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Invisible

Heyyyyy yoooooo!

So this week during my obsession with TED on YouTube I came across a talk by Kalina Silverman about a concept she has called “Big Talk”. Essentially she says that in order to not feel lonely we should skip the “small talk”. She illustrates this idea with a video she made while studying. In the video she asks people “What do you want to do before you die?” followed by “If you were going to die tomorrow what would you do with your last day?” to complete strangers in the street! I’m pretty sure my Loopy ass would not be getting the responses she got, but her point hit home big style!

At this point I am now wondering why on earth doing this blog essentially about my truth was a good idea. Every week I seem to end up terrified while writing, scared that all this sharing my thoughts and feelings might be too much. Yet, I keep writing. That maybe, it’s too personal; yet, I keep writing. Why would anyone be interested or heck, inspired?! Yet, I keep writing. I keep posting. I am compelled to keep going and keep taking inspiration from people like Kalina Silverman. So here it is…

St. Giles Church is now without a Vicar. As of yesterday he and his lovely wife are onto their next chapter. It’s so exciting for them and probably a whole bunch of other emotions attached. For me, it has brought about an inner turmoil that I have struggled to contain. I can’t honestly believe that this emotional leaking is down to our Vicar leaving. I mean, don’t get me wrong he was welcoming to the church and he ran the Emmaus course and was present when I was Confirmed and of course he baptised my daughter.

He was present and guiding in some of the most special moments of my life. However, I am always in the background at church and even after nearly 2 years of going there are people surprised by this. The majority of the time this isn’t a problem; I am there to worship and be as active and purposeful a Christian as I can. I also know that there are a few that know my face and individually do seem to like me, but that didn’t stop me from feeling like the odd one out. Everyone around us had big groups of fellow church-goers that they are friends with and they were all smiling and hugging and sharing stories with each other. When the service started that whole part of the congregation clearly had a mutual connection with our Vicar. That is where I fall down…. all I wanted was to be part of that. I fooled myself into thinking I had done enough to be a part of that. I volunteer for everything I can and I always do my best to talk to people; the reality is though for some reason I find it difficult to make meaningful friendships in most situations. In most areas of my life I’m more than happy with that, as I have exactly what I need in life. At church I feel a drive to try to overcome this difficulty, so when these things happen and I realise I am still on the outside it makes me want to hide away, and I did. I went home to be with the ones that I don’t have to work so hard to be included with.  I wasn’t sure I was doing the right thing at the time but I think it was. Being around my hubs and kids heals me and reminds me whats important. I’ll figure my mental stuff out at some point but for now I just need to take comfort from my family and the bible.

Much Love and Inspiration,

Loopy Laura xx

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Unapologetic

Heyyyy yooooooooo!

Hope you’re all well this very hot week! Here’s a YouTube music video to accompany your reading, bear with me all will make sense by the end!….

So a couple of things I want to update y’all on this week… I am changing the day I release this blog every week from Sunday to Monday (lets choose to ignore that this release is a Tuesday!). This is just so I can hopefully give you something to look forward to and alleviate them ‘good ol’’ Monday Blues. Staying on my health/fundraising journey has been tough this week. Through feeling exhausted from the heat that I was not made to tolerate, and being all over the place between walking/being mum/work etc. I have also felt really hungry/craving so have had more naughties than normal. I am about to go to get weighed after writing this so will find out if I did enough to have a loss. I mostly stayed on track thanks to a friend on the Facebook group… there’s lots of nice people at this group… that I just needed to give myself the chance to know. The walking challenge has been really tough too, but I feel confident with 9 days left this month I will have at least completed a third of the Million Steps!

I do have an apology to make to you Lovely Life Livers. My spelling and grammar was atrocious last week!…. I did check it and got the hubs to read it too. I think exhaustion got us both! I will do my utmost to ensure this doesn’t happen again! Thank you sooooo much if you managed to read it through!

Calling Myself Out!

Actually, that’s a whole heap of “glossing” happening when I’m trying to explain why my spelling etc wasn’t what it should be! So this is MY TRUTH…. Fibromyalgia affected my performance. There that wasn’t so hard to admit right?! Pfft… well we don’t actually have the time in a blog post to dive into the maze my mind would take us into.

All this apologising is probably making you wonder “why on earth is this blog post called Unapologetic if all she’s going to do is apologise?!”

So my hubs wisely advised me “Only say what you would be prepared to say in front of a room full of people”… well here we go!

Ok, *5,4,3,2,1* I currently have to be around several people that generally keep a negative cloud that floats around in their general vicinity that randomly rains down on those around. This is normal right… we all have negative ninny’s to deal with…. It’s life. That’s fine until that negative ninny leaves an area of your life that you work soooo hard to maintain insecure, or the positives that keep the situation balanced dwindle.

