We got this!
This music 🎶 is so uplifting.!
No matter your walk, or lack thereof, God got us. Be encouraged. Be patient with yourself, beloved.
You can still do so much more than you give yourself credit for!
Cassandra
#YourLifeMattersToMe
I wish I could
Friday, October 9, 2026
Beloveds,
I wish I could.
Four little words.
Sometimes they carry an awful lot of life.
There are things I used to do without thinking about them.
Ordinary things.
Private things.
Things that didn’t require planning, assistance, or a conversation with my body about whether we were going to cooperate today.
And then I had a stroke.
Suddenly, ordinary wasn’t so ordinary anymore.
I was in terrible pain.
My back hurt constantly.
I didn’t have a chair with a backrest, so there was nothing for me to lean against.
Imagine trying to learn how to balance when you’re already hurting.
Imagine needing to accomplish something simple while your body is making everything complicated.
That became part of my life.
I had to learn to balance while sitting on the side of my bed.
And Pain?
Oh, Pain was right there.
Uninvited.
Unwelcome.
And apparently planning to stay awhile.
Pain became my partner in something neither of us had signed up for.
Every movement seemed to require a negotiation.
Some days I didn’t feel like negotiating.
Some days everything took hours because of discomfort.
HOURS.
Not because I wasn’t trying.
Not because I didn’t want to finish.
Because sometimes getting through one ordinary activity requires more effort than people realize.
But something was happening while I was learning to balance.
My core was getting stronger.
My balance was improving.
Little by little, I was learning how to manage my body differently.
And eventually, that strength made it easier for me to learn to use the potty chair.
Yes, beloveds.
The potty chair.
We’re going there.
Because life doesn’t stop being life just because the subject makes folks uncomfortable.
And I’m not embarrassed to talk about it.
At first, I was humiliated.
I had to learn to accept help with things I had always done myself.
God humbled me during that time.
And I learned something about humility that I couldn’t have learned from simply reading about it.
Humility isn’t the absence of dignity.
Needing help didn’t make me less of a person.
And becoming stronger didn’t make me more worthy than I had been when I couldn’t manage.
My dignity was there all along.
But there’s something else.
Something we don’t discuss nearly enough.
Sometimes we’re grateful for the strength we’ve developed while mourning the circumstances that required it.
🥹
Read that again.
Because there is a particular kind of grief that accompanies learning to do something you never wanted to have to relearn.
People see progress.
They celebrate.
And there’s nothing wrong with celebrating.
I celebrate, too.
But sometimes, underneath the satisfaction, there’s a quiet sadness.
I remember when I didn’t have to work this hard.
I remember when ordinary things were simply ordinary.
I remember when I didn’t have to be strong just to get through them.
And I miss that.
Not because I’m ungrateful.
Not because I don’t appreciate how far I’ve come.
I’m grateful for what I’ve learned.
I grieve that learning it became necessary.
Both are true.
Sometimes people are so busy admiring our strength that they don’t notice we’re still mourning the circumstances that required it.
And sometimes we don’t know how to tell them.
Because how do you explain that you’re proud of something you wish you’d never needed to accomplish?
How do you explain that you’re celebrating an ability you once took for granted?
How do you say thank You, Father, for helping me learn, while also acknowledging how much you wish the lesson had never become necessary?
You tell the truth.
It was satisfying.
Hard.
Sad.
All three.
And none of those feelings needs to push the others out of the room.
Now, let me tell you something about my Father.
I picture God standing guard while I take care of my business.
Yes.
THAT business.
He’s around the corner, protecting my privacy.
And just when I need it, here comes the toilet paper.
🧻
Discreetly handed around the corner.
No announcement.
No audience.
Just my Father being there.
I smile thinking about that.
Because I know Him as my ABBA.
My Father.
My Friend.
And His presence isn’t limited to the moments when everything looks beautiful.
He’s with me in the painfully ordinary moments, too.
Even when I need toilet paper.
Especially when I need patience.
And sometimes I need a whole lot of both.
