Comedy Through The Chaos: Freedom to Find Joy in the Chaos

Hello, hello, hello and Happy Thursday Cadre sphere. I am Ms. Shannon. Happy to be with you. Hope that you are well wherever you are. If you are on struggle, I totally understand. There are a lot of things that put us into that scenario quite often in the universe. So while we give everybody a chance to jump in, you get all my stuff. Today I was at an event. Hello Amar, good to see you in the chat. Thanks for joining. I hope the Thursday is treating you well. Good to see your name as well. I saw you earlier in the chat for our good friend Kathy over at Harbor Pilot.

So just bringing everybody up to Speed. I am Ms. Shannon. I'm a comedian, corporate speaker, voice actor, Yvette MC and benefit auctioneer that hubs out of the great state of Minnesota. I am also the proud mother of an adorable 17 year old boy who happens to also be high supports on the autism spectrum. And welcome to Comedy through the Chaos where I talk about a bunch of things regarding our parenting and caregiving journey, a lot about it. Hello, hello. It is also a lot to do with how we overcome our imposter syndrome as caregivers currently.

I just came out of a panel discussion that was Black Women in Radio. So that's why you have all of the things, so you get the benefit of. I know I have to be in front of people and leave the house makeup even though it is summer. So I feel like I have on a lot for all of you. So don't think you don't normally deserve it. You just know you see me in a variety of different settings. And today I thought it would be interesting to kind of start with a question. And that question is why is it that we hold off allowing ourselves to have joy when we are in the midst of difficult times?

And I think that we do that for a variety of reasons and I'd be very curious to why you might have done that for and to yourselves during your particular journey. So why is it that we do not allow ourselves to have joy when you're in difficult times? And I want to encourage you to examine that for yourselves and then I want to give you the opportunity to free yourselves from that of freedom to have joy in the chaos that we have in life. And I know that it is often a variety of things that make us go, I am not allowed to feel moments of happiness in the midst of all of this struggle.

I get it that there are lots of times where I'm like, everything around me is so heavy. And so it seems silly or ill advised to enjoy a moment I catch myself personally when something's going well, when there's a little moment of respite. And by respite, I don't mean, like, the full respite we get if somebody helps us with whoever it is that we take care of. I mean, if you have those days where you're just like. It just seems like a thing after thing after thing, and then you have one thing that's really cool.

You're like, well, that was great. And you don't even want to focus on it because you'll think that you'll cause it to go away. Or you're like, oh, darn, I said something. And now it's gonna go, you know, I'm gonna jinx myself, you know, whatever that is. Like. Like it's negative to say something. I don't want to talk about it. I don't want to look at this thing that's actually a good thing. Because it might actually, something bad will happen if I let the universe know that I like this. And I encourage you to let that go.

Enjoying certain things in your life is not going to cause other bad things to happen. Being proud of something that you have in your life is not going to have a causal effect of it going away. That is our brain again defaulting to. Well, negative things happen. And so we make that cause and effect happen. When we go, something good happened, and then I gave it a shine, and then something bad happened again. The inevitable evitability of bad things happening is just going to continue to be inevitable.

That's what happens. Stuff happens. There's going to be good, there's going to be bad. But what we do is we allow ourselves to focus on the negative things. We allow to focus on our fact that who we're caring for is having a bad day. We allow ourselves to focus on the fact that we forgot something and now they missed a med. We allow ourselves to focus on the fact that I got called into work, and so now I feel like a terrible parent because my kid didn't make it to summer school instead of going, you know what?

But when I got home, we had a great time playing outside. Hello, Shannon. You know, when I got home, this was this amazing, really funny thing that happened. You know, like, I'm so excited I took my kid to summer school yesterday. And if I had allowed myself to focus on what the negative was. Look, summer school for some reason, starts an hour earlier than what normal school year started. So we had enough, enough trouble just getting into, hello, junk food junkie. We had enough Time where we didn't make it to school on time when it started at 9 and I would come rolling in at 9:45 and call it a win.

So summer school, which is only a half day for a variety of reasons, and it's only three weeks long, summer school starts at 8am for my teenager who was going through vampire summer. And if you wonder what vampire summer is, it means that he's in there with his blackout curtains closed, just snoring away in the middle of the day. And I go in there and I open the curtains and he's like, close the curtains. Close the curtains, mom, close the curtain. Get up. You can close the curtains yourself. So that's sometimes the best.

The, the most exercise he's gotten is that I go in there and go, hello. And open the curtains. And then he has to get up out of bed to close them back and look at me with disdain. But it's steps. Amen. Fine. So we're in the midst of vampire summer now. Summer school started this week and I'm just doing my best to try to get him moving and awake at 8am we're not out the house, but I did manage to get him there yesterday by around 9:15, and I was still feeling a little guilty. But you know what? When I went to go pick him up at 11, his teacher came out to tell me, hey, we're trying to get him moving, but he's having a good time, he's doing something, he doesn't want to stop.

So how would that be? That instead of being so excited that my kid was enjoying himself at school to the point they couldn't get him to stop doing what he's doing. I'm still focused on the fact that I got him there at 9:15 instead of 8:00'. Clock. It's not worth it. It's not worth it to do that to yourselves. It's not. You know, I had to remind myself, it's like, you know, what's the funny part about this? The fact that this kid that barely wanted to get out of bed is now in there and so engaged.

