What motivates me?

This is a question that has been posed to me many times, in many different forms.

~ How do you do it?
~ How do you get it all done?
~ How do you keep going?
~ Do you ever sleep/How do you survive on so little sleep?
~ Isn't it hard to do it all alone?
~ What motivates you?

I've been thinking about this all day, trying to come up with a simple answer. But the truth is, there is no simple answer.

Over the years, I have battled with what I am sure is depression - I've never actually been officially diagnosed, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure it out, especially after the amount of time that I have spent analyzing and over-analyzing every aspect of my life. Since I have never been officially diagnosed, I am not on any medication for it - I have just learned to deal with it.

Some days are easier than others. Some days totally suck. Pair the depression with PMDD and it can turn into an ugly ride at times. There have been days in the past where even getting out of bed - no, even opening my eyes - was just not something that I wanted to do.

Luckily, over time, I've learned how to deal with it much better. The lows are nowhere near as low as they used to be. But at those low times, if someone had told me that people would eventually be asking me for motivational tips, I would have just given them a blank stare, because laughing in their face would have taken too much effort.

Honestly, on those lower-than-low days, motivation was hard to find. I'd get a shower because I honestly couldn't stand the way that I smelled anymore - how's that for a glamorous bit of motivational speaking? "Take a shower, or you'll stink!" But seriously, that's what it all boiled down to for me.

As I started to pull myself out of the funk, I started using lots of little tricks to keep myself going in the right direction. I am the queen of lists. I used to make lists of everything that I needed to do in a day - but it wasn't something like this:

That list doesn't look too bad, does it? But at the low points in my life, the thought of doing "laundry" was too overwhelming. I didn't know where to start.

So instead, my lists looked more like this:

I broke everything down into the smallest steps that I could possibly do. I did this because it was easier to cross off each individual step as I completed it - and then, when I got done with the WHOLE thing, I took great enjoyment in crossing the entire task off of the list.

Sometimes, it took me hours to make the lists. I would lay in bed the night before and develop them. Sometimes I even posted them online in a group that I was in at the time - I know for a fact that it annoyed people, but it helped to have some accountability to others. They could see how much progress I made or didn't make on that particular day.

Another trick I used at the same time (and still do, sometimes) is to set a timer. On the bad days, I'd set it for as short as 5 minutes - on the better days, up to an hour. But whatever the time period was, I'd pick a task and focus on that task and that task only until the timer sounded. I'd turn it into a race against myself, to see how much laundry I could fold or how many dishes I could do (or whatever it was) and most of the time, even after the timer went off, I kept going until I finished the task. I still do that to this day when I just don't feel like getting myself moving.

Nowadays, since my life seems to have straightened out a bit a lot, I don't have to rely on those tricks quite so much - although I do still use them when I'm having a bad day. While I don't use the timer so much, I know that I have a certain amount of time to myself in the afternoon when Daniel is in school, and so I have exactly that much time to get things done - whether it's the laundry, or grocery shopping, or working on a craft project. I know that the only time that I can generally get anything done is when the kids aren't around or when they're sleeping - so I use those times to the fullest.

When people ask me what keeps me going, the only answer that I can truthfully say is "the kids". I know that no matter how crappy I feel, no matter how bad of a day I am having, my number one priority is to take care of those kids. I have no choice on that one. I can't stay in bed and sulk all day - if I do, they'll likely burn the house down without a second thought. I have to get up just to ensure their safety, if nothing else. And well, while I'm up, I might as well throw in a load of laundry and wash the dishes, and well, you get the point....

The kids are my number one priority. And being a single mother, I know that if I don't do what needs to be done around here, no one else is going to do it. It doesn't matter if I'm sick - I have to get up and do what needs to be done around here. There isn't anyone else to pick up the slack. Honestly, I don't look at the majority of what I do as being the result of motivation - I look at it as a means of survival.

If I don't go out and buy groceries, no one else is going to do it.
If I don't do the laundry, no one else is going to do it.
If I don't take the kids back and forth to school, no one else is going to do it.

Another really good way to get me to accomplish something? Tell me that I can't do it - that I'm not capable of it. I have always enjoyed walking and hiking, and I had mentioned to someone (who shall remain nameless) a few years ago that I would like to start running. What did he say?

"You're too fat and lazy to do that." Yep. That's what I was told. So guess what? As soon as I got the hip replaced and felt strong enough, I started walking. And then it snowballed from there and I've now got a half-marathon and 3 5Ks under my belt. So there.