😅
Beloveds, I don’t know what you’ve had to learn because life changed.
Maybe you’re learning to live alone.
Maybe you’re learning how to begin again after a loss.
Maybe you’re learning how to manage an illness, a disability, an empty house, or circumstances you never imagined would become yours.
Perhaps you’re getting good at something you wish you’d never needed to learn.
I want you to know something.
You don’t have to celebrate what happened to appreciate what you’ve accomplished since it happened.
You don’t have to call your suffering a blessing.
You don’t have to pretend the lesson was worth the loss.
And you don’t have to stop missing what used to be.
You can appreciate today’s strength and still grieve yesterday’s ease.
There are days when I still wish I could.
And there are things I can do now that I couldn’t do before.
I’m grateful for those things.
But I won’t pretend they came without sadness.
I won’t pretend every victory feels like a celebration.
Sometimes a victory is accompanied by a sigh.
Sometimes it brings tears.
Sometimes it leaves you sitting quietly, thinking about how much life has changed.
And sometimes you smile because, against considerable difficulty, you managed something that once seemed impossible.
The strength is real.
The grief is real.
And so is the life we’re living between them.
I wish I could.
And sometimes, beloveds?
I discover that I can.
Not everything.
Not always.
Not without difficulty.
But something.
And today, I’m grateful for that something.
Even while I remember what it cost.
❤️
loving me some you
Cassandra
#YourLifeMattersToMe
Note 📝: Ah, God. I wish I could…
Friday, October 9, 2026 — 6:00 PM
Love was already in the room ❤️🔑
Beloveds,
Yesterday I left you with half a sentence.
I know.
That was wrong. 😅
I said:
The door may have been locked.
But…
👀
Well…
Hhm…
👀
I came back to finish it.
The door may have been locked…
But love was never locked out.
❤️
That’s where I want us to land tonight.
Not with another lock to examine.
Not another key to sort through.
Not another door to decide whether we’re ready to open.
Come sit down.
🪑
We’ve done enough walking through rooms this week.
Monday, we asked:
Where are you stuck?
And instead of immediately demanding movement, we asked something gentler:
What happened there?
Because sometimes the place where somebody stopped makes sense once we understand what happened before they stopped.
Tuesday, we went behind the door.
What have you locked away?
Trust.
Tenderness.
Hope.
Joy.
Dreams.
Need.
The parts of ourselves that once felt safer hidden.
Wednesday, we came for that little five-letter lock:
Should.
Where should I be?
Who should I be?
What should my life look like by now?
And maybe one of the most important things we discovered was this:
Maybe you didn’t fail. Maybe the map changed.
🗺️
Yesterday, we talked about keys.
Who has one?
Who shouldn’t?
Who lost access?
Who may deserve another look?
And whether shame has ever convinced us to pack up our own chair and leave before anybody actually asked us to go.
🔑🪑
That’s a lot for one week.
So tonight…
I don’t want anything from you.
❤️
No assignment.
No list.
No demand that you identify one more thing to work on.
No instruction to unlock anything.
No requirement to forgive tonight.
No pressure to trust somebody again.
No insistence that you move.
Just sit here with me for a minute.
Because there’s something underneath everything we’ve talked about this week.
Love.
❤️
Not sentimental love.
Not love that pretends nothing hurts.
Not love that calls every boundary unforgiveness.
Not love that tells somebody to open a door that still needs to remain closed.
I’m talking about the kind of love that comes.
The kind that doesn’t wait until everything is cleaned up.
The kind that can hear the lock click and not take it personally.
The kind that knocks.
The kind that waits.
The kind that tells the truth.
The kind that respects the door.
The kind that leaves the chair where it is.
🪑❤️
The kind that says:
I came for you.
👀
That sentence has been sitting underneath this whole week.
Because sometimes when somebody is hiding, hurting, ashamed, afraid or convinced they no longer belong…
they don’t need somebody shouting directions from the other side of the door.
Sometimes they need somebody willing to come looking.
