Just a Conversation…

Hi there! Welcome to “Soul Sips on Sunday”

Cheers! I’m Andrea and I’m 49 years old and I thought this would be a great opportunity to just have a conversation about a thought, a cause or maybe a pause. I think these sort of conversations whether we’re men or women, I really think are quite valuable at this moment in our lives.

 

These conversations are honest, they’re real, they’re about stuff that’s going on in our lives and I think one of the best ways when we do have some isolation and then we don’t have as much interaction or even if we did have the interaction, could we have these conversations?

I think it’s really, really important to share our stories and share feelings because it’s all of that stuff that gets bottled up that just…my God it gets heavy. I was just saying to Sophie (my daughter) earlier today sometimes I really don’t like being an adult, it sucks, and that’s just the way it is. But we also know in the same breath, I just finished a conversation with my dad, who is in his mid 70s, and he said, “Yeah I remember that moment in my life when I got knocked down but you get back up. You get back up.”
So, this Soul Sips on Sunday, cheers, is about, it’s just about a little bit of a conversation. And I thought maybe today we talk about something that’s really looming around me these days and a lot of individuals my age as I encroach 50, I think this is a conversation for both not just women, but men too. I think it is such an important conversation of all ages to discuss and maybe understand or be open to what happens and that’s menopause.

Menopause is just, it is always been a conversation that I’ve gone, “Oh my God no!” You know it’s like an end right? And a lot of menopause, we just kind of think, that’s going to go little crazy, it’s when you don’t get your period anymore, and you kind of go into this world of being old.

And recently, I’ve honestly been enlightened in the world of ‘being excited to be entering menopause’. So, I decided to make a few notes and maybe open up the conversation or maybe put a little bit of, I don’t know, a little bit of sunshine into your thoughts as we age. This whole aging process we’ve been taught, it’s been in our environment forever, I was even a promoter of youth and vitality and fit and health and beauty. It can be all of that, but we’ve been taught it’s not, and this is where I’m choosing to challenge it, I’m choosing to challenge your thoughts. I’m choosing to challenge my own thoughts. As I step into this and I’m going to try to be as honest and vulnerable with you as possible right now.

I think one of the, quite a few negatives, you become a little bit more tired. You become sore. Your body is sore, your inflammation goes up. Fatigue, when we talk about fatigue, like those lousy, lousy sleeps and then we can even go into body sweats as your body is going through a whole other way of regulating. And with all of that whether, it’s at this end of your life when having babies or you’re going through all of that no sleep, and then you’ve got this other end of no sleep. And then both of those you can have stress looming around you that can just magnify what is happening to physiologically and psychologically.

I think this is also where it’s really important for men to understand, to not just go “oh you’re crazy”, or “oh, you know you’re going through THAT” or “you’re getting your period”. That is stuff that is not necessarily stuff we choose, like I mean physiologically but like psychologically, it happens to us, and it makes us, you know, very would I like to say passionate, makes me very passionate about things. And I am that girl. I am that girl who goes really loud and big, and then I could just drop right into my seat and be in tears.

Number 1: Celebrate
And so I think it’s about celebrating, respecting and appreciating who we are. But here are my thoughts on celebrating menopause, and not just what happens physiologically right, like the ending of your, your periods and your bleeds. But I think, I think probably my biggest one is not fussing with bullshit anymore. You know? Like, it’s like stuff that really got under my skin 10 years ago, now it’s like nehh? That’s alright you just do you. I really love that, just do you. That’s it. I’ll do me, you do you.
Don’t mind my dog in the background.

Number two: Wisdom
I love this whole thing with wisdom. It’s just, you know, you we’ve lived this life – male or female – we’ve lived this life. And at this moment in our life, when I kind of think I’m half way through, and I certainly hope to be only halfway through, but who knows, but at this moment in my life, I kind of go, “all right Andrea, that thing you did over there, that wasn’t really cool. You could have done that a little bit differently.”

I don’t, I don’t try to hang on to guilt or regret but I do analyze things that I have done or ways that I have, you know, not dealt with things the best I could have, so I think that is wisdom though. I think I can park it, I can leave it, but I can take what I learnt and bring it forward, and that’s what I call wisdom. What have I learnt? What do I want to take with me? What do I want to just leave? Just leave it, just let it go. And then, it’s with that wisdom that we choose to move forward. We, you know, if we still have children, are all of our interactions, and as I said halfway point right, we get to move forward with what we want. We get to leave what we don’t want we can do that. It’s your life we can do whatever we want.

Number 3: Embrace the Crazy
I think the other thing is number 3 is embracing the crazy. I love crazy. I love crazy. I think it’s vibrant. I think it’s energizing. I think it’s contagious. I think it’s also a freedom that you don’t need to be anybody else, right? You just – I don’t know. If you want to stand on top of a table and scream something you get to do it. You get to do whatever you want. You really don’t care about whatever anybody else is saying versus stuff that we might have wasted her time worrying about, being hesitant about. What’s that person going to say? What’s that person gonna say? I just don’t have those worries as much anymore and I really, really think if I’m feeling this way at 50 and pretty sure as I enter my 50s, it’s going to even get better and better.

Number 4: Listening
So, number 4 is listening. I think I’ve spent the last 30 years of directing, controlling, guiding, and I really feel like, although this is my word for 2020, of sitting back and listening, and in particular as a parent, but just generally in relationships. I’m really trying to practice listening. And I think there’s a lot for us to learn from listening. And I’ve talked about this before, seasons and reasons, people come into our lives, experiences come into our lives, and they are for us to learn. So can we sit back? Can we not direct? Can we not tell? Can we not be rigid? Can we just listen? What is in this precious moment for us to learn?

Number 5: Choosing to Change
And the last one that I came up with is choosing to change. Although we’ve always done it THIS way. We’ve always gone on THIS vacation. We always hang out with THESE people on Friday night. Not that there’s anything wrong with it. But I’m just saying that if you’re not really, really happy with it, but you’re not really, really happy with that person or persons or grocery store to, I don’t know… Why can’t you change? Just I know, but like I mean, we have a lot of living to do, a lot of living to do. And we also have a lot of inspiring to do. Everyone of us, the twenty somethings are looking at us saying, “how do you do that?” “How can I do that?”
And it’s not so much us telling them but listening to them, supporting them – just being there and saying, I get it, life is hard.

And sometimes it sucks to be an adult. However, we got to get up. You get to sit, you get to be crazy. You get to celebrate. You get to enjoy a cup of coffee. You get to choose to take care of yourself. This is all up to you, and you don’t have to do what you’ve always done. We can change. We can change. We aren’t all old dogs, no new tricks.

So men, women – open minds. Looking at life a little bit differently. Understanding that we’re all in this together. It takes a village. And what about celebrating aging? What do you think about that one?

Thank you for joining me on Sunday, Soul Sips on Sunday. Soul Sips on Sunday.

Cheers!