Day 7: 30 Days, 30 Episodes - Pet Loss & the Grief Journey

Matt Gilhooly
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I'm Matt Gilhooly and this is the Life Shift.

Matt Gilhooly00:00:04

Candid conversations about the pivotal moments that have changed lives forever.

Matt Gilhooly

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Hello, my friends.

Matt Gilhooly

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Welcome to day seven of this little 30 day, 30 episode experiment that I am doing here in November.

Matt Gilhooly

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So thank you for coming along this ride.

Matt Gilhooly
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And again, I don't really know what I'm going to talk about each day.

Matt Gilhooly
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I just spent the last couple minutes kind of looking through a list that I put together with the help of ChatGPT and other suggestions that people have made, and I'm trying to kind of pick something and I think I'm going to talk about something that's not on this list.

Matt Gilhooly
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But before I jump into that, maybe if you have some ideas of things you might want me to address or think about, please reach out via social media or you can email me at Matthew life shift podcast.com and I will put those on the list and then I can choose whatever is kind of sparking my interest or I am compelled to talk about that particular day.

Matt Gilhooly
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So it's day seven of this and I am doing this one before work, so I might look a little different, a little tired, I guess.

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I've, you know, just been challenged to get the energy to go to the gym and do my normal routine and get into all the functioning parts of my life lately.

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And so I think that's kind of what I'm going to be talking about today.

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And it's really the journey of pet loss and how unexpected it was.

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So if you've listened to the podcast with me, you obviously know that the Life Shift comes from my experience of losing my mother when I was a kid and the journey that ensued after of me, like not really grieving until I was probably in my early 30s.

Matt Gilhooly
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And then the journey of losing my grandmother and how I approached that grief journey differently.

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And I felt like, okay, sudden loss and that grief journey, anticipatory loss, and then finally the loss, like very physical, right there in front of me.

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Journey of grief.

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I thought that I'm kind of prepared for anything, any kind of grief.

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And so that was fault number one of really thinking that I knew how to walk through all kinds of grief.

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So just as a side, not every grief journey clearly is different.

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And pet loss is one that I think I was wholly unprepared for because most of the time people don't really talk about it.

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I think we see it on social media, we feel bad, but then if we've never experienced it, perhaps we discount it as, oh, it's only a dog oh, it's only a cat.

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It's only a whatever, fill in the blank kind of pet.

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And I would like to apologize if you are someone that has been in my life and I ever kind of dismissed that, because now I know and now I understand, and now I think it's more important than ever to speak out about my experience so that other people feel comfortable talking about theirs, feel okay when they just lose their minds, essentially.

Matt Gilhooly
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And they are like me, who I'm about four months out and still affected in my daily journey in the way that I approach life from this loss.

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So I got Mikey when I was, like, 29.

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I adopted him kind of randomly.

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I think recently I talked about hasty decisions, and that was kind of a hasty decision that I made.

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And I'm so happy that I did.

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But it was.

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It was like, oh, I think I need a dog.

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And then I found one, and I fell in love with him.

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And he was like £4 when I brought him home.

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And he was just this little tiny ball of energy who really, really, really loved life.

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And he wanted to get every morsel of life from every single moment and for his entire life until after he passed.

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I kind of chalk that up to him being crazy.

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And I wish that I had stopped and reflected on the way that he approached life, because it's kind of one of my regrets of thinking, oh, I wish you would settle down, when really it was like he was just trying to get everything out of every single moment.

Matt Gilhooly
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But, you know, I had Mikey through all the.

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So many pivots in my life, from, you know, moving jobs, going to different states to different houses, to all these different decisions that I had made over time.

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And he was there for all of it.

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Eventually, Molly joined us.

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Molly is.

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She's about 10 pounds, and she's a little thing, and she's still around.

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And they didn't really talk to each other.

Matt Gilhooly
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I guess they don't really talk, but they didn't really engage with each other.

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But Mikey was always just, like, we shared a birthday.

