A happy challenge

I am on Instagram and I follow one of my cousins. I noticed that she has recently been uploading pictures every day and hash-tagging them with #100happydays. I got curious and decided to Google what in the heck this hash-tag meant. It turns out #100happydays is a challenge. The challenge is to upload a photo via the platform of your choice (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.) of something you did that made you happy that day. To complete the challenge, you must do this every day for  100 days. Apparently, people who have completed the challenge have had positive results. They have experienced changes that range from noticing things that make them happy to falling in love (definitely not holding my breath on that one).

So I decided to jump on board and do the 100 Happy Days challenge. I am really quite excited about doing this photo challenge. I think it will be interesting to see what during each day makes me happy especially because I have a pretty routine schedule so my day-to-day life isn't really unpredictable. Thinking ahead to the next 100 days makes me realize how much I have to look forward to: choreography for a retreat in April, said April retreat, family coming into town, a few birthdays, Skypes with my best friend from college, and maybe some new friendships. 

I encourage anyone who is reading this post to embark on the 100 Happy Days challenge. All you have to do to get started is to go to 100happydays.com and register to do the challenge. Then, start noticing what makes you happy and photograph it!

Broken Hallelujah

It has come to my attention that 2014 is proving to be a challenging year for some people, myself included. Whether it be problems within the family, losing a friend too early, a health issue, extreme cold, or even uncertainty about what to do with their lives, 2014 has not been too kind to the people around me. So how do we find hope and strength in a hopeless and tough situation? For me, it has been through the song "Broken Hallelujah" by The Afters.

The inspiration for this song came to this band from the book of Job in the Bible, specifically from Job 1:15-22. In this portion of Job, Satan comes down and destroys absolutely everything that Job possesses. He loses all his animals, his property, and all his children. If I were in Job's position, I would be extremely pissed off at God. Instead of being angry, Job shaves his head and tears off his clothes, gets gown on his knees and cries out, "Naked I came from my mother's womb and naked I will return there. The Lord gives and the Lord takes away; blessed be the name of the Lord" (Job 1: 20,21). Despite his suffering, Job blesses and worships God.

My favorite line in Broken Hallelujah is "With nothing left to hold onto, I raise these empty hands to you. Here's my broken Hallelujah." When I hear these words, I envision myself on my knees with my hands raised telling God that even though I have nothing left to give and may be angry at Him, I will continue to praise Him because I know that something good is going to come out of this. As I've gotten older, I have found that when everything in my life seems to be out of control, the one thing that I can control is whether or not I continue to worship God. If I choose not to give God my broken hallelujahs, as Job did, I probably would not be able to come out the situation well.

If 2014 has reared it's head at you and is challenging you to no end, remember to still praise God in your anger.

Goals for 2014

A new year is quickly upon us. Going against a classic New Year's tradition, I have not made any New Year's resolutions. Instead, I have set up a list of goals that I want to achieve in 2014.

1. Be more organized.
       I would say I am a pretty organized person, but there is definitely room for improvement. In order to be more organized, I plan to have a chore schedule, which will help me keep track of what I need to do every day, week, and month in order to be more organized and clean.

2. Get a job as a certified nurse assistant (CNA).
         This is more of a needs-to-happen than a goal. Getting a job as a CNA will help me get more experience in a clinical setting, which will help me in my applications for nursing school. It will also bring me more income so I can save up money for things such as trips that I want to go on, buy some necessities, and maybe eventually move out of my parent's house.

3. Get As in all of my classes.
        This is another needs-to-happen since I am retaking classes so I can apply to nursing school. As I learned in my last round of applications, accelerated nursing school is extremely competitive and average grades will not cut it. If I want to be a strong applicant, my grades better be damn near perfect. It would be really awesome if I could get into nursing school this year and start in the fall of 2015 at the latest.