The good news… No ninny will ever decide my actions. Just because some people take a disliking to me, that will not lead to me apologising for me. Apologies are for when an action of yours was wrong NOT for not behaving how someone else expects you to or for not allowing someone to dictate what your actions should be. This is my general Truth… We haven’t the time to go into specifics but I am happy to answer direct questions… I am also happy to say any of this to a room of people… well apart from the fact I have never done such a thing as public speaking and would probably melt from anxiety. Hopefully, the words would be out before the melting occurred.

If you read last weeks blog… and still wanted to read this! Then you will know that there was something that happened last week at work that I decided to save for this week to save the blog post turning into a dissertation! So since becoming a Christian I have developed an obsession with the moments that Christians have where they can’t deny their faith any longer. I will share my moment with you one day…

I have found (to my surprise) that actually a lot of my clients are comfortable enough with their own faith or non faith to be interested enough in my excitement over this part of my journey. So this particular client had shown interest and I went on, while mostly looking down at her hands to work on her nails, to tell her about someone I met through my church and her moment. Her moment happened when she ended up in Coventry Cathedral taking part in a course. The people running the course said they wouldn’t be “doing” anything with the first session… simply there if someone needed them but otherwise people were to just enjoy the Cathedral and take it in; get to know the building and soak in the atmosphere; pray if the notion took them etc. So she sat in the middle of the Cathedral, overwhelmed by some tricky stuff going on in her life. She sat and prayed… asking for one thing…. “God, if you’re there, send someone to pray with me“, a moment later a person from each side of the room walked to her, knelt beside her and silently, they prayed together… When they stopped praying, and with tears now streaming she asked “why did you come to me?” they responded by saying they simply felt compelled too.

When I finally finished the re-telling and looked up my client had watery eyes and thanked me for sharing, that she had been feeling “something” recently and she was going to investigate this further. As a Christian it obviously is a responsibility to share my faith… but I don’t expect that everyone will have the same faith I do. Our journey’s are all different and this is partly why the world is so beautiful. A lot of the time people I speak to don’t have the same faith I do, but I listen without judgment just the same as I request from anyone who listens to me. There’s one thing I believe we should all have in common; whichever faith or those just trying to be a decent human… judgement free kindness.

Cher said it best….

Love and Understanding, Loopy Laura xx

P.S. So back to slimming club… tonight was a massive turn around for me. I had enjoyed the previous classes but I didn’t feel like I was part of that group. This week was different as more than the leader and the well intentioned misfirer recognised me and spoke to me. I may be starting to get over what I am going to call my “paddywhack” over not being able to go to my previous group. My heart is starting to open to these people and even Miss Firer makes me smile to think of now. Patience and not judging too soon is definitely the lesson learnt here. Plus, I got my half stone award AND slimmer of the week!

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The Epitome of Blah

Hey yoooooo! Hope you are all well!

This has been a funny old week… I started the week feeling Blah.

I partly put the feeling of blah down to being too poorly last Sunday to get to church. It clears my head and realeases a lot of the worries I have by handing them over to God…. he has afterall, got my back like no human could ever (Mat does come as close to it as humanly possible… this is definitely on my long list of things I am so immensely grateful for). I akways feel more ready for the week ahead with a good old praise session. The walking challenge has an emphasis on challenge that I physically was not ready for. I forget that I don’t do the same things day in, day out, so I have to cram a lot of steps in big long walks on many days to attempt to stay on target. Physically I find it less painful to spread out the steps over the day.

My first weigh in at Slimming World was an interesting and overall positive experience. A very well intentioned but misfiring lady decided to impart her wisdom that step challenges are too easy to cheat on and the watches (that she pointed to around my wrist) just counted how many hand waves I did. Well, now I am not deluded, I do know they are not 100% accurate but I am by no means cheating… as anyone who actually knows me would know I can’t allow myself to do this even with something that seems innocuous. Anyway, then I got on the scales and I had lost 6lb! Not a bad start (the painful legs seemed worth it on a selfish level in that moment) and despite the little comment “that won’t last” from the again well intentioned but clearly misfiring lady I felt proud of myself and positive for the next part of my journey. The next weigh in I had maintained which is ok cause as you will see I was away from home for the weekend and was completely off plan and didnt drink enough either. I also joined a 3lb club (3 of us are aiming for a 3lb loss this week) which adds a little fun addition to the week.

