Sober Not Somber Hour

Hey, Cadre Sphere, welcome in to the Tuesday Sober Not Somber hour. I'm your host, Jen Varale. And yeah, what I love to do here is share a little bit about my sober journey which has been over 10 years now. Pretty soon I was reminded in July, if all goes well, I get to say 11 years, which is an absolute gift. Oh, hi Genevieve. Welcome in everyone. If you've joined me before, you know that at this time of the day I like to highlight a favorite non alcoholic beverage that I'm loving. And I can't believe I have not highlighted this one yet.

It is called Fresh Steeps. There are three varieties and this one is Recover. So I feel like my emotions are recovering a bit today and. Oh, Steph, hi. Yes. Met you on Sunday. Yes. We had an amazing meetup live in person folks in the Cadre Sphere that are contributors here and it was amazing. I mean online and access easy like this is so fantastic. But that one kind of touch point so all of us could come together. Whoa. Was so good. So here's. And this is actually a local maker. His name is Vince La palooza and he's 30 something.

Got fresh ideas, put it into his tea beverages. It's a nitro tea. This is a hibiscus tea blend and it's na. Cheers. I hope you all have a refreshing beverage in hand. So today I am wanting to share on the theme of balance, emotional balance. And a couple things come to mind. I'm thinking about this season of Gemini, which if you follow astrology and there's a duality and I always feel like my emotions, I'm a cancerian, if you know anything about that sign, it's a water sign, very fluid, very emotional.

Probably gets billed as the most emotional sign of the zodiac, which is a little hard to overcome. I try to just take it as it comes, but I am, I can find my emotions extremely out of balance from minute to minute, hour to hour on any given day. And I feel like in sharing more about stories about balance, I'm not alone and you're not alone if you experience a wide variety of emotions on a daily basis. I didn't realize this growing up. I didn't realize it was normal to have a whole range of emotions.

And I would say today, and the reason I brought in this recover was I'm recovering from sort of an emotional weekend and trying to remember that I do have a steadiness within that I can call upon drop in the the chat. If you have felt in many different emotions even today, like if you have Felt extremes that feel high and low. Let me know, I'd love to hear it where everyone's at. Yeah, I think my share and my encouragement to you all is to really think about how balance might show up. And as a term balance I kind of believe is an elusive thing to achieve.

It's more about the process of being in the moment, working toward what sort, what some sort of comfort level looks like for you. So in that I'm thinking about this past weekend. So this weekend would have been 24 years had I stayed married to the process of divorce for three years. And I thought I was kind of done processing the wedding day, which would have been June 9th and this would have been 2021. And I realized that I am not the crazy emotional ups and downs this weekend because I happen to be at a wedding.

Almost felt like I was looking into my younger self, experiencing it as a 52 year old woman, thinking about when I was 29, 28, 29, being married, and all the hope and optimism around and all the love in those moments. And this past weekend just wrestling with, you know, being in it, watching this beautiful young couple sitting, step into life together and be so overcome with emotions for them, yet draw, you know, out all of my, my own kind of personal grief around my own failed marriage that I have not yet processed.

Have not yet processed. And that's okay. So at the wedding dance itself, all sorts of emotions came up. Huge gratitude to be there with my boyfriend of over 18 months and have started a new chapter, but also reflecting on where I was as a 28 year old. And it was an emotional roller coaster, that is for sure. And it's a lot, it's a lot on the body and the heart to go through all of those in any one given moment. Yeah. But what I ultimately found, and you may feel this too, that on the outside, as an observer of this wedding, kind of internally processing my emotions, I did feel eventually some sort of steadiness.

And that kind of came to me in the message of, you know, you're gonna be okay, you have, you've weathered the hard part of the storm. There was beauty in those moments as a 28 year old and there is beauty in the moment now. And could I just lean into that, that kind of experience across a time momentum of what, 30. Gosh, I can't do math. 34 years. 24 years, sorry. In just thinking about how that all is possible when you know that emotions can come in and really sort of set you off, it can really derail you to have these experiences personally while you're in a social setting.

And there's not really a lot of control in my experience of, you know, stuffing those emotions down. So I just let it. I just let it come out. I just cry if I need to and don't let my emotions derail me too much. But, yeah, I feel like I'm recovering from that a little bit because not only did I have the weekend, a full celebration with this couple went into Monday, which was actually June 9, with a heaviness and just trying to find out where is that kind of it's okay feeling among all those wild emotions.

Anyone else? Anyone else feeling heavy emotions? And also the duality of extreme emotions, extreme gratitude and joy for where I'm at now in my life, but also a deep appreciation for where I was at then. And then in between, a little bit of sadness. Oh, we're all probably in recovery from something, right? Yeah. Genevieve. Yes. Both. And experience. Hard and beautiful. Yeah. I think there's always something to wanting everything to just be beautiful and perfect at a wedding, especially at a wedding.

And it is. It really is such a. A moment. And I always look to weddings to kind of, you know, bask in the. The glow of this. This couple's love. And that's a powerful thing. And I. I kind of just tried to lean into that and let it also just be very hard to know that, yeah, that was once my experience and, you know, no longer is with that person, but creating something new out of just being in a new space. So that's how I'm feeling today. So we're not somber hour. Usually I'm a little more upbeat, but that has felt really heavy.

And we and Cadre with the content around balance this month, you'll probably see a lot of us showing up very authentically telling more stories, more, which, you know, can be hard to do. We're all on here because hopefully we have some authenticity and some something to share that makes you, as listeners, feel less alone. And yeah, so lots of stories and look for them for the rest of the month as we dive into emotional balance, social balance, all types of what that can look like. And I wish you all a very happy evening.

The sun is out here in Minneapolis. I'm going to achieve some new balance by getting some movement. When all else fails, get some movement in Cheers and N A Cheers, as I say. See you next week.