❤️
And sometimes…
that somebody has to be us.
Come for yourself.
Come for the version of you who made the mistake.
Come for the version of you who didn’t know better.
Come for the version who stayed too long.
Come for the version who left too soon.
Come for the version who trusted.
Come for the version who stopped trusting.
Come for the person whose body changed.
Come for the person whose plans changed.
Come for the person who thought life would look completely different by now.
Come for the person who is tired of being told how strong they are when what they really want is somewhere safe enough to put the strength down for a minute.
😭❤️
Come for you.
Not because everything you’ve ever done was right.
Not because nothing needs changing.
Not because accountability disappeared somewhere between Monday and Friday.
Come because correction and abandonment were never supposed to mean the same thing.
Come because growth does not require exile.
Come because you do not have to hate yourself into becoming somebody better.
Come because shame has taken enough keys.
🔑
And beloveds…
I come for you too.
Every day I sit down to write, I am coming looking for somebody.
Somebody hurting.
Somebody laughing.
Somebody grieving.
Somebody rebuilding.
Somebody questioning God.
Somebody who doesn’t believe in God at all.
Somebody who needs a chair.
Somebody who needs to hear:
You still matter.
❤️
I can’t know which door these words will reach.
I don’t know who will read them.
I don’t know who will scroll past.
I don’t know who will sit with one sentence for five minutes.
But I can knock.
That’s what love can do.
Love knocks.
Love listens.
Love tells the truth.
Love respects boundaries.
Love leaves room.
Love keeps a chair.
And love comes back.
🪑❤️
For those who share my faith…
this is where the whole week becomes personal for me.
Because when I think about My Father, I think about all the times I imagined I needed to find my way back to Him.
After anger.
After questions.
After disappointment.
After confusion.
After days when I didn’t understand what He was doing.
After life hurt so badly that I didn’t have a neat spiritual sentence to put around it.
And somewhere along the way, I realized:
I wasn’t the only one doing the finding.
😭❤️
My Father came for me.
Again.
And again.
And again.
And sometimes I thought He was standing outside the locked room waiting for me to open the door.
But maybe…
He had been sitting inside the room with me the whole time.
👀
Maybe the door was locked.
But Love wasn’t locked out.
Maybe Love was already there.
❤️
And maybe that’s true in more places than we realize.
Maybe love is the friend who came back.
The person who told you the truth and stayed.
The boundary that finally protected your peace.
The part of you that kept hoping even when you swore you had stopped.
The hand that reached.
The chair that remained.
The quiet realization:
I am still here.
And maybe finding our way home isn’t always about discovering a road we’ve never traveled.
Sometimes it’s realizing love has been leaving the light on for us all along.
❤️
There it is.
Home.
Not perfection.
Not the old life restored exactly as it was.
Not every question answered.
Not every lock opened.
Not every relationship repaired.
Home.
A place inside yourself where shame no longer gets to decide whether you belong.
A place where truth can enter without love leaving.
A place where you can say:
Something needs to change.
without turning it into:
I don’t deserve to be here.
A place where your chair remains.
🪑
So after everything we’ve talked about this week, I have only one Heart Check tonight:
What love is already here?
Don’t go looking for what’s missing first.
Look around the room.
Maybe somebody came for you.
Maybe you’re learning to come for yourself.
Maybe God has been sitting beside you.
Maybe there’s a chair you thought you’d lost.
Maybe there’s a little light under a door.
Maybe there’s more love in the room than shame allowed you to see.
❤️🔑
The door was locked.
Love was already in the room.
And maybe love doesn’t only unlock doors.
Maybe love helps us remember which way is home.
❤️
No cliffhanger tonight.
😅
Just this:
You don’t have to abandon yourself anymore.
The chair is here.
Sit awhile.
We made it to Friday.
loving me some you
Cassandra
#YourLifeMattersToMe
Thursday, October 8, 2026 — 6:00 PM
Who has a key? 🔑❤️
Beloveds,
Yesterday I told you we needed to talk about keys.
