Early morning is my favorite time of the day.

I’ve always been an earlier riser, but that said, I’ve always found 4-6 am to be an especially sensitive time of day. Combine that with a heightened sense of smell and empathic tendencies, you have the recipe for a potential early morning emo breakdown, should the potent mixture of scent, music, picture, etc. trigger a sad memory or feeling.

Growing up as a teenager, sharing one bathroom among 7 family members required careful planning to get everybody out the door in time on weekdays.

By choice I had the 5am slot, and I remember my 15 year old self listening to the radio while lathering my hair with Agree shampoo. 14 and 15 were particularly turbulent, adolescent-growing-up-and-becoming-involved-in-things-I-wasn’t-actually-mature-enough-for years for me and those emotions will forever be tattooed on my brain in the smell of Agree shampoo and the Neil Diamond song September Morn.  (popular at that time)

Luckily, Agree shampoo went off the market because yes, even though it makes me sad, I’d still be driven to smell it- don’t ask me why. Probably for the same reason I can’t trust myself not to touch an electric fence. 🤷🏼‍♀️

As for the Neil Diamond song, it still makes me emotional. Maybe it’s the lyrics, maybe it’s the piano, maybe it’s just the Neil Diamond-ness of it all. I have always loved and felt his energy clearly there in his music and it touches me.

Maybe it’s the fact that I was just learning then, as I know well now, how love and missing someone can hurt like hell. Especially for the ultra sensitive. And obviously, if scents and songs are tattooed on your heart, it goes without saying that people you love are as well. Deeply.

*this is slightly OT but I must say it because I believed it at 15 and I continue to believe it at 60: the pain of young love cuts deeper than any other. That’s a controversial statement, but I stand by it and here’s why: youthful love is like skin that’s never been exposed to the sun. Love becomes the sun; its warmth creating a heat the likes of which this pure skin had unknowingly craved. Once exposed, the skin longs for more, and MORE, its youthful purity not understanding the sun’s ability to burn. Until it does just that.

Old skin knows it will heal. It’s burned before and witnessed its capacity to not only heal, but to become thicker with each burn, never returning to its former tenderness. Young skin does not know this yet and believes that the pain of having been burned is enough to destroy it. And wishes it would. Because it just. hurts. too. damn. much. to. bear. sigh…

Believe it or not the purpose of this post was not to bring myself everybody down. Although, if the purpose was to prove to you why I know better than to allow my thoughts to wander, I have done just that! 😁 Illustrating my point that:

Feely people need to direct their thoughts on purpose. 

All people become empowered by directing their thoughts on purpose, but for feely people especially, practicing empowered mindfuckery can be the difference between actively progressing forward toward a predetermined destination or finding yourself so lost in feelings (his, hers, theirs, & everybody’s) that you have now fallen off the abyss and are drowning in a sea of feelings, immobilized by the depth.

This means developing mantras, acronyms, affirmations, workarounds, and/or any other tools that will aid your ability in putting your ass where it needs to be rather than letting your monkey mind lead you astray.

Not surprisingly, I require every tool I can get my hands on; those I’ve picked up from others and those I’ve created.

I’ll be sharing them in an upcoming post.

Unless Neil completely does me in this time. Nope, nope- not gonna listen to it…