I really wish I was more diligent in posting. Looking back, and wow it’s been ten months since I’ve posted. So what has been going on in my life you may wonder?

I got a dog. He is awesome, but can be spastic at times. He seems to suffer from anxiety, so in my own humble opinion he fits right into my family with mental illness.

A couple months later after getting a dog, we bought our first house. It’s great. Love home ownership and all the costs, fees, upkeep, and associations to deal with. In all honesty though it is really great to have a house and not be living in a tiny apartment. The change in scenery though for the dog only seemed to make the anxiety worse, so what do you do for an anxious dog? Get him an emotional support animal.

I found a dog in a local shelter that is quite similar in size, age and breed so now he has a friend to keep him company so he doesn’t get lonely during the day.

Back to the house. I consider myself a tech person so it has been fun turning the home into a smarthome. This has given me something to distract myself with so when things are turning downward for me I can focus on that instead.

I was also asked to help chaperone a group of high school students to Italy and Greece for ten days, so I have been able to get some world travel in under my belt. It was a great experience, and as cliche as it is to say, my favorite part of the trip was getting to see the changes in the kids. Granted one might say, “It was only ten days, how much could someone change in that amount of time?” Let me tell ya. More than you might think. Breakfast and dinner were provided but lunches were up to the individual. There were some that went crazy shopping in the beginning only to come up short towards the end of the trip and realize they needed to be a little more thrifty if they wanted to eat lunch. There was another one whose bank account got frozen due to something going on with his parents, so the group pulled together to make sure he got taken care of. Another student was charged $150 for her lunch and had to deal with the restaurant in getting her money back. There were a couple of parents that tagged along with their kid for the trip, one such father it seemed went out of his way to make sure he was next to his son every minute of every day and hindered the interactions with the other students to the point you could tell the son didn’t want his father there. Again toward the end, you saw him going out on his own and interacting with the other students so that he wasn’t forced into staying by his father’s side. There was one girl, who openly stated she had a lot of negative thoughts about the area that we live in, but after seeing a couple of other places around the world, she realized that what she had really wasn’t all that bad after all. One student spent $100 on a (in my own opinion hideous) gold chain and began to panic and worry what his parents were going to say about it, to which I coached him to tell them that it was something that would stick with him and help him remember the trip by. One girl had her phone stolen while walking around through a plaza on the second to the last day despite being told numerous times not to keep it in her back pockets. My favorite though had to be one girl, that made drama in everything. Things like “OMG, I lost my passport.” when she had it three minutes earlier or “There are too many people in here, I need to go outside.” or “Oh no my phone is almost dead.” after she had been staring at it for hours straight vs. paying attention to the world around her. I understand that there are many phobias and anxiety triggering things in the world, not knocking the validity of these, but it was a constant thing with her. One the last day of the trip she openly stated that she “Wasted the trip, and the experience”. As sad as it is for her to have missed out on so much of the experience, to have her realize it and state it out loud was a huge sign of growth on her part.

Personal growth is the key to everything. Good or bad, the experiences that we have each and everyday push us and shape us into the people that we are to become. Take it. Learn from it. Grow from it.