So…
empty your pockets.
👀🔑
Because somewhere along the way, some of us started confusing love with unlimited access.
They are not the same thing.
You can love somebody and change what they have access to.
You can forgive somebody and decide they don’t get the same key they used to have.
You can care deeply about somebody and still say:
You cannot keep entering my life this way.
❤️
And that doesn’t automatically make you bitter.
It doesn’t automatically mean you haven’t healed.
It doesn’t automatically mean you’re holding a grudge.
Sometimes a boundary isn’t punishment.
Sometimes it’s a lock doing exactly what a lock is supposed to do.
🔐
We’ve spent this week talking about locks that may no longer serve us.
But some locks still have a job.
👀
That matters.
Because I don’t want us leaving this week thinking love means every door should be open.
No.
Some doors need to stay closed.
Some people should knock.
Some people belong on the porch.
Some people had a key once and demonstrated exactly why they shouldn’t have one now.
And some people?
Beloveds…
they don’t even need the address.
😆🔑
Love does not require foolishness.
Grace does not require unrestricted access.
Forgiveness does not automatically restore trust.
And reconciliation, when it is possible at all, doesn’t mean pretending nothing happened.
Trust can be rebuilt.
But rebuilt trust is still rebuilt.
It has history.
❤️
And here’s where this gets more complicated.
Sometimes the person we’re afraid will misuse the key…
hasn’t.
Sometimes shame makes us take somebody’s key before they’ve done anything wrong.
👀
They correct us.
Click.
They disagree with us.
Click.
They misunderstand something.
Click.
They disappoint us.
Click.
They don’t respond exactly the way we hoped.
Click.
And suddenly we’re standing behind the door thinking:
See? I knew it.
But did we know it?
Or did an old wound recognize something that looked vaguely familiar and sound the alarm?
🔐
That’s why we have to learn the difference between discernment and fear.
Discernment says:
Pay attention to what is actually happening.
Fear says:
What happened before is about to happen again.
Discernment watches patterns.
Fear can turn one moment into a prophecy.
Discernment can change its mind when new information arrives.
Fear has already written the ending.
👀
And shame?
Shame does something else.
Sometimes shame doesn’t wait for somebody to take our key.
We take theirs.
We decide for them that once they see the messy part…
once we make the mistake…
once they disagree with us…
once they discover we’re unfinished…
they won’t want to stay.
So we leave first.
We get quiet.
We pull away.
We start packing up our own chair.
🪑
Because rejection hurts less, we think, if we can beat somebody to it.
But beloveds…
what if nobody asked you to leave?
😭❤️
What if correction wasn’t an eviction notice?
What if disagreement wasn’t abandonment?
What if somebody saying:
“This hurt.”
or
“This needs to change.”
didn’t mean:
“You no longer belong here.”
Those are different sentences.
And some of us have spent years hearing the second sentence whenever anybody speaks the first.
👀
That’s shame again.
Shame turns:
Something needs attention
into:
Something is wrong with me.
And then it tells us to run before anybody confirms what we’re already afraid is true.
But love can do something shame cannot.
Love can tell the truth and stay.
❤️🔑
Read that one again.
Love can say:
That wasn’t okay.
That hurt.
We need to talk about this.
Something has to change.
And still say:
Your chair is here.
🪑
Truth can enter the room without love having to leave it.
THAT is a key worth keeping.
🔑❤️
Because safe love isn’t love that never corrects.
Safe love isn’t love that agrees with everything.
Safe love isn’t love that avoids every uncomfortable conversation.
Safe love is love where truth doesn’t automatically threaten belonging.
And maybe that’s part of finding our way home too:
learning which voices help us return to ourselves and which ones keep teaching us to abandon ourselves.
🧭❤️
Somebody can love you and challenge you.
Somebody can love you and say no.
Somebody can love you and have boundaries.
And you can do the same.
Because boundaries aren’t the opposite of love.
Sometimes boundaries are how love refuses to become resentment.