4. Apply to nursing school (see goal #3).

5. Make a trip (or two) out to Chicago.
         There are two things awaiting me upon my arrival to Chicago: my college roommate/BFFL and my relatives. Two of my cousins are graduating high school this year and I would love to be able to make it out to Chicago for their graduations. I also want to spend time with my college roommate in real life and not over Skype (though seeing her on Skype is fantastic). However, my parents have made it clear that if I want to go to Chicago, I must provide my own airfare. Clearly goal #5 is dependent on goal #2.

Those are all my goals for 2014. Hopefully, they all happen this year. 2014 is already looking like an exciting year, but I will take it one day at a time and continue trusting in God's plan for my future.

A Lesson in Time Management

The month of December was an extremely busy one for me. I had at least one event scheduled for every day of every weekend. This is the list of events that I attended in December

• Cirque du Soleil performance
• Jackie Evancho in concert
• Christmas at the Corner (my high school's performing arts Christmas showcase and performance)
• Our Lady of Guadalupe Mass
• Advent prep concert
• Christmas party for homeless kids and teens, put on by my church 
• White elephant party
• Best friend's graduation party
• 5-year high school reunion
• Brother's graduation party

Between all of these events, I still had to go to class, study for an exam and a final that were within two days of each other, finish my microbiology lab notebook, take an online quiz, write a 4-page paper for microbiology, write two essays for my ballet class, bake cupcakes as extra credit for microbiology, and perform onstage for my ballet class. I was pretty busy and stressed throughout the better part of December. But, it was a blessing in disguise because I had to refine my very rusty time-management skills. So if you find yourself in a busyness such as this either periodically or constantly, here are some strategies that I found helpful during the month of December.

1. Set a schedule for each day

        One of my weak points is that if I do not plan what I am going to do with my day ahead of time, I will get little to nothing done on said day. Looking at everything I had to do, it was imperative that I set a schedule for the next day. Most of the time, this meant waking up earlier than usual and getting out of the house to do my studies. 

      Corollary 1: start your day as soon as you wake up. Yeah, I know this sounds pretty obvious, but I like to lay in my bed for a while before actually getting out of bed. Even then, my day doesn't start. For me, the day doesn't start until I take my shower. So by setting a schedule for myself, I gave myself a restricted amount of time to lay in bed and had to get in the shower as soon as I got out of bed. This meant that I was showered, dressed, had my hair and make-up done, made my bed, and had eaten breakfast within an hour-and-a-half to two hours of waking up.

      Corollary 2: Find a study spot where you can actually get work done. Again, another seemingly obvious one. I have found that I do not study well when I am at home. So when I find myself with a heavy load, I know I need to schedule time to get out of my house and actually get work done. For me, these study places are the youth room at my church or a library. These places are ideal for me because it is quiet and there is minimal distraction from both life and the Internet. Let's be real; the Internet is a horrible distraction in this day and age.

2. Make a list

        Whenever I have a lot to do, I find that making a list helps me prioritize. By list-making, I have an organized way to look at what needs to be accomplished. After I write my list, I see what is going to take the most time and the least time and decide from there what I am going to do first. I usually end up doing the things that take the least time first so that I can have the satisfaction of crossing something off my list ASAP. 

3. LADIES: If you have an event to attend in the evening, do your hair in the morning. 

         I found this especially helpful because could cut out a good chunk of getting-ready time by showering and doing my hair in the morning, which was already part of my schedule for that day (refer to point 1.1). Showering and doing my hair in the morning meant that I only had to do/ touch up my make-up and get dressed in the evening, which took a grand total of 25 minutes at the most. I shaved a good hour off my getting-ready time just by doing my evening hair in the morning. The styles I chose were ones that were versatile and could go from day to night without a hassle. 

4. Take some time for yourself. 

         If you are doing a million things every day feeling like a chicken with its head cut off and don't schedule any "me-time", you are going to suffer from a case of burn-out. Take an hour throughout your day to do something that is not on your list of things to do (read: something to temporarily take your mind of your busy life). This could be anything from exercising to watching a favorite show to mindlessly browsing Pinterest. 

