Cheerleading

Dealing with my required medication has not been all that easy.  Apparently I'm not the poster child for med tolerance.  Since the primary purpose of the current med is to suck the life out of me (I'm in disagreement with the doctors on this), I'm on a relentless mission to counter the side effects.  I don't know how to be anything other than a high energy person and don't plan to learn.  I've been making progress figuring out what helps and what makes it worse.  Not eating helps bring my energy back, but of course that is not sustainable.  So I experiment with what and when I eat, push through exercise, and write in my log every day to track what I've eaten, what I've accomplished, and how I feel. 

I use music to keep me going, always have.  Normally my choices have tended to the unabashedly exuberant:  Rubberband Man; Fat Bottomed Girls; In The Mood.  It took little musical encouragement to bring on all consuming physical and mental joy.  Now I'm often at a different starting point where my old favorites are incongruent to my state of mind.  Rather than draw me in they goad me in a way that hinders my ability to move forward.  I'm more reliant on music than ever.  I've learned to skip past selections that are too great a reach for my current mindset and find quieter rhythms.  Matching the musical attitude more closely to my starting point allows me to follow along, go forward, and maybe work to a place where my old favorites will be welcome.  If not today maybe tomorrow. 

In considering this I go back to a problem many, myself included, have in training dogs.  In offering encouragement we begin to cheerlead.  We offer boundless enthusiasm and energy with no regard to the mental starting point of our partner.  Our efforts are inaccessible to the intended recipient, and indeed are an irritation that hampers their mental reach.  We do this to people too.  We forget to let empathy shape our responses appropriately.