262- 52weekgratitude, weeks 26-30 : July 2017

July has quite busy and I was often tired or uninspired to compose my blog entries. Thus, 52weekgratitude took a back-seat to more pressing subjects and tags that I'd managed to organize my thoughts for. 



I now catch up on weeks 26-30 of this gratitude challenge, though I have to adapt the prompts, which are as follows : 

26 – Someone you got to meet

27 – Favorite spot in your city

28 – Your past

29 - Your favorite memory

30 – Your current age 

• For week 26, I assume that the person supposed to be talked about is a celebrity of some sort. Indeed, on daily basis, we meet friends and acquaintances ; we may interact with co-workers or vendors in shops, but some of us get to meet celebrities we admire, and in the regard, I have absolutely no one to mention. I never went to meet and greets of any kind, as I never went to any concert - with the exception of a few moments at a performance a couple friends gave in a local bar. 

So, the most notable meeting of that week was when we invited a friend and his sister to celebrate his birthday, eating a vegan meal that we'd made for the occasion and spent a couple hours talking. Incidentally, it was 3 years ago that I had to refuse this very friend's invitation to celebrate his 50th birthday and it was the realization that I'd had enough of avoiding such occasions to share joys with close friends that had set  in motion my CBT and thus recovery from social phobia and surrounding anxieties. 

My gratitude to him is that he was very understanding and it didn't disrupt our friendship - as, quite the contrary, this led to many discussions regarding my mental illness and other occasions to pass time together, travelling periodically to villages of our beautiful area, as well as deepening our friendship even further, with mutual support in many difficult moments. 

• For week 27, my favorite spots in my city are the local libraries where I can borrow books, cds & dvds, and the other isn't in the city itself but in another, close-by, which is part of the grand metro-pole area. This place is 30-45 minutes by buses away from here. There are woods, up that mountain. There are 3 main paths I can hike there, and my favorite going up-hill. It's an exercise that I hope to resume soon, as this place is just outside out civilized city, in a close-by natural space where I can breath fresher air, practicing digital photography and on rare occasions, thus far, share moments with friends or family. 

The last few hikes scared me a bit as to the presence of snakes, and dangers not only of possible bites, but also being lost, out of communication. I really want to go back, but also wish to find more opportunities to do so with friends who also love hiking and photography, and not rush ahead of me, or make me rush my photos.  

As I went to to this spot in our area on numerous occasions, and have been taking my camera with me for years, I have 1000's of photos of it, especially since I grew a passion for macro. Thus, I have a good amount of plants and bugs, seen as close-up as I can with my gear, which used to be only a bridge camera, and expanded with macro-attachement lenses, the cheapest way of zooming on these particular subjects. 

After a long, uphill hike.... 

 ... I arrive to my favorite tree, and shortly thereafter, to this table, tucked away between and under trees, where I can sit, rest and replenish by eating and drinking whatever snack I'd brought with me. 

Last time, the view here was quite different, as bushes grew so tall, I couldn't see much of the soil. It was really hot, and that's when I realized that running through this wasn't very smart, and that I really must find partners to get there - I could be bitten by a snake and no one would know about it as it's so far away from the nearest city. 

•  My past, the subject of week 28, hasn't been an easy one. As you can read anywhere on my blog, I suffered severe, repeated traumas, from my youngest age until late teens, thus I have a very limited number of happy memories to be grateful for. I am, on the other hand, grateful that I found inner strength to fight it all and survive my ordeals, albeit in limited fashion as I developed many mental illnesses and blockages as a result.
  It also forged my personality and core values (a topic that will  addressed in week 31). 
• Week 29, My favorite memory : I find very few, so I'll redirect you to two posts, one about fondest childhood memories, and one about my happiest which was my wedding day. 
• to finish this July catch-up for the challenge, week 30 is about my current age, which is 41. I think the only things I am happy about for this time of my life is that I am somewhat more poised, or rather, better control my anger/ cptsd rage, finding new coping tools in my recoveries from parts of my mental illnesses. I improved my friendship-filters, and don't let people mistreat me anymore. I am therefore grateful to the implementations of lessons learned.