Mackenzie Carose

Aspiring

By Mackenzie 2 Comments

I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with social media and when I say “social media”, I am referring specifically to Instagram. That is really the only platform I use and I do enjoy it most of the time. But there are aspects of it that are bothersome and one of those aspects as it relates to me specifically is this concept of aspiring.

Aspiring definition: directing one’s hopes and ambitions toward becoming a specified type of person. Instagram as a platform is breeding ground for aspirational wants. “Want to lose weight and fit into skinny jeans? Follow this perfect looking person!” “Want to travel more? Follow this person who makes a living travelling to all these places and people pay her to do it!” “Want to (insert here)? Follow this person!!!!!!!” You get the drift. Slowly but surely, we start following people who we aspire to be or look like or want some aspect of their life without really asking ourselves if that is what we truly want.

Lest you think I only follow who I absolutely want to follow, I am not immune to this type of encroachment. I realized this when I was trying to figure out how to spend less time on Instagram itself. The whole app was bothering me truth be told. The ads, the influencers peddling crap. people trying to grow their accounts honestly and failing. The sameness of everything. The feeling of this “need” to constantly check in and see what is going on. I was trying to figure out why I was on this app & why it seemed so important. I decided to take a hard look at who I was following and why.

One of the things I realized is I was following a lot of people who garden and can their harvest. Hmmm…. Why am I following these people? I admire what they are doing and am not taking anything away from that amazing feat of accomplishment, but I will never do this. I was aspiring to be someone who cans their food. Never mind my intense fear of botulism, this is just something that in my life today, I have no desire to do. So why was I following intensely, what these people were doing? I don’t want to can my own tomatoes or make my own jam. It sounds interesting but I really don’t want to do that. Why were these people and their daily garden exploits in my feed?

Maybe I was feeling this need to do it somehow because I am a homemaker? Could be. Do I just admire what they are doing? Maybe. But this type of gardening super-ninja is someone I don’t want to be. And spending copious amounts of my everyday life invested in whether or not they have enough veg to do all their canning was not making sense mathematically to me. I needed my time back. So I hit the unfollow button.

This concept of “aspiring” is still something I am working on. I am slowly making my way through whom I follow and seeing if it helps or hinders me when I am on the app. I am consciously deciding who and what is worth my time when I am on Instagram. Life, real life, is what happens off of those squares. I like Instagram but it can definitely pull you in and there is more to our days in the here and now than constantly scrolling. I want to make sure that if I am spending time on that app, that it is for the right reasons. I don’t want to aspire to look like someone else. I want to look like me. I don’t want the perfect home. I want my home with books on the kitchen table and Paw Patrol toys strewn about on the floor.

How do you handle Instagram? Let me know in the comments? 🙂

Plants and Mental Health

By Mackenzie 2 Comments

I’ve never been a “plant person”. Even though I come from a long line of plant people, garden tenderers, share croppers, and just lovers of all things chlorophyll green, it just wasn’t my thing. I could literally list for you the things I would rather do than water a plant.

But then the pandemic happened. And being home all the time makes you notice things about your abode and I saw that my apartment patio looked sad. Sad and empty. Sure it had kids toys strewn about the concrete floor, but it still felt lacking in some way. I mentioned that one day to my dad and he suggested that I should get some plants for the patio, and matter of fact, he’d swing by that coming day and we’d all go to the nursery and he would spring for a few plants for me.

So we went to our local home improvement store’s nursery/garden and I picked out a few plants and I put them out on my patio. It definitely improved the space aesthetically. But there were days when I forgot to water the plants or there were days when even going out on the aforementioned patio to water the plants seemed like too much work. But they didn’t die. And I kept at it.

Something began to shift in me although this shift took several months if I am being honest. Again, I felt that my ancestors green thumb had bypassed me. But I began to enjoy seeing my plants grow. I loved seeing them bloom into some sort of technicolor bonanza. I even felt closer to my grandmother in some way, even though she passed away over a decade ago. She grew the most beautiful roses I had ever seen and although I am not growing roses per se, I feel she is smiling down on me and happy to know that even though it took several decades, I am carrying on her legacy on my own terms.

Caring for these plants has been its own sort of elixir as well. The world seems to be spinning madly off its axis most days of the week and there are things that are beyond our human control. There is strife. There is desolation. But there is also a bit of happiness in nature and taking care of something and nursing it to an herbal fruition. Taking care of my plants calms my mind and stops the anxiety from volleying back and forth like a ball on a ping pong table. Watering my plants takes me out of my own headspace for a few minutes and steadies my breathing and causes my face to just relax.

My plants have helped me more than I know. I have even added to my collection and repotted a few here and there. I know how to repot plants! Me! It is hard to believe something so simple would make me happy but it does. We have to search for these little nuggets of happiness because life is fleeting. Moments matter. Simple things like this matter. If plants are not your thing, find something that is.

Or stumble across it like I did.

Are you a plant person? Let me know in the comments 🙂

Role Reversal

By Mackenzie 5 Comments

I recently posted this to my Instagram account:

I am still in the midst of feeling all the feelings regarding this and what all these changes will mean and continue to mean. Time does not stand still for anyone, least of all our parents. They took care of us for a certain period of our lives and now… now we take care of them.

For now, to get through all the packing and what not, I am compartmentalizing. Some days I cry because my dad is my dad. I want him to live forever and ever and imagining an inevitable time where that may not happen sends me into a tailspin that I am not willing to contemplate or acknowledge at this moment.

And honestly, I do not know what the future will hold. My dad may be here with us for many, many years. He may not. Only the Lord knows the answer to that definitively. But I am here, the adult child, doing what needs to be done. Contemplating the way life goes and the role reversal that inevitably makes its way to our door.

I am holding on to it all, moment by moment.

That is all I can do.