Comedy Through The Chaos

Hello everyone. Happy? A couple of things. I am a comedian, corporate speaker and voice actor hubbing out of Minneapolis, Minnesota. But most of the time I am the caregiver to an adorable 16 year old boy who I call Cyclone kid who also happens to be high supporters on the autism spectrum. And I am happy to join you on this lovely Thursday for our caregiver Thursday live stream. I decided that today I was going to be one of the cool kids like a number of our contributors and speak with you from my car.

I'm also going to try and use my microphone again and see how this is so secm, if you can hear me well on this mic, let me know. Go ahead and put some information in the chat because I'm using my technology again and also doing it from my car. Hey JC. JC, good to see you. I have good news for you JC. So hopefully I sound okay on this mic. If not, tell me and I will unplug it and just shout at my phone. But normally I get to do my live streams either from my home studio or from whatever locale I am on.

But today I'm doing it from my car. Hello, Miss Tiffany. Tiffany has seen my car because she's my best friend in the whole wide world. And so if you wonder what's in the back of me, that is a aggressive pet barricade that I have up in the backseat because it makes my son and I feel a little bit more comfortable. Hello speak wander. Good to see you as well. And so the reason that I'm joining you from my car is a couple of things. So this morning I had the opportunity to attend a memorial service for a wonderful human being who happens to be a member of our comedy communities.

A good friend of ours, his wife passed away. And so that is where a bunch of us in this community were at this morning. And so if you're in a situation where you are dealing with grief, this is a great opportunity to remind you that we have a number of contributors that do focus on that subject matter on Fridays, so feel free to pop in there. And so the wonderful, although sad, thing about being at this memorial service earlier today is that it's really a good testament to what it is that we do as comedians because it was beautiful and sad, but had a lot of really funny moments in it and a couple of takeaways that I personally had from going there is that our friend, when he was talking about his process right now, is that he mentioned that he was feeling a variety of emotions all at the same time.

So about how you can be sad and grateful, angry and happy, and all the emotions all at the same time, which is a lot of what you hear. And if you wonder why, I go by a live stream called comedy through the chaos. And Tiffany has her comedy centered. It's really not that we think everything is funny every minute of the day. It's that we are just in a situation where we use comedy to process a lot of the things that we go through. So humor is just very important to us for that. And so that was one of the things that I thought was very impactful for him to share.

And it's always interesting when we're in these settings because you're so glad to see the other people in your community, but you're also reminding yourself that it would be wonderful to be able to see each other when we're not in this setting and how quickly time can pass between connections. So if you are connecting with people here in the Cadre sphere, I encourage you to continue to do so. Because time, we say all the time that time is short. I don't necessarily agree that time is always short.

I agree that time is sudden, though. And there are so many opportunities to look down and then look back up, and you just don't know where the years have gone. You don't know where the moments have gone. So time can feel very sudden. The other thing that really just came to mind this morning, as our friend was talking about his lovely wife, who passed recently, is talking about how she was good at so many things, and she was a wonderful homemaker and mother and was great at all these things. And as he put it, but she really wasn't great at self care.

And that came up to, that caught up to her, and that really struck a chord with me because that's a lot of what we cover here on caregiver Thursday is about how we as caregivers are so good at so many things and taking care of other people. And as much as we try to practice what we preach, we continually fall short at taking care of ourselves, as much as we know that that is important. And people may advise us that as important that, you know, if you aren't refilling your cup, how are you going to be able to refill that for other people?

It'll make you a better parent. I'll make you a better caregiver. You know, we all know that, but do we actually have enough space in our existence to actually do that? And it was just, you know, I don't even want to call it a wake up call? Because it's not like I've been sleeping to this, and you probably haven't either. We know that we need to take care of ourselves, and if we have to do that in incremental steps or little bite sized chunks, you know, what does taking care of yourself today look like?

Is it getting one more thing off your to do list? Is it getting one more thing on your, as we've spoken before, your ta da list, that list that you've already, things that you've accomplished that may be the reason why you didn't get to some of the things that you thought needed to be a priority. Are you giving yourself credit for that? Are you maintaining your hydration? Are you making sure that you have a moment to laugh or to breathe or to do any of those things that you need to do when you're a caregiver?

And I am as guilty of this as anybody else of going, I know I should probably do x, and instead I do y. And then I looked up and because, like I said, time is sudden. I don't even know where the day went. And so I remind us that if we get into that cycle, you can always go, I can stop here, and then I'm going to go ahead and reset and then see how long you can go and continue to turn the page of taking care of yourself. And you might get back into that same bucket of now I'm back to not doing it, but at least you did it for a little while and you gave yourself a few more minutes to breathe.