The strategies I mentioned really helped me get through the month of December. At the end of it all, I was physically exhausted and took a good 4 days to be a hermit and recharge myself. But I managed to go evenly distribute my time between events and studies mainly by making and sticking to a schedule. 

DIY: Decorative Pillows

Have you ever bought a t-shirt that is either too small or too big but you keep it anyway and don't know what to do with it? This is a great way to repurpose your t-shirt and it can end up looking really cute.

This project is relatively easy, but can be very time consuming if you choose to hand sew over using a sewing machine. I did two pillows and it took me about an hour and a half per pillow sewing by hand.

Here's what you'll need:

• t-shirt
• one 20oz bag of polyester fiberfill per t-shirt
• scissors
• thread to match the color of your t-shirt
• needle (or sewing machine)
• pins or extra needles

 

Instructions:

1. Begin by cutting off the sleeves and collar from your t-shirt. For the sleeves, cut straight along the sides of the t-shirt. For thee collar, note where the scoop of the collar ends and cut straight across. At this point, your t-shirt should be shaped like a rectangle.

     2. Flip your t-shirt inside-out and pin the seams of the sleeves. This will help keep the seams together when you are sewing.

     3. Cut a long piece of thread, thread it through the needle, and tie a small knot at the end.
    
     4. Sew along the areas of the t-shirt that you cut in Step 1.

     5. Flip the t-shirt back out. At this point, your t-shirt should look like this:

 

     6. Take the polyester fiberfill and stuff the pillow to heart's content.

      7. Pin along the hem line once your pillow is stuffed. This will help in the next step.

 

 

     8. Using the pins as a guide, cut off any excess t-shirt material.

 

     9. Take your newly cut "hem" and fold the two sides of the t-shirt into each other and repin to help hold them together.

 

    10. Sew your pillow t-shirt closed.

 

    11. Once your pillow is all sown up, knead the pillow to spread out the stuffing as evenly as you can.

 

 

 

Happy crafting!



A Persuasive Speech

Background: I recently took a speech class and one of our speeches was a persuasive speech. I chose to do my persuasive speech on destigmatizing mental illnesses. I chose this topic because I have dealt with the stigma that comes with have a mental illness/psychological disorder and I think it is extremely important to take steps to decrease that stigma especially when dealing with young people. I present to you my speech.

     There is an illness that is different from any other illness or disease that we know of. This illness has few, if any, outward physical symptoms. Most of the time, we cannot tell that a person has this illness just by looking at them. The illness I am talking about is mental illness am weirdly proud to say that I have been affected by mental illnesses. Over the past week, I have been able to find many research articles on mental illness and what can be done to reduce the stigma of having a mental illness. Today, I am going to be talking to you about the stigmas associated with mental illness and what we can do to decrease this stigma.  Depression, generalized anxiety disorder, eating disorders, etc are more common than one might realize, but they often go unnoticed because of these stigmas. First, I will define mental illness and give you some statistics about mental illness. Second, I will define stigma and tell you about the ways mentally ill people have been stigmatized both in the past and today and why. Finally, I will tell you about some laws that attempt to decrease stigma in the work place and offer suggestions as to how to further decrease stigma.

         In order to understand what mental illness is, it is helpful to have an operational definition of the term. The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) states that " mental illnesses can affect persons of any age, race, religion or income" and defines mental illness as " a medical condition that disrupts a person's thinking, feeling, mood, ability to relate to others and daily functioning... that often result in a diminished capacity for coping with the ordinary demands of life." Using this definition, we can conclude that mental illness is non-discriminatory and is a legitimate condition that affects a person's ability to function in their day-to-day life.  The statistics on mental illness are surprising. NAMI's website gives the following statistics on reported mental illness. Bipolar disorder or manic depression affects over 10 million Americans. Depression affects 5-8% of adults, 1 in 8 women, 1 in 5 teenaged children, 2% of school-aged children, and about 20% of seniors aged 65 or older. OCD affects 1 in 40 people or about 2% of the population. Schizophrenia affects 2.4 million adults over the age of 18. Anxiety disorders affect about 20% of the population. Looking at the numbers gives us a better picture of how common mental illnesses actually are. However, most psychologists believe that these numbers are too low because of the cases that go unreported because of the stigma of having a mental illness.

