Good afternoon crickets. Welcome to day number two-hundred-eighty-two of Operation Achieve Anything. Last night was the first night that I spent without my dog for close to four years, and it was very weird to see how many little things would trigger a sense of loss. I know I always go on about being a shut-in, but that’s just because I like to hide out in my safe little space and not that I want to be alone and she was my primary source of company.

Other than when I would write about her in social media posts to give updates on her health, or for any blog posts where the topic may have come up, the day went pretty smoothly while I was preoccupied with work. My door leads to the backyard, and I keep it open all day, this would allow her to come and go as she please, so I was used to her disappearing for hours at a time throughout the day, so the fact that she wasn’t physically there wasn’t all that hard to notice.

It wasn’t until my day was done and I went to shut the door, that it really sank in that she was gone. Instinctually, I looked around the room to see if she was there before closing up shop for the night. After that, I had a seat on my couch to cry, and all I could hear was silence. It’s not like she was a loud dog, in fact, she was extremely quiet and kind of cat-like in the way she dealt out attention, meaning she wasn’t a dog that was constantly in your face and would track you down whenever she needed some love or sensed you were feeling down. It turns out that her cat-like qualities weren’t as subtle as I once thought.

Though she wasn’t always right on top of me, whenever we were in the same room she would continually check-in with her eye contact. I think both of us had similar abandonment issues so we would both check-in from time to time. Sitting on the couch was the worst because, even though she wasn’t a lap dog, once I would settle in for TV time she would settle in on the opposite end of the couch. Sitting there minus the sound of her scrounging around or cleaning herself or the site of her pathetic puppy stare led all the loss to sink in.

I didn’t do much but sleep after that, with my mattress still on the ground, which I set there to make it easier to get on the furniture so that we could watch TV for her final weekend. This morning I decided to start to tidy things up, hiding all of her belongings thinking that getting rid of the visual reminders would help but that just made things worse. And again, it’s more the subtleties that bum me out, like how her food and water bowl was directly across from my desk so that I always knew her food and water situation. I never realized how much I would check on these things until the two bowls were gone.

There are also subtle things like how I used to have to narrow my gate while passing the bowls mentioned above because they created a narrow path between the wall, the couch, and the TV stand. The final straw may have been the removal of all of her beds that I had scattered around the room to provide comfortable options where ever she wanted to nap. Now I look around my room and other than the hair that I need to vacuum up, there’s not much physical evidence left that she was ever even here but she’ll always be in my heart because official or not, she was a service dog that really helped me cope with my mental health.

Oh well, I like everything else, I’ll get over it with time, or not but I’ll appear to move on either way. Like how now I’m going to move on to discuss yesterday’s assignment where I was supposed to share my listening skills. I think I’m all over the map on the topic of listening. Where I do listen very well because I’m constantly looking for cues to chime in with a joke, or for material to use as a reference later on in life.  The chiming in often makes it seem like I’m not active in the conversation, but I always felt this showed that a person was being heard more than when a listener just sits there going, “Yeah, yeah, mhm, yeah, oh sure, mhm, yeah.”

Sure it’s much more distracting but I also always try to get the conversation back on track if my efforts to entertain derail the conversation. As always, that’s how I see my approach playing in my head, but for all I know, the people who interact with me don’t find this approach to be fun, or funny. I try not to do this as much since I barely talk to anyone outside my family, and I no longer feel like being the fun/funny guy. Now I am that “Yeah, mhm, oh, you don’t say,” brand of listener that just hears things and doesn’t bother to explore, which was another thing that I would attempt to do with my interjection. I wish I could say that it’s helped, but now, everyone seems disappointed by the new me and that everyone does include me, but I don’t think I can go back.

That’s that for that task, now let's move on to today’s where the Achieve Anything… book wants me to explore my competitive side and share whether I’m the type that builds up anyone that I see as competition or if I try to take them down. Of course, you’ll have to wait for tomorrow’s update to hear my thoughts on the subject. Until then, it’s now time to wrap this one up by saying, good day and good luck to you and all of your projects.

Talk to you soon.

Sincerely,

The Wicker Breaker

P.S. Below are links to my novel, which I plan to promote as part of Operation Achieve Anything, as well as a link to where you can buy the book that is providing the structure to this project in case you would like to purchase it in order to play along.