👀
So who has a key?
Not everybody.
And not everybody needs the same key.
There are people who may have access to the front porch of your life.
Others get the living room.
A smaller number know where the kitchen is and don’t need directions. 😆
And maybe a precious few have seen you sitting on the floor in the middle of the night when nothing made sense.
Different access.
Different trust.
Different history.
That’s okay.
❤️
But here’s another question:
Have you given somebody a key who keeps using it to hurt you?
And another:
Have you taken a key away from somebody safe because somebody unsafe once had one?
Whew.
🔑
Those require different answers.
And neither answer should come from shame.
For those who share my faith, one of the things that continues to undo me about My Father is that He knows.
Not the edited version.
Not the Sunday version.
Not the version with all the doors cleaned up before company arrives.
Me.
And He comes anyway.
❤️
Knowing me does not require Him to abandon me.
And being loved by Him does not mean nothing in me ever needs correction.
Both can be true.
What I do matters.
And:
I matter too.
Maybe we need to learn how to hold those together.
With God.
With each other.
And with ourselves.
🔑❤️
So tonight:
Who has a key?
Who has earned your trust?
Who respects your no?
Who can tell you the truth without making your humanity feel like a crime?
Who keeps showing up?
Who handles your tenderness carefully?
Who needs less access?
Who perhaps deserves another look because fear—not their behavior—locked the door?
And one more:
Have you been standing outside your own home because shame convinced you that you lost your key?
👀
Beloveds…
stop moving your own chair.
You live here.
🪑❤️
And tomorrow…
we’re going home.
Because after a week of locks, doors, shame, chairs and keys, I have one last thing I need to tell you.
The door may have been locked.
But…
👀❤️
I’ll see you tomorrow.
loving me some you
Cassandra
#YourLifeMattersToMe
Heart Check — Thursday, October 8, 2026
Who has a key? 🔑❤️
Beloveds,
We’ve talked about being stuck.
We’ve looked at what we locked away.
Yesterday we confronted that enormous little lock called “should.”
Today I want to talk about keys.
Who has one?
And maybe just as important:
Who shouldn’t?
👀
Love does not mean everybody gets unrestricted access to you.
Some doors have locks for good reason.
Some boundaries are wisdom.
Somebody can be forgiven and still not receive the same access they once had.
You can love someone and recognize that closeness with them is harmful.
You can wish somebody well without inviting them back into every room of your life.
Love is not the absence of boundaries.
Sometimes love is exactly why a boundary is necessary.
❤️
But there is another side to this Heart Check.
Sometimes nobody is trying to get through our door anymore.
And we’re still standing behind it.
Because shame has convinced us we don’t belong on the other side.
Shame is sneaky like that.
It doesn’t always say:
Hide.
Sometimes it says:
If they really knew you, they wouldn’t want you.
So we leave before anybody asks us to leave.
We withdraw before somebody can reject us.
We stop speaking before somebody can correct us.
We disappear before anybody gets the opportunity to stay.
We stand outside our own chair.
🪑
And this week I have been thinking deeply about something:
Correction and condemnation are not the same thing.
Somebody can say:
“That hurt me.”
without saying:
“I don’t love you.”
Somebody can say:
“You misunderstood me.”
without saying:
“You are worthless.”
Somebody can say:
“We need to fix this.”
without saying:
“There is no longer a place for you here.”
👀❤️
But shame translates.
“You missed me” becomes:
I am a disappointment.
“I need you to do this differently” becomes:
I can never get anything right.
“That wasn’t okay” becomes:
I am not okay.
And suddenly we aren’t responding to what somebody actually said.
We are responding to the verdict shame added afterward.
🔐
I have learned that one of the most loving things we can give another person is a relationship where truth can enter the room without love having to leave it.
Read that again.
Truth can enter the room without love having to leave it.
❤️🔑
Love doesn’t have to pretend nothing happened.
Love doesn’t have to excuse harm.
Love doesn’t have to erase accountability.
Love can say:
No.
