finances and saving for my future. I am about two months away from my 21st birthday right now, so that leaves me a little over a year until the point of no return. Because I know that if I don't do it then, then I might not ever do it. And then I really would be stuck in the situations that I described above. Which I really do not want to happen. So, when it comes to being motivated, that is one aspect of my life I could be better at motivating myself to do. And I will.. in one year and two months :)

Work. Oh man work. Well that is an entire blog in itself right now. Not just about the struggles I have had in the past with jobs and liking them, keeping them, doing a good job at them, etc. But just about my current job at present. Boy.. well lets just say I don't know if I just have bad luck at jobs or if I am just THAT BAD at the ones I do get. But this one isn't going much better than any of the last. The only thing that does keep me from up and quitting this one just like the last.. oh I don't know.. four billion.. is that I take care of two little girls. Who sometimes are literally the snottiest and worse behaving kids on the planet I think, but I love them so much :) And don't want to just up and quit on them and make them find another new nanny and go through all of that again. So we will see what happens closer to summer.

The only other thing right now that I need to work on motivating myself to do is get back into my art and painting. Painting has ALWAYS helped calm and center me, and once I get back to doing that on a regular basis again I think that will do MOUNDS of good for my soul, spirit and happiness. Soon.. soon I will start again. I can feel it.

So, all in all I think that I have gotten much better at motivating myself to do things. I could definitely work on some aspects of my life and my motivation for certain things. But I can only do so much at once. And right now all of the changes I have made have made me so much more happier and more willing to sacrifice and motivate myself in other ways that I am just going to keep on going at the pace I am, and eventually I think I will have all of my "shit" figured out :) Eventually.

Lazy Train

The first sport I ever joined was dance in Mankato. I think I was three or four? Needless to say that didn't last long, I like to think I have some sort of rhythm now but if you asked me to copy a dance number I would laugh in your face. Next I was in soccer and track in Rosemount (maybe squirt ball too.. I can't quite remember.) And when my family moved to Belle Plaine I was pretty much involved in every sport possible from the age of eight until sixteen. Softball, basketball, tennis, soccer, bowling, volleyball and track. And from third through fifth grade I dabbled in touch football with the boys at recess and after school program.

Every aspect of my life revolved around sports and being active. The first thing I wanted to be when I grew up was a figure skater.. even though I am horrible on ice skates. When I got older and realized I could actually have a future in volleyball my life revolved around it, six days a week for probably forty weeks a year. I LOVED it. One problem though... I HATED school. And in high school you play if you pass and by tenth grade I was never passing every class every quarter. Meaning volleyball slowly slipped away from me. But I still went to practice everyday and sat on the bench with the team and loved the game. I was lazy when it came to school.. but probably the most active person out of all of my friends and maybe even all of my peers.

I still remember watching our varsity volleyball team crumble at state two years in a row and telling all of my team mates in our huddles afterwards, even though no one was watching us now, they would be when we were seniors. Fast forward five years... my team was at state in the bronze medal game. And I was sitting with my boyfriend in the stands with everyone else on the edge of my seat watching. Six years of playing competitive volleyball (competitive anything for that matter), a broken ankle, concussion, and two severe asthma attacks and never once did I shed a tear. That day when my friends and once team mates stood in front of 10,000+ people in the Xcel Center and wore their Bronze medals, I laughed and cried at the same time.



For reasons I will speak of some other time, I dropped out of high school after my sophomore year and "homeschooled" with my mother. My high school guidance counselor at the time had told me if I made that decision I would not be eligible to play on the schools sport teams anymore. A factor that almost had me live out the rest of my dreadful high school years in that hell hole, but inevidibly I decided my mental health and sanity were more important that a silly sports team. I later, at the next seasons volleyball home opener, came to find out that that indeed was not true and I could have been playing all along. But it was too late, I was replaced and my once "understudy" was now the new team captain and doing a damn good job at it, so there ended my volleyball career.

I could have very well gone out for basketball or softball after that and done just as well as I had in the past. But it just wasn't the same anymore.

I felt like a piece of me were lost... for good.

