Weekend Creativity Challenge

 Happy FRIYAY and a long weekend to boot!

I had done a poll up a while ago to try to come up with ideas to help improve engagement in the group for members by posting more meaningful and inspiring content to help with promoting health and wellness and one of the things was ways to help with supporting peoples creativity! 

Nurturing one’s creativity is SO key to helping to ensure a healthy mindset … human beings are all born with an instinct to express themselves through creativity but sometimes external factors impede peoples abilty to engage in creative expression and so their full healthy mindset is also impeded! We need to get back to ensuring that everyone has at least ONE creative outlet for expressing themselves. 

So introducing the new Weekend Creativity Challenge - each week I will post a photo prompt, like below, that you can use to get your creativity mojo going! 

Choose from the photos colours or imagery or just the general feeling that it brings to your heart! 

You can create with whatever medium speaks to you and inspires you! There are so many ways to nurture one’s creative soul! 

What’s your favorute way to nurture creativity?

Here are just a few of mine:

Colouring 

Mixed media / Painting

Papercrafting

Fun Nail designs

Poetry/Short Story/Blog writing

Snap a photo of your creative work and share it in our Facebook Community by the following Thursday night at midnight to get your name entered into the draw! 

Here is my creation using inspiration from the colours in the photo.

Bonus entry if you share the creative prompt image  and your own entry on your own social media in a public setting and tag my Totallyawake4-life & Nailin' it Together group and use the hashtag #TA4L001 in this case but I will change the number with each new prompt and have it in the prompt to help remember it. 

I will be doing a monthly prize draw inside the group here from all the creative entry’s shared and that show up tagged outside the group (remember the settings needs to be public otherwise I cannot search the hashtag to see them)  … let’s help spread the joy and benefits of creativity together 💗

Happy creating! 

Margaret

Love, Laugh, Love

Be Totallyawake4-life 

*post contains affiliate links 

Living with Chronic Illness

This is so very very true and sometimes we can pay dearly for that one day of “enduring for sake and benefit of some socialization” with days afterward of increased pain and decreased coping cause we used up all the resilience and energy we had in one go!

Sometimes I think of chronic illness as waking up with, let’s say 5, energy chips and I have to be reflective of which activities I will do to make it through the day without running out of chips  - and if something I am being asked to do is going to take 20 energy chips that means I am going to have to accept that for the next 3 days after I am likely gonna be useless for doing anything. And sometimes that’s ok one is willing to go into debt so to speak cause I really want to participate and other times something is offered to me that I really WANT to do but I have to decline because I already used up all my energy chips on something else and I am now in debt and I KNOW from past experience if I say yes and borrow any more energy chips from my tomorrows that my autoimmune system will start demanding significant interest on said debt in way of new symptoms to knock me back a peg! 

It is a delicate balance and sometimes someone with chronic illnesses can get into that spiral of borrowing more and more chips from tomorrow because they hate having to miss out on things and hate that their disease controls so much of their life that they end up hitting rock bottom again with a nasty flare that sets them back that peg or two  before remembering that unlike others they cannot gamble with their chips and hope that they will somehow win more of them and it will balance out in the end.

Just a little PSA that when someone says yes to one persons invite and the next day says no to another persons invite it’s often nothing to do with the INVITE and often much more to do with the timing and the same invitee just being out of energy chips to be able to say yes. Please don’t take it personally and KEEP inviting them out for the next times so that they can trust that it’s ok to say no to “this time” and do get into the spiral of borrowing energy chips from tomorrow out of FOMO in future.

We never know what someone else is going through which is why it’s important to act with empathy and kindness to all! 

Margaret 

Live, Laugh, Love 

Be Totallyawake4-life 

Ode to the Thyroid Gland

 Thyroid...

It's been a few years since you found out I'll be with you the rest of your life.

I'm very slippery, I don't always show up when you test.

People around you can't see or hear me, but your body does. I can attack you anywhere and any way you choose. For example tingling or hand pain.

Remember when you had a lot of energy and had a blast! Well, sometimes I participate in: your energy, and I left you exhausted. I took a little of your memory and part of your concentration.

I can make you sleep for many hours, or I can cause insomnia. Make you tremble and feel cold or hot but for everyone else the temperature is normal.

I can make your feet and hands swell, your face and eyelids swell... I can make you feel very anxious and give you panic attacks.

I'm very complicated...

Do you remember the sudden mood change ? Yes, thats me... I can make you cry for no reason ... and get pissed off for no reason yes that’s me again.

I can make your hair fall out and make it very thin , dry and fragile, I can cause severe acne, cause dry skin, I have no limits or borders.

I will make you gain weight no matter what or how much you eat. Your diet becomes impossible to lose weight yes I take credit for that too.

Doing activities like walking or doing other exercises is a massive effort and really strains your body and you will never get me out of your body, 

You now have to take medication for the rest of your life or I’ll kill you.

I can make your cholesterol high and give you blood pressure problems, that's me!

Heart failure? Me! Elevated liver enzymes? Me! Got dental problems? Me too!

You feel tired..., and your family and friends will be tired of hearing again and again how tired you are". Yep that’s me doing all this too!They don't know that I remove part of the energy your body and mind that’s needed daily to perform normal activities. They will not understand why, this disease attacks your body from the tip of the hair to the tip of your toes , and that every cell and organ of your body requires the appropriate amount of thyroid hormones 

With love ♥ ️...

Your Hypothyroidism

Credit Rachel Ducker 

Wanted to share because this has got to be one of the most accurate descriptions of life with under active thyroid challenges! Every single one of the things she covered I have struggled with over the past 20 plus years! Including the challenge of regular tests not indicating an issue because I was on the low end of “normal” so the Family Dr initially didn’t believe it was my thyroid that was the problem. 

It was my oncologist after my hysterectomy that had to send her a note saying it was clear the her that my normal didn’t align with what the thyroid testing benchmark of normal was and that she saw a body struggling to heal from surgery because the thyroid wasn’t doing it’s part and recommended starting thyroid medication to support my recovery. 

So now when I have loved ones and friends who exhibit symptoms like above I am a strong advocate to PUSH their family Dr to not use the standard test alone to really look and listen to what are going on in their body! 

Be Healthy!  

Margaret 

Live, Laugh. Love

Be Totallyawake4-life