And, you know, it's just interesting because whenever I talk to a certain pocket of our group of friends, they're like, oh, I know, you're so busy and you're this, and I bet you that. And so if everybody else sees it that way and they don't really even know half the stuff that you do, you really probably are not given enough time to actually take care of yourself, and it will creep up on all of us. So, hey, steph, thanks for joining the live stream. So, yes. And so for me, the reason why I'm in this parking lot is that, you know, my type a slash high functioning anxiety, said, no, you need to be home in your home studio and your good lights and do all that stuff.

But what I really need to do was really weighing heavily on my mind and something major and minor simultaneously. So I am in the parking lot to a retailer called Menards. If you don't live in the midwest and don't know what Menards is, Menards is like home depot or Lowe's or any of those places where you can go in and get stuff. And the reason I'm in this parking lot is because my storm door, aka screen door, is broken on my house. And I have, like, jury rigged it, diy'd it. I already tried to, like, glue it back together with industrial strength glue.

I already tried to like, like, right now it's just really ghetto fight. I put a bunch of, like, duct tape and I don't even have, like, regular gray duct tape in my house. I got the most extra red duct tape. I don't even know why I thought I needed red duct tape. So now it's the window is actually, like, duct taped into the frame because my son and I do not open the door clearly like normal people. By using the handle, we booty bump the door open every time we go out. So we have booty bumped the door into brokenness.

And so now I need to order a new screen door. And so I was going to do it myself, and then I sat down there and back to my version of self care. I was like, how long is it going to take you to hang this screen door? And how likely are you to hang it improperly? And how likely are you to not be in a situation to take the time to do it the right way? And now it's going to take you extra time to do it because you did it sloppily and then you got to look at it. So what I'm going to do is I already talked to somebody and I hired somebody to put the screen door slash storm door in.

All I have to do is run in here into menards and buy it. And I am counting that as part of Miss Shannon's self care because I'm giving myself back the time that it would take me to poorly install this screen door and spend that time doing something else. I don't know what I'm gonna do with the time. I just know that I'm not gonna stare at the guy who's actually installing the door who does this all the time, will be much more efficient at me. So that is what I'm doing for my self care today, is that I'm doing that.

Maybe yours looks like it's a spa. Maybe if you just sat down actually, and ate your food at a table instead of eating over the sink because you spent all your time feeding other people in your circle. Whatever it looks like for you today, enjoy it. I'm going to enjoy going in here and looking at screen doors and buying something that I hopefully will be a good investment, because it's not going to be something that's going to break immediately or be off its hinges because I spent all this time that I already am allocating to other things rushing to get this done.

So give yourself some credit. Don't feel like you have to do everything. Remember that giving yourself that moment to enjoy whatever your version of self care looks like as a caregiver is important and it's valuable. And something that I had come up in one of my affirmations. I'm going to leave you with this. Something that came up in one of my affirmations, and I've been reminding myself of this since I heard it. You do not need to be busy every single moment of every day. Say it with me. I do not need to be busy every single moment of every day.

Keep saying it. I do not need to be busy every single moment of every day. I know it feels weird and I feel like I'm being lazy. I feel like I'm a loser when I'm not busy. But I'll get. I got to work the muscle, and maybe so do you. m. central. So shout out to JC. JC, I think of you quite often because I have a very morbid reason. I love one of the songs that you play, and it's the song that, because we were talking about funerals today, it's the song that I want them to play at my funeral. And so I will remind you what that is.

That's a. I'll leave that little piece of information out there for everybody to guess. What does Macheton want played at her funeral? And if you haven't thought about it, you're probably not as goth as I am. Hey, let's go. But we enjoy you joining us here as we continue to build our community in the Cadre sphere. There are a variety of different contributors that are here. Everybody has a different vibe, so whatever you need, you could probably find it. And even if you change the vibe that you need from moment to moment or day to day, that's okay, because we've got a bunch of different people here sharing their version of mental wellness, mental illness, mental health, and content with you in their very authentic ways.

So please pop around the cadres fear and find your community. If you ever have any suggestions on what you want us to cover, please let us know. You can drop it in the chat of your individual contributors, or you can just go ahead and find us in the app. And people are always looking through all of that content and looking for ways that we can be a wonderful resource for you. So I am going to go in and order some storm doors, and then that's something that you can check back in with when you watch more comedy through the chaos and then see how my storm door project came out.

So, hey, everybody, take care of yourself. You do not need to be busy every single moment of every day. We'll see you soon.