The Chronicles of 2020: Doggy Painkillers

fix·ate

verb

cause (someone) to acquire an obsessive attachment to someone or something.

Looking back at mid-April, I had shifted into a not-great mindset of expecting things to go wrong. If it looked like it was going to work out, it probably wasn’t going to.

I started to feel felt small rocks were repeatedly being thrown at my head, in different forms of life. And I was just trying my best to duck and dodge them.

Somehow our female dog, Kira, managed to sprain her tail; something I didn’t realize dogs could even do. It led to a swift trip to the vet, and a very awkward exchanging of her in the parking lot in front of the office. I wasn’t allowed to go in. My leash was to be brought back to the car and stay with me.

The vet hooked her up with some doggy painkillers. It took a few days, but she eventually started wagging her tail again.

The next week, our furnace stopped working. I paced the main floor of our house as we waited for a repair guy to come check it out; the furnace was very old, and the last thing we needed on our plate was paying for a new $6k furnace to use for all of about one more month.

We breathed a sigh of relief when he was able to easily fix it. One rock had been dodged.

It was around this time that I realized I needed a mindset check. At the time, I was passively listening to the book ‘Unf*ck Yourself: Get Out of Your Head and Into Your Life’ by Gary John Bishop. Most days, I would put it on while walking the dogs, or mindlessly cleaning. But if I took one thing from the book, it was time to drop the victim mindset that I had been dragging around for the past month or two.

I had literally been keeping a list in my phone of everything that had being “going wrong” in my life. Did I mention that our Civic keeps getting flat tires? Or that our male dog ate a live bird in our backyard, right in front of me? That my friend’s mom passed away?

But instead of stewing on the bad, I decided that it was time to end the pity party and be more mindful. I deleted the list, to start.

Accept what was happening for face value, instead of fixating on the negative, and move forward.

It was small shift in my brain, but it helped to finally snap me out of the haze that March and April had managed to settled over me.

On the final day of April, we had a virtual burger cook-off with my sister and her husband. It was a fun, delicious way to end the month. And while we had no idea what May was going to bring (besides flowers, hopefully), it started to feel as if a lot of us were starting to somehow settle into this new normal.