#HandleWithCare Mug Shot 115 of 365 📖 ☕️

Morning, friends!

Looks like a right good day to paint! 🎨

We've been monitoring the weather, and tut tut it looks like rain 🌧 tomorrow, so I bumped up my windows to today and then again Sunday at Tim Hortons. Smile 😃 Cookie 🍪 Week, let's go!

I'll be at Arlington Place, followed by Bath & Gardiners if you want to spend a creative, sunny Friday with me! ❤️ 🖌

A long time ago, I'd read: your relationship is not a community project.

For all intents and purposes, that's fair. What you allow or welcome or heed as advice from loved ones and family members, friends and so on, that's completely up to you. Whether it be unsolicited or not, it's up to you whom you involve or don't.

There's also buzzwords like "oversharing" that can be applicable, also.

And THEN you add being someone who's on social media 24/7, baring your soul every morning ober coffee.

So, let's begin.

I am absolutely someone who seeks out the glaringly awful, sometimes heinous comments that filter through my feeds. And more often than not, it's one in hundreds. And those are pretty good odds. But, my sadism causes me to read them over and over and allow them to stick to me like flies on stick paper. And that's what they do. Stick.

I, for one, was unbelievably surprised by the sentiments yesterday when J and I were flooded with kind words and well-wishes. And I was *not* surprised by the "agains?!"

But what was I expecting? I'd like to normalize that relationships are not normal. No two are the same. The dynamics shift, the people change, the paths they'd laid out in one year sometimes become grown over by brush and leaves and obstacles.

So, yes. Again. And maybe again. And maybe never again. And maybe things change. And maybe things go right. And maybe one time needs two times or three times to go the direction you want it to, no matter how many times or tries it takes.

I'll leave you with this.

Do you. Be you. Accept you. Accept your version of normal. Be unafraid that your path doesn't look like their path, and that doesn't make it the wrong path.

It makes it yours.

Off to paint!

- c xx ✨️