Loss and gain

I’ve had bad pet luck for the past year or so.  In the fall, we realized that our old girl Ashe had cancer.  We ended up putting her down in October/November.  In January, we lost our 14 year old bearded dragon, Rascal.  Today, we lost our new bearded dragon – the one that we had only had for a couple of months.  The loss of a pet never gets easier, I guess.

It wasn’t really the loss of Draco that set me on edge today.  Realistically, I’ve been having a couple of weeks.  In addition to pet loss, I also am undergoing stress over school and student loans, money worries, career worries, the future worries.  I know that I should take things one step, one day at a time – that’s what my wife always says – but that’s just not the kind of person I was born to be.  I’m a plan-ahead worrier.  It’s in my DNA, and no matter how much I try to reprogram my brain to like or accept myself, this is a single point on which I seem to make no progress.  It eats away at me if I let it.  Sometimes I can shut it down, sometimes I can put it on a back burner temporarily, but it always comes back.

I am trying to reprogram my brain to like myself, and I ‘m having some kind of progress.  I convinced myself that I was proud of myself a week or so ago.  While normal hippy dippy affirmations don’t really work on me (You can’t convince of something if you know that you’re lying to yourself) I can convince myself of certain nice things about myself.  It’s progress, and at this point I’ll take anything I can get.  All I can do is to do the best that I can today.  I don’t have to be perfect.  I don’t have to always have all of the answers.  It’s okay to struggle and to experience moments of weakness.  But every day that I wake up and decide to get out of bed, put one foot in front of the other and move forward is a step in the right direction.  Maybe today, that’s all I can manage.  But changes are high that there will be a tomorrow, and I can wake up and try again in a brand new day.