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He was always just like, by my side and my shadow.

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And so we did so much together.

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And he met so many people, and so many people loved him and wanted to be a part of his life, and he wanted to be a part of their life.

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I often said that if he could, he would probably reenact the scene in the Revenant with Leonardo DiCaprio, where he attacks that bear and kind of gets inside the bear's carcass to stay warm.

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Like, Mikey was so in love with people.

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That, like, if he could climb inside someone's body, he probably would have.

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But this year, earlier this year, he turned 14.

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So in 2024, February 17, 2024, he turned 14.

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And around a little bit after that, he started, like, one of his legs started shaking his back legs, and he would, like, lift it and shake.

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And I was just like, okay, he's getting older.

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It's a little bit arthritic or something like that.

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And so I just kind of, like, brush it off as just, you know, he's getting older, it's fine.

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He's still, like, doing all of his normal stuff.

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He's.

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He's kind of, you know, just acting a little bit older but not really slowing down.

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And then as the months progressed, I noticed that he was struggling to eat with this food on the ground.

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So then I had to raise his food up, and then it was a little bit easier for him.

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And then just things started, like, kind of snowballing, if you will.

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And I took him to the vet, and the vet was like, yeah, he's probably in a little pain.

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It's probably arthritis.

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You know, here's some medicine we can try tried.

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The first medicine was supposed to kind of work in a.

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In a quicker speed, and it didn't.

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So then I went to the route of, like, trying these shots.

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And so we tried the shot, and that was supposed to take, like, I don't know, four weeks or so.

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So we tried a couple rounds of those particular shots, and everything just started getting a little worse.

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He was going to the bathroom all over the house, and he was not sleeping through the night, and he was pacing, and.

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And it was.

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It was.

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He was different.

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Things were different.

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And I knew that he was starting to not enjoy the life that he was living.

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And he was kind of telling me that, but I wasn't really listening for a while.

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And I think, you know, it's probably normal.

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And so we were getting pretty close, and things just started getting really bad.

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Like, as he was walking outside, he would fall, he would trip, he would hurt himself, he would fall out.

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Like, going outside the back door to go outside.

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He was having more accidents in the house.

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He was just really, really changing fast.

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And so I started to, like, have that conversation with myself.

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Like, this is.

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I'm going to have to make this decision.

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I can't just let him suffer more.

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And part of that is really hard because you have to weigh a bunch of things.

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And I think this is something that I think people need to talk about more, is you have to weigh One, the quality of life of the, of the dog, of the cat, of the whatever pet that you have, and, and how they're living life and thinking back on the parts where they were living their best life and then what kind of life they were living at the moment.

Matt Gilhooly
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But you also have to think about your quality of life and what this is doing to you as you kind of try to navigate this new world of this animal.

Matt Gilhooly
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So I had to have a lot of conversations with people and I wasn't going to make a hasty decision this time.

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And I had to figure out, you know, like, what to do.

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And the resources don't tell you what to do.

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It's kind of like he'll tell you when it's time, and you're like, I don't know how that's gonna happen.

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Like, what does that actually mean?

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And, you know, you just kind of have to make this decision.

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And part of me was like, really heartbroken that I was going to have to, like, put him in my car, take him to the vet, and then have the procedure done there whenever it was time, and then leave without Mikey, leave this sterile vet place.

Matt Gilhooly
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And so someone reminded me or told me about Lap of Love, which is like the one thing, if you take anything away from this and you have a pet, please plant the seed of Lap of Love.

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Lap of Love is an in home euthanasia program.

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It's run by veterinarians.

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It is something that has been a lifesaver in this really, really hard journey.

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But essentially they will come to you.

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You can have this, the last beautiful moments in the space that your dog feels most comfortable or your cat or whatever animal, and set the scene so that you can say a proper goodbye without having a fully sterile environment.

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And so that's the decision that I had to make ultimately.

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And, you know, I set.

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Set the room up, put his favorite bed, had all the nice things, had some gentle music playing, had some candles going.

