Intro To Caregivers Finding Comedy Through The Chaos

Hey, friends. Happy Thursday to you. I am Miss Shannon. Hello, Colleen. Good to see you. Already in the chat. We're going to wait for a couple of other people to give here. Colleen, I loved everything you said this morning. I hope that you enjoyed your massage. I think you said you were going into, I haven't done that in a really long time. I am curious to know whether my friend Colleen earlier today, who was practicing her self care, was doing one of those aggressive massages that you go to or if it was more of one of those, like, fluff and buff type things.

So feel free to let me know. Hello to Shannon as well. And as people continue to join or if you're watching us in the replay, I am an additional Shannon. I am miss Shannon Paul, and I am a lot of things. If you go to my LinkedIn page or if you looked at my resume, I'm a comedian and a speaker and a radio and tv host here and a bunch of things just like a lot of you who will be watching us on caregiver Thursdays and with the rest of the content that we're going to see here on Cadre. But mostly what I am is that I am a wonderful autism mom to a 16 year old kiddo who I call a cyclone kid for anybody who's known me for a while.

When he was little, I used to call him the toddler tornado. But just like a Pokemon, you have to evolve them occasionally. So now he is a giant six year old who is taller than I am and more robust than I am. And the other thing is, he also happens to be high supports on the autism spectrum. And I share that with you because I know that we were joined earlier today. Jamie from our Minnesota Autism center was on our caregiver Thursdays as well. And I always appreciate all of the content that they have and that they provide as a resource to a lot of the families that are on here.

I know that you may have already heard the content from Shannon Stoff and also the content from Colleen Lindstrom. So the story of dealing with a variety of levels of diagnoses and those type of things may not be something that is new to you. If you didn't get a chance to meet my friend Shannon and my friend Colleen yet, you can find those replays here in the Cadre app. And they are both wonderful, wonderful human beings. And I'm glad to be part of this community. And the thing that I think is interesting is when we start looking at those labels and those diagnoses and the things that we end up navigating as caregivers is whether that label is something that we would pick or whether it's something that we need to use, because that helps us facilitate being a better caregiver and providing the resources that we need for the people that are in our circle.

So when people ask me, and I thankfully get this question a lot less than I have in the past, as I get that question about how much autism does he have? And so I'm like, that's a difficult question to answer and kind of weird, but he's high supports on the autism spectrum and I'm very fortunate to be able to support him and to be his mom. And he cracks me up. And if you follow me on the social medias, you can see us occasionally go on some adventures. And he is the smartest person in my life and much smarter than I am on most days.

So what we're going to talk about in my livestream here with comedy through the chaos is helping you anchor your life as a caregiver with some of those moments of humor. And I want to start by framing this conversation by starting with the quote that we hear a lot that says laughter is the best medicine. That is a load of crap. Laughter is not the best medicine. Medicine is the best medicine. If you have a quality practitioner in your life, both mental health as far and actually a physical practitioner, I encourage you to continue to talk to them.

If they are not communicating to you in the way that you need, fire them and find another practitioner. There are wonderful practitioners out there who will actually support you. I am a comedian who can tell you from my particular history and the way that I work and the way my brain works, that the way that I use laughter is that it helps you anchor onto those good moments that you have in life as much as you can anchor on to the negative moments that we have. And a lot of the time, because our brain is looking for a way to not have painful things happen to it.

It will anchor onto those negative moments. So we've heard about a negativity bias, and some practitioners who are much smarter than I am are the ones that taught us about all of those things and why our brain will latch onto something that came up that was really negative so that hopefully we don't have to go through that pain again, and then we're less likely to remember all of the humorous things and the joy that we had because it doesn't seem as necessary and important. And I encourage you to find a way to latch onto those moments.

One of my mentors had told me this back in the day, that we all get to decide whether our life is a comedy or a tragedy because we're going to have the same beats. And so it's just a matter of which of those beats you decide that you're going to highlight on. And when I'm out in the wild and I'm telling a story about something that happened in my life or something that I'm dealing with with my kid, what I get a lot is that people go, oh, my gosh, I'm so sorry that I'm laughing at a way that I told a story and I'm like, please do not apologize.

That is what I do for a living and a profession is go around and make people laugh. And if I told you in a way about something that might have been challenging that I'm going through and you ended up laughing, that was intentional. Because I choose to not only feel all of the feels about the negative things that happen, I also choose to feel all of the feels about the positive parts of that as well. And so hopefully on Thursdays, that's one of the things that I get to help you also find in your life.

I'm coming into hot at the last spot of our live streams that are going to be on Thursdays for our caregiver Thursday events. m. Central is because this is my last bastion of adulting time before I run to go pick my son up at school. So I thought there might be some other people that are like that out there, just like me where you're going. I need one more minute, just a few more minutes to, like, bring this all together before I have to go full force back into caregiving or parenting or whatever it is that you're doing that soaks up a bunch of your laugh.

So I encourage you to go, I have one more shot at finding and focusing on something that's humorous in your day and using that to bring you back into how do I refill my cup? And one of the things that I'll bring today, and we're going to continue to have these conversations through the through every week when we log on to what's going on with our caregiver Thursdays. Another thing that I want to remind you as we are having this conversation about feeling all the feels is when we're caregivers, we're put in a position where the people that we are caring for, who we love and adore and who are probably you know, if you're in my situation, he is the center of my existence.

He is also complex and a teenager and a lot of work. And I think it's fair to remind ourselves as caregivers that the people that we are caring for cannot always refill our cups and our buckets or whatever terminology you use for that emotional store that you have. And that's not their fault, nor should they be faulted for doing that. That's your job, is to figure out a way that you can refill your own bucket, figure out a way to put those drops of joy back in it so that you don't fry yourself, because there's people who need you and who are important to you, and you need to be so important to yourself that you find those moments to go, I will refill my bucket right now because it will benefit the people that I care for in the long run.