On the same thread as weight loss… here’s a little update on the Million Step Challenge. I am behind on target for this month but I’m not overly worried yet as I have some good ideas how to get back on track… I plan to take lots of photo’s ofwhere I go. So if you would like to see more of more of the beautiful places I get too drop me a comment or maybe we could have fun with hash tag…. post a pic on Twitter or Instagram and #LoopyLaura and tag you in my pics as I post.

Soooo the reason my blog is late this week is because we (Mat, Isobel, Cam and I) went to Durham on Saturday and Sunday. My mum, sister, nephews and nan live there still and my brother was also visiting. It’s my brothers birthday at the end of the month so we wanted to have a family meal to celebrate. My nan is not able to join in with these things anymore as she is in a care home and she’s just too poorly to leave the building now. It breaks my heart everytime I see her now. Parkinsons steals so much from her. A lot of people (including me until the last couple of years) thought that it was just a shake that you couldn’t control. I don’t think any of us were ready to deal with just how debilitating and all-consuming the disease is. The moments we glimpse the person that raised us and was always there supporting us whether we deserved it or not it really is a special moment that you grab onto. It’s such a hard thing to accept her mortality; that she won’t be here forever keeping us right, or at least attempting to. We did get a couple of hours before the Parky anxiety kicked in and we got the tears and begging to not leave her and to make her feet stay still. We also had a lovely meal at The Church Mouse, Chester-le-Street for my bro bro’s meal. I love to spend time with my family…. I hope to do more of that now that my sis and Mum are moving into places that have space for guests.

Here I am with my Nan (on the right) when I was small… She always held my hand and made me feel safe when I was a kid. She also let me stay up to watch Strike It Lucky and Blind Date. She often took me to dance classes and New Years Eve was always a ridiculously hilarious games night that usually included one of us having to attempt something crazy like use a towel to make a nappy and put it on one of the players (there was only usually me and her still awake by this point so we often ended up doing some sort of ‘nappy dance’ across the living room to achieve this insane task.

Another most amazing thing that happened over the weekend is that I got to meet up with a long lost friend. I think I mentioned in a previous blog that I do a 5 minute journal morning and evening. In that journal I get a weekly challenge and a few weeks ago the challenge was to contact someone that I had been meaning to but not got round too. J was originally a friend of mine when I still lived in Durham, and our kids were in the same school. I can’t actually remember how we got chatting initially but she was someone I felt drawn too. As well as being an awesome mum of 3 lovely boys, fantabulous wife to her husband, integral part of the school board, as good a Christian as a human can manage to be (kindness is definitely her super power), she was also was a scrap-booking junkie that supplied scrap-booking supplies and supported other scrap-booking suppliers. She also seemed to have the patience to be friends with me!

Back then I was very poorly (with the unknown fibro) and heavily depressed. I was still rejecting all things faith-related but was desperately trying to find my happiness. I was still looking at “things” as the answer. I honestly don’t think I knew that my hard work would eventually pay off and the boys and I would not be stuck on benefits feeling stuck forever. J saw something in me and supported me in so many ways, much more than I deserved. I couldn’t fully appreciate her at the time because of all the reasons above.

She was clearly a blessing in my life and that was only confirmed with no shadow of a doubt (if it wasn’t already clear enough) when I contracted meningitis. I got the boys to school one day having had this piercing headache in one very precise spot and radiating out. I felt so poorly but I had to get to work. J made me take a minute to rest and then tried to convince me to go home and rest. I wouldn’t and she tried harder and didnt leave my side. Then I collapsed, and she stayed with me. I lost the next 3 days but later I found out that she had stayed with me until Nan could get to me at the hospital and she had comforted her. She had called my job and told them what the deal was and I think she also fetched the boys and helped out with school runs etc. while I was in hospital. I was not as good a friend in return. I mentally couldn’t deal with that at the time. I plan to at least try to be the good friend I should have been back then. We had a lovely catch up and now I am definitely able to be a more open friend. J if you’re reading this I really am grateful for your light in this world. I promise to always be there if you shout me and I promise to not embarrass you with again as I know this talk of how you’re such an inspirational person isn’t your comfort zone…. I very much look forward to spending more time in the future.

I actually had another really cool thing happen thanks to another inspirational friend last week but I think my laptop can’t handle anymore happy tears drip dropping over it so I will save that for next week!

Let’s keep our Inspiration alive! Love Loopy Laura xx

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I have chaos in my soul!

Hey-Yooooo! This week has been CRAZY!

Do you ever think to yourself ‘What is this Chaos around me?!’. I have had to do some serious thinking to figure this one out. Luckily, I have had the time to do that! The time to do that has been starting this Million Step Challenge (https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/laura-mannion5). So basically, I have from 1st July to 30th September to walk a Million steps.

