Has anyone else noticed the oddities occasionally offered by the predictive texting on your mobile?
Type in ‘go’ and you get ‘in’, ‘he’ and you get ‘if’, ‘got’ and you get ‘hot’.
Bizarrely, predictive texting will often NOT let me spell very straightforward words but allows me to type in nonsensical words like ‘donkle’, ‘phen’, or ‘graf’.
I was thinking about this last night when I sent my son a text.
Matt (age 20) is currently in a lambing shed on his own all night, every night for 3 weeks without a break. This week he has been delivering 30 lambs a night on average. He is exhausted, disoriented and fantasising about making banana bread when he gets home in 10 days time. (This somewhat odd distraction brought on I suspect by lack of sleep and a longing for home comforts)
Bleating sheep don’t offer much by way of conversation, hence the fairly regular calls home and the discussion about banana bread!
Last night before I went to sleep I sent him a text to remind him that if he felt ‘low’ in the middle of the night, it didn’t mean insanity was just around the corner, it was just a very predictable effect of a disturbed sleep pattern. In ‘text speak’ that elegantly expressed sentence translated into a very dull: ‘If you feel low, remember you’re just tired’. Except the phone didn’t produce the word ‘low’, instead it came up with word ‘joy’!
Aha! I thought… (lightbulb moment coming….)
‘You have to choose how you feel’
How very, very true. Sometimes life/other people or circumstances press our buttons and insist on writing the words ‘low’, ‘miserable’,and ‘angry’ all over our lives.
But I can still choose how I feel. In fact if I don’t do so I am allowing other people or situations to dictate my emotions and control my ability to enjoy life. I needed to be reminded of this today. Today is my day off. I order to avoid cleaning the house, I usually blog on my day off or ride my bike or both (but not simultaneously). This morning I woke at 4am, my throat was raw and I realised that David had kindly given me his cold. The prospects for a much anticipated bike ride on a sunny day now looked bleak.
Pants?
Well, yes it is. BUT I can still choose my outlook, a blue sky is still a blue sky even if I’m not on my bike. A cold is just a temporary blip… meanwhile a half-decent blog post is ‘a joy forever’!
So I’m choosing ‘Joy’.
And it does helps that ‘joy’ is Bobby’s default mode.
From my viewpoint I stumble downstairs to trudge through another
day but from his point of view my daily arrival in the kitchen is nothing short of ‘resurrection from the dead’ so great is the unbounded rapture with which I am greeted.
I know life is a lot simpler if all you need is two decents walks a day, a bowl of food and 20 minutes spent racing after a ball on the field but I hope I can also ‘catch the joy’ that comes in the simple things today.
Cheerfully yours…
Live Life Loved 
The big problem with depression is not being able to choose your mood. It’s not all about being down in the dumps as you can suddenly be manically happy; it really is an emotional roller coaster. I’m currently on medication that means I’m generally a lot better but I still don’t have control of how I feel – if the chemicals in my brain decided that I’m going to be ‘low’ I don’t have an autotext to turn it into ‘joy.’ What I do have is the ability to recognise the low times for what they are; just a dip and not a long down hill.
Yes, I understand this and agree that it is a characteristic of depression that you can’t choose your mood. I think what I had been learning is that for those of us who are just ‘grumpy by default’ can make alternative choices, but sometimes we choose not to
Shelia, I wasn’t trying to disagree with you – more ‘thinking aloud’ while commenting. It was as if your post pushed the right buttons in my thinking and I gained a much better view of how much my depression has affected me over the years. This led me to my blog “I’m Sorry If I Got Angry” which I posted the next day.
I am now going to try and use HTML to link to my post – wish me luck and sorry if it doesn’t work.
I know you weren’t disagreeing or being disagreeable! I thought it was a very helpful comment and your post on anger was also very insightful. You don’t need to post a link, if people just click on your name from here they go to your blog. Thanks Hugh, happy Easter