Things We Aren’t Supposed To Talk About: Not Being Fine!

Monday, Cadre friends. It's 102. Happy Monday. I'm coming to you once again live from my backyard in St. Paul. It is. I think it's. What is it? The 21st today? The 22nd. And it is gorgeous here, which is an anomaly. So I'm gonna be so grateful for it. So, hello, we have a great topic today because I'm gonna tell you a big secret and you're not gonna be shocked by it, but it's a big deal. So I'm Shannon from aloud and allowed exists to be a safe place to talk about things that are not okay to talk about.

And I'm not a therapist, I am not a mental health professional, but I'm someone who has lived through anxiety, CPTSD, parenting a child with autism and all the things. I'm gonna stop saying that now cause I think you know it. But I've lived through some things and I've been in therapy for seven years. And here's the secret I'm going to tell you today, we are not fine. As a human, as a the United States population today, we are not fine. And why that should be a surprise to your way that could be a surprise to you is because if you were to go into your local grocery store today, if you're going into target or going into cub, and if you met someone, if you ran into someone from your school, your church, or whatever it is, and they said, hey, how are you?

It's so good to see you, how are you? You would say, I'm good, I'm fine, everything's great. Or some version of that, right? Because we all do it. We've been socialized to say we are fine and in reality we're not. And I know that because three statistics I found today, I'm going to share with you. One is, well, first of all, loneliness is an epidemic, right? First and foremost, no matter what, loneliness is an epidemic coming out of COVID Coming out of COVID The surgeon general called it. Called it an epidemic this summer.

That's a huge deal. Why we're lonely, I'm going to argue with you, is because, or posit to you is because, although we say we're fine when we're at Target and when we're at the grocery store or wherever you go, actually, 31% of us in the US population have anxiety, including me, and 29% have depression. So 60% of the people that you see today at Target, at the grocery store, those are one in the same also. Yes, I realize Target and the grocery store are the same thing. 60% of those people, six in ten people are suffering.

So. Hi, Nikki. Thank you. We are not fine. You're right. Hi, Luke. It's great to see you. So I'm going to tell you a story about someone in my life not being fine and saying it. And frankly, he changed my life. So, in 2019, I worked at an advertising agency, and I sat in a pod with five other people. And a new co worker joined our team. His name was Kevin. He was in his late twenties. And on his first day, he had a ton of energy, which I love. I have a lot of, ton of energy. We're sitting together in our pod.

He sat, you know, across the way from me, five down feet. I could close, you know, almost touch him. m. His alarm goes off on his phone really loud, like. And he pops up and he says, oh, time to take my anxiety meds. And I was like. And I, at this point, have had anxiety for years and years, decades. And I look around and I said, oh, that's awesome. You take anxiety meds? And he said, yeah. Yep. And I need to take him right now, and I'm gonna go do it. And he goes into the kitchen, he strolls in, and he comes back, and he had taken his anxiety meds, and he did it with such fearlessness, which to me, at that time was fearlessness.

I was in the thick of a lot of life change, and I thought, oh, my God, this guy's just gonna openly talk about his anxiety. He did, and he continued to do that. He continued to set his alarm every day. And what I learned is, in our pot of five, three of us had anxiety. Three of us were on anxiety meds, which we wouldn't have known unless he started by saying, hey, I'm not fine. I'm taking these meds. And it truly, honestly, I'm coming here to you today as the founder of aloud and wanting to talk about things.

A lot of it started for me in that moment because I started to lose the shame around having anxiety. And I met this group of people who all had it, and I was a leader at that organization. And so there was some fear for me in acknowledging it because I was a leader. And I thought, well, what is that going to. How is that going to show up for me from a leadership perspective? So it really changed my life. And I say that because what if we created a world where instead of we say, we're fine, we say what we actually are?

And that is my goal for this group of people. That's the group for you, Nikki. For you, Luke. I want all of us to be able to show up and say exactly who we are. So today, I'm gonna tell you that I am fine. There's a lot of things that are really fine, but one thing that's not fine with me recently is that I have a son with autism. He's 14 years old, and one of his habits is he's got. He's got a lot of sensory issues. And so he loves chocolate, as many of us do. I will go to bed at night. I smear chocolate throughout the kitchen so that when I wake up in the morning, I have gone to bed with a clean kitchen, and everything is together.

And I will wake up in the morning, and I will come out and I will grab the faucet or grab the handle of something to make my coffee, and it will be smeared in chocolate. And is that the end of the world? It's not. Am I fine with it? I'm not. And in those moments, sometimes I get really p*****, and I think, my God, this is never going to end. And it might not. But either way, for other special needs parents out there, for other parents who have kids with disabilities, you get it, right? You get that you sometimes just don't want to have chocolate all over your kitchen, or you don't want to have something smeared on the wall and you think, well, God, if this kid's 14, this may be my reality for the rest of my life, and maybe it will and maybe it won't, but me saying it out loud makes me feel better.

So today, what I'm not fine about is the chocolate being smeared in my kitchen after I go to sleep. So drop what you're not fine with in the comments if you want to dm me. I would love to start a conversation where we can just be ourselves and know that we aren't fine. And that's actually more human than being fine. All right, friends, I hope you have a beautiful afternoon, and thank you for being here, and I will look forward to seeing you soon here at Cadre. Have a beautiful day. Four, three, two.