Love can say:
That hurt.
Love can say:
Come correct.
Love can say:
We need to do this differently.
And still say:
Your chair is here.
🪑
That matters.
Because some of us learned that mistakes cost belonging.
Get it right or get out.
Be useful or become disposable.
Don’t disappoint me.
Don’t need too much.
Don’t change.
Don’t fail.
And when you’ve lived with that long enough, you can begin treating every correction like an eviction notice.
But what if it isn’t?
What if somebody loves you enough to tell you the truth and enough to stay in the room while you work through it?
What if you could do the same for someone else?
And what if you could do that for yourself?
👀
Because maybe the person you’ve been threatening with eviction is you.
Every mistake:
Get out.
Every setback:
You should know better.
Every bad decision:
See? This is who you are.
Every time you don’t meet your own expectations:
There goes your chair.
Beloveds…
Stop moving your own chair.
😭❤️🪑
Accountability can sit here.
Growth can sit here.
Regret can sit here.
Repair can sit here.
Correction can sit here.
And love can remain seated too.
Maybe that’s what grace looks like in ordinary life.
Not pretending everything is fine.
Not refusing to change.
But refusing to turn every imperfection into evidence that someone—including ourselves—is disposable.
🔑
And this brings me back to the question:
Who has a key?
Who has earned enough trust to speak truth into your life?
Who can correct you without trying to control you?
Who can sit beside you without demanding access to every locked room?
Who knows how to knock?
Who respects “no”?
Who doesn’t use what you reveal as a weapon later?
Those people matter.
And maybe today is also a good day to ask:
Am I that kind of person for somebody else?
❤️
For those who share my faith, this reaches even deeper for me.
I believe God knows every room.
Every lock.
Every mistake.
Every hidden thing.
Every place where shame whispers:
If He really knew…
Beloveds, He knows.
And He comes for us anyway.
Not because truth doesn’t matter.
Because love is not frightened by truth.
God doesn’t discover us.
He knows us.
And still…
He comes.
❤️
Yesterday we talked about forgiving ourselves for not being where we thought we should be.
Today maybe we forgive ourselves for believing every mistake meant we deserved to lose our chair.
Maybe we stop running from rooms nobody asked us to leave.
Maybe we stop assuming correction means rejection.
Maybe we learn to hear:
“This needs to change.”
without adding:
“Therefore, I am unlovable.”
🔐🔑
Because shame says:
If I am fully known, I cannot be fully loved.
Love answers:
Knowing you does not require abandoning you.
And maybe that is one of love’s greatest keys.
Not:
Nothing you do matters.
But:
What you do matters—and you matter too.
❤️
So today’s Heart Check:
Who has a key to me?
Why do they have it?
Who needs to lose access?
Have I confused boundaries with bitterness—or love with unlimited access?
Do I turn correction into condemnation?
Have I been leaving rooms nobody asked me to leave?
And finally:
Can truth and love sit together in my heart without one evicting the other?
🪑❤️🔑
Tomorrow we reach the last door.
And nobody is going to make you walk through it.
loving me some you
Cassandra
#YourLifeMattersToMe
Love stays.
At least mine does.
I choose to love.
No matter what.
Being ghosted hurts.
Every time.
Yet, the love stays.
You all matter to me.
Everybody.
Friend or foe.
Gay or straight.
Rich or poor.
Believer or atheist.
ALL matter to me.
So, I sit.
Arms outstretched.
Never folded.
Shoulder ready.
Hand extended.
Here today.
Here, tomorrow?
God knows but He’s not telling.
loving whosoeverwill,
Cassandra
#YourLifeMattersToMe
Beloveds,
I find myself at a crossroads. Someone, who has come to mean a great deal to me, has chosen to do things, deliberately, to break our relationship.
Am I angry? Not, anymore. Am I sad? Perhaps.
Should I walk away? Would I have justification? Maybe.
MY faith tells me that we ought forgive 70 times 7. That’s 490 times.
I have forgiven many times over that.