And now I have set a goal for myself to do one race per month for this entire year. I sat down last night and dug around online and found 7 or 8 that I can theoretically do (including the same half-marathon from last year and a 5K that I do with the girls every year) and I'm going to try my hardest to get them all in, if at all possible. Financially, I might not be able to do them all, but what I'm thinking is that if I don't have the money to do one, I can just do it on my own - start running and time it and see what I can accomplish. Having goals like that - actual events and dates on the calendar - is a huge help for me.

Having The Dude around has been an enormous help. I don't want him - or anyone for that matter - walking into my house when it's trashed. So before he comes over, I run around cleaning things up so that he can walk through the house without killing himself. Yes, he helps when he is here but he doesn't have to - and I don't want him to feel like he has to do anything. I know that part of that is the control freak in me, but I also just don't want him or anyone else who is a guest in my home to feel like they need to help me get things done around here.

So there you have it. What motivates me, the tricks that I've learned, and things that have helped me. I don't know if it will help anyone else, but if it does, great. I'd also love to hear from others on the subject - give me your tips and tricks, what has worked and what hasn't. Leave a comment here, post it on my facebook page, whatever - it might help me and it might help someone else who is going through a rough time.

Introducing: The She-Beast

When my almost-ex-husband and I got married, we bought a nice used mini-van. It was a 2005 Dodge Grand Caravan, and although it wasn't uber-fancy, it served its purpose. When we bought it, my credit was shot, so he put it in his name. No big deal, or so I thought.

Fast-forward a bit to when we separated in May of 2009. I kicked him out (another story in and of itself) and since he didn't have a drivers license (a DUI'll do that to ya) I kept the van. And I kept making the payments. I struggled to keep it, as the payments were higher than what I could afford. I was on a first name basis with a gentleman at Chrysler Financial who worked with me for a long time to keep it from being repossessed.

Long story short, when it came time to renew the tags on it, I couldn't - because it was IN HIS NAME. I couldn't contact him because I had a PFA against him (threatening to kill someone'll do that to ya) so there was no way I could renew the tags and keep driving it legally. I scraped together some money with help from a couple of friends and a church in Wichita and scoured Craigslist until I found......the She-Beast. Then I parked the Dodge in the driveway with the doors unlocked and the keys on the dash until Chrysler finally came and took it away. (As an aside, various lights on the dash came on the very last time I drove it. Darn.)

The She-Beast is a 1991 Chevy Astro with 321,000 miles on her. She was apparently originally dark blue, but now is more of a bare metal/rust color. I've had to do some work to keep her running, but so far she's been pretty ok to me. Adding a couple of quarts of oil per week is getting a little old, but if I can keep her limping along for a while, I'm good with that. It's still cheaper than a payment for something newer (or prettier).

The other night, as I was leaving some friends' house after a WON-DER-FUL evening of hot tubbing and girl talk, I noticed that I had a headlight out. Colorful language escaped my mouth, as I really don't want to be running around rural areas of Kansas with limited visibility, since the wildlife around here seems to have been inbred with some sort of kamikaze instinct. So off to O'Reillys I went today - another group of people with whom I've become too familiar. Ten bucks for a headlight, and I was on my way home through the ice and slush and snow that just made me all the more chipper (not). I debated whether or not to change the headlight and thought about putting it off, but with even more brutal weather on the horizon I figured I'd be better off just doing it.

I got home and determined that according to the directions, I should only need a Phillips head screwdriver. Bonus! I chased the youngest two inside and started on my mission with snow falling around me. After struggling with it a bit (not wearing gloves'll do that to ya) I realized that I needed some other funky tool to get the housing off from around the headlight - some torx something-or-other (would have known that ahead of time had I read ALL of the instructions). Since I managed to maintain custody of all of the tools, I was actually able to find it and tear the thing apart. I replaced the headlight, put it all back together again, and even aligned the headlights better than they've been since I bought the thing.

Now, if I could only get the oil leak fixed as easily.....*sigh*

It's funny to me though....people tell me all the time that they're so impressed with the things that I do by myself. The thing is, I don't think it's anything that impressive.I grew up with a father who fixed EVERYTHING, and I watched. I don't see the point in paying someone to fix something if I can do it on my own. Granted,there are things that I can't do by myself, either because I just don't know how or I don't have the tools, but there are so many simple things that I have done. To me, it's not to amaze people or to show off a skill - to me it is simply survival. I've been in survival mode for so long now that I'm not sure what I would do otherwise. If there's one thing that I've learned over the past few years, it's that I'm a lot stronger than I ever thought I was. I think that a lot of people are too - but they have to discover it for themselves. No one taught me how to fend for myself - it was a by-product of putting myself into a lot of crappy situations. I know that I'm not totally out of the crap yet - but I'm getting there. One day at a time, one battle at a time. Sooner or later, the crap will all be behind me - then the trick will be to not trip and fall back into it.