He's just hanging out and he came out making jokes. He has a fun game that he enjoys called blanket on your head. It's exactly what it sounds. He puts the blanket on his head. I go, oh no, the blanket is on your head. And he goes, blanket is on your hair. And hilarity ensues. That is just as important as the thing that I was making myself feel so guilty about, that lack that I was making Those decisions from that you are a bad caregiver because you didn't make it there on time. Let it go. It's whack.

It's not useful. It doesn't help you bring him out with a wood stick. I'll try. I don't know if he'll get the joke, but the garlic should work, at least. If nothing else, if he doesn't think that it's funny, then I can use the garlic for something else. I know that it has some sort of restorative, holistic, holistic properties. So it'd probably be good to have garlic around for the additional benefit of wearing off any of the people if you saw sinners. I'm gonna keep some garlic and some steaks around anyway.

And when in doubt, I got some swords, so we'll do that too. But, you know, what's that thing that you're holding on to? Hi, Josh. Welcome to the chat. What's that thing that you're, like, sitting there and going, I. I am so caught up in whatever this chaos is that I am not allowing myself to enjoy the fun moments that I have throughout the day as well. I'm telling you, let it go. Enjoy those moments as well, because that's what you can also use to dip back into sanity when things start getting messy.

And there's certain things about mess that is inherently funny. Like if we watch a bunch of old sitcoms, some of the things that are the funniest about it is when things just go chaotic and go nuts. But we can't laugh at that in our own lives. We'll watch it happen on I Love Lucy. We'll watch it happen on Friends, watching the chaos that people go into. And we can see the funny when we're on the outside watching it happen to somebody else, but then not allowing ourselves to go, well, it's funny when it happens to me, too.

My life is complicated. It is hilarious. And normally when I tell you a story, you'll go, oh, I can't believe I'm laughing. And I go, this good. Because I'm good at storytelling. And it is funny. You know, I think it's funny all the time when I think. And I giggle to myself when I think about the fact that I have a cleaning process. Like, my nails look pretty cute today, but I have, like, those old school, like, cleaning lady gloves. You know, I look quite divine because I need to have that kind of practice in my house.

Who does that? Me. And I think it's funny. You know, who's sitting there, you Know what is your soundtrack that you play when you're going through their caregiving tasks? You know, what is it that ends up being really messy? But you can also joke about it, even though it seems like this day to day drudgery that you have going on, when, if you give yourself a chance to just zoom that lens out, there might be some moments of actual fun in there as well. But you're not allowing yourself to get it because the position that we're in, it's not that I'm saying don't take yourself seriously, but we take ourselves so seriously.

You know, we're in this position and we go, it has to be so heavy that we are taking care of this person that we're doing. And I, I challenge you to look at it. And let's let, let that go because it's a joy to be able to do this. And there's so many things about it that I would miss out on if I wasn't giving myself the time to give him the care that he deserves. And I'm so glad that I get to do that. And I get to do it in a way that I occasionally have time to put on all my fancy eyelashes and go talk to some grownups and see how that goes.

So as we continue having these conversations about what you can be giving yourself freedom of, we'll just be tapping into that throughout the Cadre sphere for the rest of the month, allowing you to kind of look at things from a slightly different perspective. Today, as I want to remind you, is giving yourself freedom to enjoy yourself in the midst of all the chaos that is going in your life. You are not going to jinx anything. You're not going to manifest additional bad things because you enjoyed the chaos that was going on.

It doesn't mean that, hey, the only way you are capable of enjoying things is through chaos. No, it just means that in the minute, if something funny happens, it's allowed to be funny. Yes. When you use mayhem, my favorite line I like to use from Alva Hardy. Well, this is another fine mess you've gotten me into, right? It is, it is. And there are lots of those lines that I remember. I'm going to tell you a quick, honest moment about Laurel and Hardy. Junk food junkie. There are a number of things when I was younger I would get confused and then end up feeling a sense of disappointment.

And one of those was I really liked Laurel and Hardy and I really liked Abbott and Costello, but I would get them confused. And of those two things, I liked Avid and Costello better. So whenever I got them confused and it turned out it was Laurel and Hardy, I was like, gosh darn it. So just so you know, I'm slightly triggered by Laurel and Hardy, but that's probably just me, so. But I do also have that running through and through my personal playlist, like, well, there's another fine mess you got in into.

And now I'm going to think about that sometimes when things happen in my house and I can look over at my kiddo and go, that's another fine mess you've gotten us into. And hopefully that brings a smile to my face like it does to yours. So enjoy what you can while you can. Allow yourself to anchor back to those moments of levity when you were going through the midst of things. Give it, you know, an opportunity to expend all that negative energy that we inevitably are going to build up when we're in the midst of chaos and use it as an opportunity to have those negative feelings release in a way that feels different.

And trust me, you will have a physical change in your body when you allow yourself to laugh about some of these things and then realize you don't have to laugh forever. You know, you don't have to laugh forever. Yes, there's going to be something else that comes up later, but just like that moment, that moment will pass just like that moment of levity did. So. So I appreciate everybody, I appreciate everybody here in the Cadre sphere as we continue to just come through a variety of topics and build this conver.

This community from a few different angles. So if there's something that you would love for us to talk about, please let us know. If there's something that we, you feel like we're missing, we would love to get that feedback. There are lots of ways to communicate it to me and the rest of the folks here in the Cadre sphere next week, don't worry, I'm gonna have more content on something you should be freeing yourself from throughout this month. So, you know what I'll do is I'll remember to put in some.

Some videos in the chat of my kiddo lately because he has been quite hilarious. And I like to share those. So I appreciate all of you. Stay safe, stay healthy, keep breathing, give yourself a laugh. We'll see you next week.