            The understanding of stigma is that stigma is not something you want to have. An article in the International Journal of Students' Research written by Kah Poh Loh and Hatem Ghorab published in 2011 defines stigmatization in psychiatry as "a stereotypical set of negative attitudes, incorrect beliefs, and fear associated with  the diagnosis of mental illness." Based on this definition, we can see why someone who thinks they may have a mental illness would not report it and have negative attitudes, incorrect beliefs, and fear directed towards them. The stigmatization of mental illness is not something new. In the article "From Sin to Science: Fighting the Stigmatization of Mental Illness" published in August 2012,  Julio Arboleda-Flores, MD, PhD, and Heather Stuart, MA, PhD state that  "banishment has been a consistent societal response to people with a mental illness." Forms of banishment included asylums, being thrown out of the city walls, or being placed in a ship that would not disembark. We can see that, even from a time when it was not well understood, mental illness was something that was looked down upon.

   Stigmatization in today's society comes from media attention and personal beliefs. Arboleda-Flores and Stuart explain that most of the contact that is made with mental illnesses is "through news or entertainment media where people with mental illnesses are depicted as unpredictable, violent, and dangerous." If this type of media depiction is the only way people with mental illnesses are seen, it is no wonder why there is a stigma towards having a mental illness. Adding to the stigma is the weight that personal beliefs carry. A research study conducted by Bernice A. Pescosolido, PhD and colleagues published in March of this year found that stigma does have a backbone. After surveying a total of 19, 508 people across the world, they found that "even in countries with more accepting cultural climates, issues that deal primarily with intimate settings, vulnerable groups, or self-harm elicit the greatest amount of negative response" among other findings. So even if someone is raised to be more accepting,  if there is an issue that harms the people around them, they are more likely to feel negatively about that issue. Mental illness is one of those issues. With all the negativity and stigmas directed towards mental illness, various measures have been taken to try to decrease it.

            Since about the late 1970s, there have been various laws put into effect to decrease stigma of mental illness in the workplace. Janet R. Cummings and colleagues discuss three of these laws in their article "Addressing Public Stigma and Disparities Among Persons with Mental Illness: The Role of Federal Policy" which was published by the American Journal of Public Health in March of this year. The first is the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008 which "required large private group health plans that offer mental health or substance use disorder coverage to offer these benefits at parity with medical or surgical benefits in annual and lifetime dollar limits, financial requirements, and treatment limitations." The second is the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 requires substance use disorder coverage to "be included in essential benefit packages for insurance plans." The third of these is the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 which protects individuals with mental illness and other disabilities from discrimination "in job application procedures, hiring, advancement, discharge, compensation, and other employment-related conditions" much like the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975 protected children from stigma. These laws were enacted to reduce the stigma of mental illness and have been successful in doing so. However, these laws do not protect everyone. Cummings and colleagues state that even though antidiscrimination laws have expanded over time, they do not necessarily protect all subgroups with different types of mental illnesses. Though there has been success in protecting those with a mental illness, there should be more Federal policies to ensure coverage of the subgroups of mental illness.

            Decreasing stigma in the workplace is a positive step forward. However, I believe further steps to reduce stigma should begin in childhood. It is important that children be educated about the signs of a mental illness so they can recognize it in themselves and others and not be ashamed if they fall victim to a mental illness. Adults should also consider educating themselves about mental illnesses. I am not suggesting a full-blown abnormal psychology class, but rather one that covers the basics of common mental illnesses such as what they are, the signs and symptoms, and the risk factors associated with them.

