An Emotional Day

I was doing errands today and stopped at the second hand shop to poke around for a bit.  They had a pile of cassettes and they were only 25 cents each!  I know it is 2017 but I just got a new car which is a 2002 - hey no cracks as at least it is of this millennium.  Anyway my "new" car has both a working cd player and cassette player, which brings me back to my excitement over the 25 cent cassettes.  I sorted through them and among them I came across Anne Murray's greatest hits How could I pass that up?  I adore her.  As I drove around and listened to it it made my mind wonder, especially this song.  It made me feel emotional and that is always hard.  I texted some friends that I was listening to Barry Manilow (another 25 cent cassette find) and Anne Murray and was feeling emotional today.  One friend recommended I get some cardio in, which is definitely not bad advice but I said I needed to clean and the response was that my mental health was important and cleaning could wait.  I agree with that statement in general yet I only said I was having an emotional day, I did not say that it was a negative thing.  Sure some of the emotions today were hard.  My sisters and the kids left for a week up in Old Orchard Beach Maine and I so wanted to be there.  I could not financially make that happen and that crushed me.  My birthday is this week, the kids are so fun and I have so many great memories of staying at the beach with my family, to be with them this week would have been beyond the best.  Also it is really upsetting to me not to be there because I want to be so much which is coupled with that it makes me feel like a failure that I cannot be.  I had to work tonight at my second job and as I walked in my favorite niece sent me pictures of them at the beach.  I literally was walking to the doors when the pictures came through.  I looked at my phone and the pictures immediately made tears well up in my eyes and I stopped dead in my tracks.  I allowed myself that minute but then thought to let go of that silliness and be happy that they were going to be having a great week.  Plus she just got there and her first thought was to send me pictures.  That is powerful demonstration of how important I am to her and that she wants to share happiness and make me happy not sad.  I shut my phone off and swallowed hard then walked on in to start my job.

That is an example of how emotions can be difficult but also Anne Murray made me think of one of my best memories ever., which is when I saw Anne Murray live with Michelle.  I don't remember the year but it was at least 25 years ago at minimum.  It was down on the cape and Michelle bought  me tickets for my birthday, which the date of the show was close to.  What a splendid night.  Anne was so good live and it was an intimate, outdoor venue so that was all wonderful and pleased me to no end.  But what really makes the memory outstanding is how fun it was.  Left to her own devices Michelle would never have been there but she was there and mainly because she knew how happy it would make me.  I got to see an amazing show that is forever ingrained in my kinda shoddy memory but also spend time with someone who was so happy for no other reason than to see that I was on top of the world happy that day.   That is a truly special and amazing feeling. That's the other end of the spectrum of emotions, the joy and the happiness.

I am a super emotional person which can make me super strong or incredibly weak and with a 50,000 foot view of that I  can recognize that emotions exist in pairs like two sides of a  coin.  It comes with the territory and is par for the course and any other applicable cliche to state the price of being human.  As I get ready to go to sleep for the night I look back on today and think, "today was a good day" and so after my emotional day I will sleep just fine.  This is a milestone week for me so we will see how it goes but I am feeling positive for it to unfold, bumps and all.