Things We Aren’t Supposed To Talk About: Taking Our Own Advice!

Hey, aloud friends, I'm three minutes late to my live today, but welcome. It is Monday. It's still. Still in St. Paul, Minnesota, still in my backyard. And again, we're gonna watch the seasons change, but today's a gorgeous day. All right, so today is gonna be a conversation about taking your own advice. So things we aren't supposed to talk about is that it can be hard to take your own advice. So I'm going to tell you my morning. My morning today, actually, I'll tell you my day and my morning. So my therapist, Tracy, who I've gone to for seven and a half years, has a saying that she uses with me when I'm struggling with a thought or a feeling that just feels enormous and overwhelming, and that is that two things can be true.

So Tracy loves to say to me, you know, you can feel x and you can also feel x, and both can be true at the same time. So today is a beautiful day for me because I am making a transition full time into working on aloud and working on this Cadre team and working on tools to help caregivers. And so all these beautiful, beautiful, beautiful things are happening. And I woke up today so grateful. Hey, Katie. Thanks for joining. I woke up today so grateful for all the great things that happened. Truly, if you've ever had one of those moments where everything just sort of falls into place and people show up in your lives and all the things, that's what the last couple of days for me have been.

So I've had this incredible gratefulness, and it's been this beautiful thing. This morning I woke up, and my son had a really, really horrible morning. And before I talk about it, I do want to say one thing about my son. I talk about caring for my son with autism all the time on here, and I want to preface it with, he's a joy. I love him more than anything. I wouldn't change a thing about him. How he shows up in the world has shown me a million lessons. He's changed who I am for the better a thousand times over.

So as I talk about taking care of him, I don't mean it in any way other than just sharing my experience so that other people who are going through it know that it's okay to feel that, too. So I just want to preface it with that. But so this morning was not a great morning. It was a morning where I felt like no matter how prepared I was, I had the laundry ready, I had his clothes ready, you know, made the egg McMuffin sandwich, and all the things that you should be, that you could do as, like, a good mom.

I did all those things this morning, and I thought, it's gonna be a good morning, and I'm gonna be patient, and I'm going to just handle everything with, you know, with grace today. And I didn't, and everything went wrong, and it ended with him storming out of the house with no coat, no backpack, getting on the bus, screaming at me in the street. And I cried. And I drove to school with all of his things. And I stood in the hall and I talked to his social worker, and she said, you know, some of this is being a teen.

And I'm like, yeah, I know. And some of it is. Is part of his autism. But I stood there and I was, you know, hat pulled down, pajama pants on, trying to make it through, and it was really hard, and I felt like a really bad mom. And I got in my car and I cried, and I thought, my God, why can't I figure this out? What do I need to do better? Why can't I be better? You know, all the things? And I had to stop myself and say, okay, shannon, you are, you know, you go on Cadre and you tell people to care for themselves and be nice to themselves and love themselves.

In reality, right now, you need to care for yourself and love yourself because this thing happened, and it is a moment in time, and you're not a bad mom, and those things happen. And so I had to really, really, really intentionally give myself, take the advice that I would give to someone else, which is to say, listen, you're doing your best. You're an amazing mom. The fact that you think about it shows it, and all the things that, you know, that we say to each other as moms and friends. And so I say that just to say, you know, it was easy to kick off that narrative in my head and that story that I tell myself of not being good enough.

And I was lucky enough in the moment to have enough skills to say to myself, this is a moment, and you're going to do the thing that makes you feel better, and that's you're going to go to the gym at 10:00 and I did, and I got there, and I was surrounded by peers who get it and said, listen, you did a great job. You're here. We're going to have a great workout. And it just. It's a beautiful thing. And so I say all of that to say two things can be true. It can be the most beautiful day, and you can have all of this gratefulness for all the great things, and you can easily go down that road of telling yourself a story that's not true and have to sort of recorrect and be intentional in remembering that you deserve the care, too and that you are okay and that you are enough.

So I guess my reminder today is if you find yourself in any moment where you need care, you need to feel better. You need, you know, any, you need just someone to say to you, you're doing a great job, just remember, and if you can do this, I call it tricking yourself. But talk to yourself the way you would talk to a friend and say the things to yourself that you would say to a friend. And it will help you reset and remember that you deserve that care just as much as them. So thanks for being here today.

I hope that helps. If you have a hard moment, two things can always be true, and that's okay. And we will see you later this week. So thanks for joining us. Have a great week, Cadre friends. Thank you. Bye. Five, four, three.