Do I turn my back on the shared laughter, the shared sadness, the shared foolishness.
Ah, God, what do I do with me. Here. Now.
I, at least, choose to forgive. I have been thinking about agency. I have been doing my best to love as many as I can.
I have sought friendship and love for 50 plus years.
I don’t regret my heart’s choice to love a world that appears to care not a whole lot for Cassandra.
I’m STILL going to show up as long as I have breath. My life is NOT a cliffhanger. By MY choice.
I love yall. Periodt.
Why? Because, your lives are important to me. Why? Because, He first loved me.
Will I forgive my friend? I already have. Will I do so until the end of time?
Tune in next time…
standing at the cliff,
Cassandra
Note: Normally, I would have offered encouragement here. Understanding. Reconciliation.
About all I can muster, beloveds, is to remain in my pulled out chair.
Have the day you choose to have. I shall do/ have the same…
I was only trying to eat some crackers 😅
Beloveds, I’m in a goofball mood this 🌄 morning. Laugh with me…
I have to take my morning medication with food.
It was too early for an actual meal, and I was still entirely too tickled from negotiating with hard for some PTO, so I decided Ritz crackers would do.
Simple.
Quiet.
Responsible even.
Ritz looked at me and said,
“Nah fam.”
👀
Excuse me?
I know a cracker did not just get smart with me before sunrise.
Before I could properly address Ritz, Ziploc showed up.
Nobody called Ziploc.
Nobody asked Ziploc.
But Ziploc took one look at the situation and said,
“Both of you need to zip it.”
😐
Oh.
So this is what we doing this morning.
I went and got annoyed.
You remember annoyed.
Blue.
Extra annoyed.
Already irritated about having to exist.
Annoyed came marching into the kitchen like somebody had activated the emergency response system.
“What happened?”
I pointed at Ritz.
Ritz said nothing.
I pointed at Ziploc.
Ziploc suddenly discovered silence.
Interesting.
Then boring showed up.
Now boring had JUST gotten free from PTO jail and should have gone somewhere and enjoyed being boring in peace.
But nooooo.
Boring heard commotion and decided this was the perfect morning to develop a personality.
Boring leaned against the counter.
“So we fighting crackers now?”
I looked at boring.
Annoyed looked at boring.
Ritz looked nervous.
Ziploc tried to disappear into a drawer.
And then amused arrived.
Amused brought coffee and donuts.
☕️🍩
Did amused come to help?
Absolutely not.
Amused pulled up a chair, got comfortable, took a sip of coffee and said,
“Please. Continue.”
😂
About that time, we heard a tiny knock from down the hall.
Everybody froze.
hard peeked around the corner.
“Can I come out now?”
I said, “Are you prepared to respect the PTO agreement?”
hard thought about it.
“Define respect.”
Annoyed stood up.
“OH, I GOT TIME TODAY.”
😂😂😂
Amused reached for another donut.
Boring whispered, “This is why I preferred PTO jail.”
Then peace wandered through in pajamas, surveyed the entire situation and turned right back around.
I couldn’t even blame peace.
😂
And somewhere between Ritz getting disrespectful, Ziploc getting mouthy, annoyed getting more annoyed, boring finding a personality, amused eating donuts and hard trying to renegotiate a contract we JUST signed…
I realized something.
Life can be lifing and still be ridiculous.
Something can hurt and something else can make you laugh five minutes later.
You don’t have to wait until everything is fixed before you’re allowed to enjoy something good.
Joy doesn’t always wait on the other side of hard.
Sometimes joy shows up right in the middle of it.
Sometimes carrying coffee and donuts.
Sometimes hiding inside a ridiculous conversation with a sleeve of crackers.
Sometimes it’s just a few minutes when hard isn’t getting all the attention.
And, beloveds, we’ll take those minutes.
Every single one.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to find patience.
Patience is late.
And annoyed has questions.
😅👖☕️🍩
loving me some you
Cassandra
#YourLifeMattersToMe
Whew.
Whew!