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And right there, right before the most wonderful human vet showed up to do this horrible process, Mikey looked me in the eyes.

Matt Gilhooly
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He finally settled down, like, wasn't.

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He wasn't laying down on his own for like the last couple weeks.

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And I always had to place him down.

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And then for the.

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Right there before she showed up, he looked at me and he laid in between our legs and was just like, calm.

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And so that was like that moment in which you're like, I guess he is telling me, I guess he's saying that it's okay.

Matt Gilhooly
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So I'm not going to go into details about the process as you can look that up.

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It's not, it's not horrible.

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It's just horrible, right?

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Like it's not.

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It's very calm and peaceful and all those things, but it's horrible.

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It's a really hard experience.

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But after I just lost it, everything didn't matter.

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And the day after, I think I said this on yesterday's episode about like this love and then how hard it is when you lose it.

Matt Gilhooly
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I couldn't do anything.

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Like I just felt like I would fall to the ground and just cry and sobbing.

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Like not crying that I've, you know, watching a movie or something like this was like heaving.

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It was.

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It was crazy and I just didn't expect it and it was so hard.

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And I think that what helped me was to share this, to put it on social media, let everyone know that I wasn't okay.

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I did a little episode on this podcast about, about Mikey, mostly a tribute and then talking kind of to him.

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But I was still like in the throes of it.

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And obviously I'm choking up a little bit now, so I guess I'm still in the throes of it.

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But it's been an up and down journey.

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Like I used to go to the gym five, six days a week.

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Now I struggle to wake up in the morning and have the energy to go or the desire to go.

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I used to eat fairly decently and now I'm just finding myself just haphazardly eating and, and going back to some disordered eating tendencies.

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And I find myself disconnecting a little bit more, maybe not reaching out to people as much as I used to.

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And the good part of that is that I understand that this is all just part of the journey.

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The weird part of it is that I just never expected that losing a pet would bring so much upheaval in my life and kind of knock me off course for so long.

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So there is no moral to this story today.

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I guess in the last couple days I've been trying to find or I ended up with some kind of recommendation or advice.

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But I guess there is advice here.

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Just like let yourself feel how you're feeling and, and the things that are happening in your life and acknowledge that Mikey was my shadow for essentially 14 years.

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And so losing him was kind of like losing a piece of me, as weird as that might sound to non pet owners.

Matt Gilhooly
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And I know that eventually I will feel more like myself or maybe a different version of myself, but more in the routines that used to bring me joy and satisfaction.

Matt Gilhooly
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But right now, I'm just kind of riding the roller coaster.

Matt Gilhooly
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One day I might feel great.

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The next day I might feel terrible.

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I might remember those last moments.

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I might remember something really happy.

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I might just miss the way that Mikey, I don't know, smelled or the way he sounded tapping through the hallways or whatever it was.

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And that's all okay.

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You know, grief is its own thing.

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And I hope that if you ever have to face this, that one, you consider lap of love, because I think it was the single best decision that I made in this terrible journey.

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But two, you honor and share how you're feeling because they think it's going to help you.

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And I think that, you know, we're, we're just human and we can't navigate everything, quote unquote, perfectly or be a steel wall because eventually it's going to crash down.

Matt Gilhooly
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So I hope this wasn't too depressing.

Matt Gilhooly
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I guess it was.

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But here's what I'm thinking on November 7, 2024.

Matt Gilhooly
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So this is day seven of 30 days, 30 episodes for the Life Shift podcast.

Matt Gilhooly
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I guess you're going to get to know a little bit more about me.

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Maybe.

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You probably know enough.

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But thank you for being a part of this journey again.

Matt Gilhooly
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If you have any ideas or things you want me to address, please send them to me and I will be looking out for those.

Matt Gilhooly
00:14:45

Until then.

Matt Gilhooly
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I have to go to work now, so I will talk to you soon.

Matt Gilhooly
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For more information, please visit www.thelifeshiftpodcast.com.