The Importance Of Fun

I’ve always been a big fan of taking a break and having some fun, no matter where you are in your healing. Sometimes the best way to get past a particularly stressful point in your life is to step away from it for an evening, an do something for yourself.

I was reminded of that this weekend. I’m in the midst of trial prep at work, and as I’ve said on my other blog many times, trials are life-consuming events when you are getting ready to go, and during one. Even when you’re just there to setup equipment and run the presentation software, it takes a lot of time to get everything the way the attorney wants, and it’s always changing at the last minute. Hence the reason I was in the office both Saturday and Sunday.

In between, however, I took my own advice about getting away from things and having some fun. I met up with a friend to see an Irish band named the Prodigals at Byrne’s Pub here in town. Yeah, it meant there was a late night in the midst of all this work, but as nice as a long night’s sleep would have been, doing something fun for myself was more important.

I felt the same way when I was in therapy, and struggling through the most difficult times of my healing. Having some fun and laughing from time to time made a huge difference in being able to continue. I hope you’ll keep it in mind too.

Similar Posts

  • Another loss

    I was having a discussion with my wife tonight about giving blood and all the eligibility requirements that the Red Cross has added to keep the blood supply disease-free when we realized, that I can’t give blood. I hadn’t ever realized that before. I’ve not been a regular donater of blood by any stretch, because…

  • |

    When it Comes to Abuse, Trafficking, and Violence, Do We Have a Race and Gender Problem?

    What I want to address, however, is how our society defines victims and how it leaves far too many people behind. The article above is a great example. How many people, if asked about sex trafficking, picture little white girls or women abducted from Target? Probably a lot. For many, the only information they’ve ever gotten about trafficking are warnings about Target or shopping mall parking lots from their Facebook friends. They don’t know how many teenage boys from broken homes, living in poverty, are pulled into being trafficked. How many gay youths, rejected by their families, fall victim to it? How many immigrant children here, with no parental supervision, are sold off by the people who should be protecting them from sexual slavery? 

    Those stories, even if they’re told, are not going to grab national headlines. They are not going to evoke world-wide outrage and sympathy. Those are things that happen to “other people”. We might even be tempted to start looking for reason why it’s their own fault, or at least the parents fault, right? 

    From a media perspective, we also have to keep this in mind. An abduction of a young white girl from her home, is a rare event. It’s actually newsworthy because it happens so rarely. When it happens, it’s shocking. A trans, minority, teen being coerced into selling themselves, with no one to turn to for protection, isn’t any of those things. A gay male teen being kicked out of their parents house and trying to make it through homelessness, is also not something that happens so rarely that there would be major news coverage of it. These things happen all of the time. So often, that they aren’t really news. 

    So, which group should we have support and services for? I’d like to vote for ALL OF THEM. But that will take educating people about the reality of who gets abused, who gets trafficked, and for us all to accept that it happens everywhere. Until we get there, and are willing to see all different types of people as victims, we will continue to fail one group or another. That’s not acceptable. 

  • Project82

    I got an email today from Pat McDonald of Project82.com. They are providing a place for abuse survivors to file a confidential report so that prosecutors can find them as they research possible victims of a molester. In their own words: Project82 and The National Sexual Assault Report Database is the brain child of Katie…

  • Deep Level Stigma

    I’ve had some recent opportunities to sit down and have coffee with some people who have worked in child abuse prevention and treatment and do fundraising for those efforts. I’ve already been creating some blog posts out of things that came up during those conversations because they were that good. Still, there was one particular…

2 Comments

  1. I loved that you put this up for discussion on your board and of course here. I think it’s essential to the human spirit that we remember to play. I have so many thoughts on this, but I think I may need to blog it rather than take up space here. Aye the blogs…I love this part.

    Have a wonderful day, keep up the good work 🙂

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

To respond on your own website, enter the URL of your response which should contain a link to this post's permalink URL. Your response will then appear (possibly after moderation) on this page. Want to update or remove your response? Update or delete your post and re-enter your post's URL again. (Find out more about Webmentions.)