            We now have an understanding of what mental illnesses are, how common they are, how and why people stigmatize, and the laws that have been set to decrease stigma in the workplace. Remember that mental illness is a sickness of the brain and does not have many physical manifestations so it is not easily recognizable just by looking at someone.  I hope that after tonight you all can recognize stigmas within yourselves and the people around you and try to change any stigmas towards mental illness that you recognize. I also hope that you will take some time and educate yourselves about the various mental illnesses out there. If you educate yourselves, it may be easier for you to talk to a friend who is being affected by a mental illness and help them not feel stigmatized.

  

 

 

         

Blessings in My Life

The last month or so has been both very exciting and busy for me. In the midst of all the excitement, I have found myself to be extremely blessed in many ways. I am blessed daily with the seemingly little things that are actually big things such as my family, the gorgeous area where I live, the kids that I babysit, etc. The following are the blessings that, while they are bigger blessings, took me a while to see how truly fortunate I am to have them.

1. Volunteering on the Mother-Baby Unit
As part of the CCE program at my local hospital, we are able to work on different floors every 3 months provided we complete our 48 hours for each rotation. Due to some unforeseen circumstances, I was unable to complete my hours for the last rotation and am repeating the rotation for the next 3 months. The Mother-Baby floor is easily the happiest floor that I have been on. Every day that I am on the floor, I get to see and sometimes hold tiny newborn babies, most of whom are less than 24-48 hours old. I also get to discharge the moms and babies. Seeing new life on a weekly basis reminds me of how incredible God is and how much love a mother can have for her child. Last month alone there were 529 babies born at my local hospital.

2. Passing my CNA exam.
As of 3 weeks ago, I am a Certified Nurse Assistant (CNA). For me, the exam was super easy. I passed both the written and the skills exam with flying colors. While I was at the exam, there were others who were taking only the written portion or only the skills portion. Of those who were taking only the written portion, few of them  spoke English well. I also didn't really study for the exam that much. I started studying maybe four or five days before the exam. I've realized that I am incredibly lucky to have such ease in taking exams and to be able to speak two languages completely fluently.

3. My new car
A few days after passing my CNA test, I got a new car. Before the new car came around, I was driving an extremely janky car. Many things were wrong with the old car; the biggest one was the transmission was having problems. I drove a car with a bad transmission for 8 months and I stalled twice. I didn't drive the car very far and every time I got in the car I prayed that I could get to my destination without too many problems. I was lucky and had the option of driving my mom's car if necessary. I've realized that a lot of people are also driving around in janky cars for longer than I had to and may or may not have other means of getting around. I think this would be a good time to give a big THANK YOU to my parents for doing everything they could so I get around to all my activities safely.

4. Retreats and bonfires
I frequently talk/write about how great it is that I'm involved in the youth ministry program because of the people I've met and how they have all become a big part of my life. While that is all well and good, what I haven't talked too much about (at least in the blog) is the God part of it. I just came back from another amazing retreat and God did a number on me once again. What I love about retreats is that you get to spend time away from modern life, take a good look inside yourself, and God does something to enrich your life throughout the course of the retreat. For me, this has happened during adoration on the last two retreats. After this past weekend's retreat, I have felt so much lighter and happier than I have been. At adoration, I was finally able to let go of the pain caused by words that were said to me by someone close to me after about a year. When kids get back from retreat, so many parents tell us that they can already see a change in their son or daughter and that we did a wonderful job. That is God's work being manifested before our eyes.

Another thing that I have come to love about youth ministry is the bonfires that we have every week during the summer. I really can't put into words why I love bonfires so much. Everyone is there seemingly carefree and we have a good time by simply being at the beach, playing volleyball, and roasting hot dogs and marshmallows. As summer draws to a close the bonfires go later and later. To me, bonfires are another way of building community between the kids and adults regardless of their age (at our bonfires, ages range from 11-24).

I have a challenge for you all this time, dear readers. My challenge to you is to look for at least three blessings that you may have not seen before and continue to look for them even in your toughest moments.