And I say that from a position of perfectly imperfectness. I am not that great at it. I have actively worked on turning that rock over the years so that it does not continue to be a wall. I am not organically one of those people that spends a lot of time taking care of myself and worrying about it. I'm very Gen X in that nature where I'm like, I will give until I exhaust myself and pass out. But I've had to learn that it's actually selfish to not take care of yourself as a caregiver. If people are counting on you and you don't do what you need to do in order to allow that to go on as long as possible, what good are you, you know?

So, yes, you do have to take some time, as Colleen mentioned this morning, to go and get her fluff and buff massage, as some of you might be going, oh, this was another day that I meant to go and work out. I meant to go on a walk, and I meant to go and do a whole bunch of stuff that had, you know, that had to do with you that you didn't get to, and now you got to go and take care of them again. I understand that that is a challenge and that there may be guilt associated with you taking 15 minutes to actually make yourself something that you want to eat.

Maybe you were like this, more like me this morning where my kid asked me as we were trying to leave to go to school. He asked me for pancakes and bacon, literally, as I was like, could you just put on your socks? Could you put on your socks and your shoes? And can we go? And he was stalling out, but because I did have enough in my bucket to go, maybe you should do the math on this. And here's the math that happened in my head this morning. I could either try and talk him out of me making pancakes and bacon, or I could just spend the time doing making pancakes and bacon.

So am I going to talk about it or do it? The math is, it probably would have taken me about the same amount of time to do both of those things. So what I did is I made this young pharaoh pancakes and bacon this morning, and he had a good time and we laughed about it, and we got to leave the house with smiles. Equally as late, equally as late as we would have been if I tried to, like, knuckle down and go, I need you to actually listen to the words that are coming out of my mouth and other people in this universe respect me, why don't you?

16 year old nonsense. But it took me probably about the same amount of time to actually make him these pancakes to set us up for success, to release myself from feeling like me taking him to school 15 minutes later than I had planned or hoped was the reason why he eventually was not going to end up being a Harvard scholar. All of that once it gave myself time to release that and actually get out the door. It all worked out anyway, and we were both happier. And I have a happy story from this morning.

Instead of another story about, man, let me tell you about how slow my kid is. Do you have some moments in your life that are like that a couple of times where you're like, you focus on doubling down on whatever the hard thing is instead of looking for what could be the fun part. If you do, maybe you can sit there and go, you know you deserve the fun. You know you deserve the fun. It's okay. It's okay to focus on the. Here's where we sat and we laughed at things as much as you focused on the hard thing that is inevitably going to come back up anyway?

As we are continuing to get to know each other and building this monopolized dialogue, I just want to encourage you to, again, do not drop into toxic positivity with this whole thing. I'm not telling you that things aren't hard and they don't suck, and there are lots of days when they do. But if you can, as much as we need to protect ourselves from the hard things, give yourself time to sit down. When you have something fun and joyous, let yourself steep in that fun, joyous moment like you're a teabag and some warm water.

Because that is what's going to help you monopolize your mind, to have those happy moments pop up as much as those negative moments pop up. It's practice, man. It's practice. We only have so many opportunities to have quiet moments in our mind. And if we continue to practice this and as we continue to get to know each other, hopefully we can fix it so that when those quiet moments happen in your mind, what wanders through there is something happy and not always something negative, because it's very difficult to get yourself to do that.

So, Shannon, I hope you enjoyed your egg sandwiches this morning. What I ended up eating was leftover pancakes because I am a steward. I am a steward of our environment. And they were already made, and I was pretty proud of myself. They came out good this morning. I was focused as on focused. The pancakes this morning that I did not want to make came out beautiful. I should get a Michelin star for them. So, you know, thank you for joining us. We'll continue to build this. If you have any suggestions on what kind of content you want on caregiver Thursdays or any of the days that we have coming up, we have content going throughout the week.

And we encourage you to use this as a brief moment, a respite sometimes. If you're like, hey, I'm in my own head and I just need to know who else is out there that might be going through the same thing. That's what we're going to be doing in this Cadre app is just providing an additional resource, something that may be able to get you through for that moment when you're just like, I'm feeling overwhelmed. Maybe this will be the thing that gives you a second to breathe. Maybe this will be the thing that gets you to your next appointment with your care practitioner.

Maybe this is the thing that gets you to the point that you stop feeling like, oh, my gosh, am I a terrible person because I feel so overwhelmed that I want to cry? No. You know, sometimes laughing and crying simultaneously is a thing that happens. And so if me sharing a couple of stories, and eventually I'll show you the mess of my house that I don't always get to, just like you probably don't. And we can get to know some of the things that are part of our long list of things that we are in addition to caregivers and all of the things that I would find on your LinkedIn profile or on your resume.

So we'll do that. So again, go back through, please see all of the great content that we had today for our inaugural caregiver Thursdays. Check on us tomorrow. We know that there's going to be a lot of overlap of all of the content that we have tomorrow. We're going to be working with our folks that are focusing on navigating grief and loss. m. Central tomorrow. And then it's always going to be living here in this Cadre app, you know, if you only get to hear part of what I'm saying because you had to hop in the car, pop back and find us later, you know, we sound really good in your earbuds if you need to do that.

So if you're waiting until whoever it is that you're, you know, giving care to gives you a mailman, we will be here for you when you come back. So content seven days a week for all of the things that you need to get you through until the next time you have a chance to take a deep breath. So enjoy the rest of your day, everybody go pick up whoever you got to pick up, and I'll see you back here next Thursday.