When I first signed up to this a few months ago, I honestly thought it would be pretty easy. As life seems to, time just sort of skipped and all of a sudden it was 2 weeks ago and I realised I had not prepared at all. So I ordered one of them watch things that track your steps and other things and I started to get moving again. I have just come out of a fibro flare-up, so for weeks before I had been in survival mode; work and as much mum stuff, and everything else had to go out the window until the flare-up passed. A flare-up also means that I lose muscle tone and fitness. Every time I have a flare-up it effectively means that I start again with my health and fitness, but it’s ok because I do and I’m proud of myself for that.

I’m on day 8 of the challenge and I have, no doubt, already annoyed a bunch of my facebook friends with holding myself accountable by posting my daily steps. That’s ok. Because one of my conclusions from all this analysing time is that I only know I’m living if I feel like I’m dying 😂 I have had such good support from my friends and my family it’s been worth potentially annoying others.

Anyway, to go back to this serious thinking…

via GIPHY

I figure that Friedrich Nietzsche was right on at least on one count…

I’ve realised the Chaos isn’t around me it’s inside of me! It’s in us all and embracing it is the way forward. We’re all “dancing stars”. My Meems gave birth to me and my “dancing star” siblings; I have 3 “dancing stars” but that’s not the only take home I get from this quote.

Every day we live, we make decisions and actions. We have families and hobbies and careers. We often don’t realise the impact of our actions especially when those actions delay our happiness. Happy people are the most productive, they are aware of their actions but can forgive themselves for their imperfections. Just imagine with me a moment; the ramifications of happy you and unhappy you. Here’s my versus:

Happy Loopy is positively affecting her children; takes a positive action to improve herself and her family’s lives; can accept compliments and criticism; can analyse negative feelings and MOVE ON; can appreciate people and what they have to give; has inner strength and uses it; is calmer generally; more aware of surroundings. The list could just keep going! We are complicated creatures after all.

Unhappy Loopy wasn’t aware of her impact, positive or negative, on her children; often allowed self doubt to decide her actions; rejected compliments and took criticism as insults; analysed negative feelings and stayed for tea; tried very hard to avoid people altogether; had inner strength but wasn’t aware of it and only occasionally would let the lioness be free; calm?!… mmm nope!; surroundings were always scary.

I would LOVE to know a) What Happiness means to you? And b) What’s your Versus? Feel free to comment or contact me directly with yours!

Finally, a massive thank you if you got all the way through this! As a thank you I want to share this glittery, sparkly, summer-y, special birthday creation that I made for my son’s girlfriend this week… it made me smile and I hope they make you smile too! I am always interested in feedback, good, bad or ugly so if you have an idea for me or want something included in a blog, just want to give feedback or have a story for me please email it to [email protected] or post in the comments.

Lets get inspired together! Loopy Laura xx

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Hi its me!

Hey-yooooooo! So today I am “feeling the fear and doing it anyway” (Susan Jeffers, 1998) and putting myself out there for anyone vaguely interested to see.

So my name is Laura Mannion. I am 36 years old and I have 3 amazing children. I also have an amazing husband, a cute dog and a fox-fighting cat. My job title is Nail Technician and I have recently won an award for my work. I have no hair (by choice) and I consider myself to be a talks-too-much introvert…. It may also be obvious that I love to contradict.

I love my family; my friends and my job. I love to read and write and learn about the world around me. I love to laugh and to challenge myself. I am socially awkward (although not in the typical way) and I quite like my own company. I like to listen to music in the car and mostly I love life!

I am also flawed and would consider myself to be a work in progress, and besides all of that I have a health condition called Fibromyalgia and I am a new Christian. This is what has been the biggest changes in my life in the last few years and also the thing that has been both the most positive and negative experiences of my life. I am here to share my experiences and also to share inspirational and awe-inspiring people that I discover along the way.

I hope that this blog is interesting to people that are:

  • Finding inspiration from the world around them
  • Maybe a new Christian or have an interest in Christianity, or, like me, just want it to be an OK thing to talk about
  • Love nails (because I almost definitely can’t help but chuck some nail stuff in)
  • Believe in the power of positivity (but not in the fake Facebook kinda way).

What’s coming up over the first few weeks:

  • My 40 things to get done before I’m 40
  • Same me, new obsession: Why becoming a Christian isn’t as weird as some would think
  • Million step challenge: What have I let myself in for?!
  • My current reading list and Youtube obsessions

I am always interested in feedback, good, bad or ugly so if you have an idea for me or want something included in a blog, just want to give feedback or have a story for me please email it to [email protected] or post in the comments.

Lets get inspired together! Loopy Laura xx