I was never a "stick" and super skinny and I wouldn't necessarily classify myself as being obese now. But I am definitely not in the shape I once was. I guess that is understandable when you go from exercising at least three hours a day, six days a week, to having the most activity you partake in in a month being to carrying a twenty pound bag of cat food up a flight of twelve steps. For three summers I played women's league slow pitch softball and this past summer I did co-ed beach volleyball. But that was only once a week, and usually involved putting down a six pack in the mean time.

So all in all it is quite fair to say that I am a very lazy person now. I don't want to be and I know if I were to become more physically fit again that would help me feel more emotionally fit as well. So I am going to dedicate the next few days to coming up with some sort of work out plan. Also, considering in high school I was only eating two meals a day and probably working that all off each day too in practice, I need to work out a more healthier meal plan or something of the sort.

I know that if I could do it when I was... sheesh... twelve years old (the age when I really got into volleyball and keeping fit) then I can certainly make it work now!

And I will!

xoxo,

Meghan... with an "h"

Meghan... with an "h"

I want to use this blog as a venue for me to talk straight to myself and try and figure out this crazy thing I refer to as my life. But before I can do that I need to come to terms with some facts about myself. So here I go...

1. I have become very lazy

2. I am not motivated to do much at all anymore

3. I am stubborn and selfish

4. I lie more than ever now (to myself and others)

5. I am indecisive and lost in myself mostly

6. I am not happy

These are things that I know and have known about myself for awhile, but I try to hide and deny. It may seem that being I think these things about myself, or I KNOW these things about myself I should say, that I have very low self esteem. But I wouldn't say so. The list above only mentions the negative things I am feeling right now and doing right now that have put me in the situations I am in now. If I were to list all of the positive aspects of my life and myself I know it would outweigh this list by far.

I have changed a lot in the past few years from what I once was and from the actions I used to commit... some for the better and others for the worse.  I have viewed myself in many different lights and had all sorts of opinions of myself. But I guess that the only way to get deep down to the root of the issues I am facing with myself right now I should go back as far as I can remember to my first self image and work forward from there. 

That is why I have titled my blog 'Meghan... with an "h."' I don't remember exactly how I felt about myself when I was first starting school in kindergarten. I don't know if I thought I was fat (I hope I didn't though), I don't know if I was so stressed about my future and the decisions I needed to make that every time I bathed I lost a fist fold of hair to the drain and I don't think when I looked at myself in the mirror I had no idea who I was looking at anymore (on the inside as well as the outside.) But I do remember that ever since I learned how to spell my name, anytime I had to spell or tell anyone how to spell it that is what I said. Meghan... with an "h". I have always felt like I had to specify to people that my name was not just an ordinary name, it wasn't just a simple name that was in the top twenty baby girl names the year I was born. MY name was special. I do realize that there are millions of Meghans out there that also spell their name with an "h." And I also realize that there are Meghans out there that spell it even more uniquely (ex: Megyn, Meagan, Magen, etc.) But I know that now; now that I am twenty years old, I know that. When I was five though.. I knew only one other Megan (not millions) just one. And as you can see she spelt her name WITHOUT an "h." So, to me, I was the special one. My name was different and I was different. I was not just a plain Jane, boring, normal Megan. I saw myself as special, special enough that I made it known to anyone that asked "What is your name?" That I was 'Meghan... with an "h".' And to this day I still recite those same words. Maybe not anytime someone meets me and asks my name, my internal recording of that phrase has advanced with the technology of todays world. Meaning that when I give someone my cell phone number and they are entering it, is usually when I somehow make sure I sneak in that my name is not just "Megan", but Meghan... with and "h."

It may not seem like much or explain at all how me remembering this small detail of my childhood is going to help me figure out the very large detail of what I need to do with my life now. But to me it speaks volumes. It tells me that small glimmer of a light I still feel inside myself that I am "special" and unique just might actually still mean something.  And if I could see myself that way at the young age of five... I am sure I can get back to that again today at the age of twenty.

Now anytime I come to my blog to write I can see those words and remember. Remember that little kindergarten girl who ran around head high and free spirited, thinking no one else in the room mattered but me (and certainly not that OTHER Megan) because I was special. And hopefully I can find that light again or at least a new flame to brighten up that light again now. By remembering.

That is all for now.

xoxo,

Meghan... with an "h"