WHEW!
Beloveds,
Thought someone could use a laugh this 🌄 morning. This morning’s text:
Everything is backwards AND upside down. It took forever and a day to get my pants 👖 on the right way. I have learned to laugh when that happens. Okay, maybe not so much laugh as understand this is my new normal, but not.
Think I will spend some time encouraging someone. Starting with me.
I’m no longer asking hard to leave me alone. I DID ask Him(God)to send boring and incredibly boring to spend the foreseeable with me!😆
This tickled me so much am going to share this exact text on my blog.
Don’t worry, names have been changed to protect the guilty!
HAHAHA!!
Be encouraged, beloveds. Just because life appears to be backwards AND upside down doesn’t mean it is.
Laugh. Hug somebody. Starting with me.
here upside down and all
Cassandra
Note 📝: Never negotiate with fear, tho. Negotiate with hard for some PTO!
Truly, life is worth living. Even when it’s lifing. 💋💯🥰💯☕️👖🤗
Missing me
Beloveds,
I miss me.
Not in some deep, philosophical, somebody-call-a-meeting kind of way.
I just miss me.
sigh
I miss taking a long shower without it being something that required thought.
I miss making coffee and sitting there enjoying it while it was still hot.
I miss grabbing my keys, getting in my car and heading for the highway about ten minutes from my apartment.
Sometimes I wasn’t going anywhere.
That was the point.
I would drive for an hour or so with my music blasting.
No appointment.
No destination that needed explaining.
No one waiting for me to arrive.
Just me, the highway and whatever song happened to understand me that day.
Sometimes I would treat myself to a movie.
Sometimes I would stop at Village Inn for coffee and French silk pie.
Sometimes I would grab Popeyes, go home, watch YouTube and turn in early.
Nothing extraordinary.
And maybe that’s what I miss most.
The ordinary freedom of being alone with me.
Solitude used to ride shotgun.
She didn’t talk much.
Didn’t need to.
She knew I wasn’t lonely.
There is a difference.
Solitude and I could sit in a restaurant together.
Go for a drive together.
Watch a movie together.
Drink coffee together.
Do absolutely nothing together.
We were good like that.
Now Solitude comes by sometimes and stands at the door.
I look at her.
She looks at me.
“You remember when we could just go?” I ask.
She smiles.
“I remember.”
sigh
I miss that.
Today, doing almost anything requires another person somewhere in the equation.
Someone to help.
Someone to drive.
Someone to accompany.
Someone to make possible what I once did without thinking twice.
I am grateful for people.
This isn’t about wishing them away.
It is about missing the woman who could say, “I think I’ll go get some coffee,” and then simply pick up her keys.
I miss the privacy of independence.
I miss spontaneity.
I miss changing my mind halfway down the road because there was nobody else’s schedule to consider.
I miss being responsible for nobody’s time but mine.
Mostly?
I miss being enough company to make the day possible.
That’s the part that’s difficult to explain.
Because when I say I miss being alone, somebody might hear loneliness.
I’m not talking about loneliness.
I’m talking about alone me.
The woman who could spend an entire day with herself and never once feel like somebody was missing.
She wasn’t waiting for company.
She was the company.
So tonight I think I’ll leave Solitude’s chair out for a while.
Not because I’m pretending things haven’t changed.
They have.
And not because I’m trying to turn this into one of those tidy little lessons where everything difficult has to reveal its purpose before bedtime.
Nope.
Tonight I’m simply remembering.
A highway.
Music too loud.
Coffee.
French silk pie.
Maybe some Popeyes later.
And a woman perfectly content in her own company.
“Solitude?”
“Yeah?”
“I miss us.”
“I know.”
Another sigh.
Then we sit.
No tears.
No fixing.
Just two old friends remembering when going nowhere was something I could decide to do all by myself.
And, beloveds, sometimes missing who you were isn’t rejecting who you are.
Sometimes…
you just miss you.
I do.
loving me some you
Cassandra
#YourLifeMattersToMeMissing
