A weekly conversation about the messy, meaningful reality of caregiving, told with humor, honesty, and the occasional slightly ridiculous life metaphor. Come laugh, reflect, and leave with a little more grace for yourself and the chaos we’re all navigating.
Miss Shannon Paul greets viewers, summarizes her professional background as a comedian and speaker, and shares that she is the parent of an 18-year-old who needs high supports. This establishes her perspective and why she’s hosting Caregiver Thursdays.
She describes the Caregiver Thursdays series and emphasizes coping with daily complexities, noting that current events have made day-to-day survival more important. The host frames the conversation around balancing future aspirations with immediate needs.
Shannon reflects on observing her son and community anxiety and outlines the mental shift to focusing on what can be done today. She explains why creating space and reducing pressure to solve everything at once can be helpful for caregivers and those they support.
She lists practical tactics—comfort meals, trusted friends, tending houseplants, stocking useful supplies, and learning skills like 3D printing—to create small, achievable wins. Shannon emphasizes the value of completing manageable tasks that bring immediate peace and help the people you care for.
She commits to showing any whimsical 3D prints and thanks the community for sharing time, explaining the channel’s consistency and searchability. She also announces plans to return Saturday morning and hints at stories from an upcoming fundraiser.
Shannon urges viewers to allow themselves respite, to solve what they can today, and not to feel pressured to fix everything immediately. She offers appreciation for the community and signs off with warm goodbyes.
Hello, hello, hello. Happy Thursday to you. If you are watching on a Thursday, if you are watching somewhere in the future, happy whatever day it is that you are on. Hi everybody. I am Miss Shannon Paul and I am by trade a variety of word related things like a comedian and a corporate speaker and a voice actor and an event MC and a benefit auctioneer and those kind of things. Actually, actually, actually, That's a good word. I'll have to look it up and see if it's an actual word or if I made it up.
If I made it up, that's cool. I do that sometimes. But actually, I'm also going to be an author soon because that book will be completed and I'll be happy to share that with you when I get it to that point. Those are the things that make up the list of accoutrement that is on my LinkedIn profile or you might read in my bio if you go to my website. But I'm also the proud parent of an adorable 18 year old kiddo who happens to be high sports on the autism spectrum. One of my proudest achievements is hanging out with my kiddo.
He is my champion. He is a complicated onion of a human being as we all are, but he is my champion. So that is why I'm happy to join you on Caregiver Thursdays where we cover a variety of topics that hopefully Give you a few more things to add to your toolkit as we are dealing with the daily and weekly and monthly and yearly complexities that we are all dealing with. Especially these days, which I thought would bring me to what I thought we'd talk about for a little while today. I now more than ever have really been focusing on the concept of doing what we need to do to get through today.
And I don't mean that I have gotten rid of any future plans, any planning for what's going to happen in a week, a year, five years, all of those things. I still have a variety of aspirations and things that inspire me to keep moving forward. But I do notice that right now, at least in my circle more than ever, there has been that need to go, well, what am I going to do to get through today. And in my particular realm, a lot of that comes from the fact that the world is a heavy place for a variety of reasons.
And I think that very few of us are immune to everything that's going on. And I want to remind us that that also holds true for the people that we care about and care for and give care to. And I want to bring this up because I thought about this over the last couple of days like I said my kiddo he's a high schooler who happens to be high supports on the autism spectrum and although he and his classmates may not process language the same way that a lot of us do I know he's not being inundated with headlines I know that his phone isn't giving him all of the complexities and the daily things that make us know how hard things are right now he's not the one responsible for the bills in the house.
So he doesn't know whether we are having economic upheaval. And he's not hearkening back to stories of before he was born about back when we went through recessions and depressions and those things. Hello, Amanda. Good to see you in the chat. So I was talking about my kiddo. And so no, he doesn't have those general pressures that a lot of us may be dealing with if we are feeling overwhelmed by the headlines and the weight of what the world goes on. But what he does have is that empathy and that feeling and that vibe check that he can tell that things are tough.
He can tell that things are, there is a film of anxiety just floating through our communities. And I can tell that he and his classmates who are all on similar levels of of needing support on the autism spectrum or a variety of developmental delays. And I was talking to his staff and we could just tell that the kiddos are a little off. And I don't think it's anything particular that we'd go, Oh, well, they saw this story and here's what it is. But I do think that they can feel the ripple effect of how anxious in general our community is and how anxious in general our society is and with very good reason.
And so that has had me go through the mental process of what can I do to help us get through this moment and this day and still move towards whatever our variety of normalcy is, still have those aspirational endeavors that I'm like, okay, well, when he's 22, here's what I hope that he does. I haven't put any of those things away, but they are something that I'm going, okay, What can current Shannon do for future Shannon and future Cyclone Kid? So that has been allowing us a lot more space for what we need to do to make today survivable and more peaceful or just a little more engaged so that we don't have to continually flash forward and get out that negativity bias crystal ball that is very easy to come across right now.
So maybe that looks like doing your favorite local, favorite comfort meal right now in your house. Maybe it's giving yourself a little bit more time to say, you know what, we're just gonna sit and be still and do that. For me, it's also like leaning into certain friends that just get it without me having to explain a lot of subtext. I have some very friends that I could just go, Isn't this weird? And they just know, yeah, it is. You know, or we can bounce things off each other and I know that I kind of just pull off that veil of having to be in performance mode.
And that I think is really good for me and for my kid is being able to help him know how to generate a space that isn't filled with that weight that isn't filled with that anxiety that we know will come back inevitably. But to be able to build a little bit more bubble and cushion and add in that bubble wrap around us so we do have those moments to just exhale. And that's not always easy, I have to catch myself 'cause my brain will definitely, the way that my high functioning anxiety works, it will run off on a treadmill of ridiculousness if I don't occasionally go, Yeah, but you could just walk for a little while, you don't gotta run right now.
So I encourage you to do that and maybe it's something silly. The other thing that I've done is like for me, it also is sometimes it's getting things out of my head and affecting change in what I can do. That has looked like a couple of things. I've been paying more attention to my house plants because that seems like a good skill set. I've actually been doing my version of stocking up, not that I'm full on prepper, but there's some things that make me feel a little happier to have around. that includes I'm gonna show you a box Amanda there's a box over there that box got delivered today you want to know what that box is that box is a 3d printer so because that seemed like a good thing to have right now to be able to make some stuff and I do have some things I'm gonna make right now I'm not like immediately going to be starting my own society in the woods but I'm not already preparing to I don't know 3d print a fortress that I can go hide in my kid with my cat But there are some things that are actually, if I get kind of good at it, that'll make my life a little easier.
Like for instance, my kiddo has a certain group of videos that he's been watching for years. There's certain things in these videos that he is continually asking me about and he likes, but these videos are fantastical. And so all of the things that he asks me about in these videos sometimes do not exist in our real world, but that doesn't mean that he doesn't have an interest in them. So I'm like, you know, maybe that's the stuff that I can print. And if nothing else, he has a whole collection of trains and they have tiny little connector pieces that break all the time.
So I figured I could get maybe good at printing out the little connector pieces so mom can be magical and fix his things. So that has been another thing that has just been giving me a little bit of peace for today. It's one more question that I can address. It's something that I could affect. It's something that I can make a difference on today. Because we're not going to get to the point that we can solve not only all of our problems, but all of the complex layers of everything that's going on in the universe.
There's no way we're going to get all that stuff by dinner time. And that gets hard going, okay, I got to roll this drama over another day. So if there are some things that you can go, this is something that I can go, I got it done. I completed it. That is not work. It's just something that you can affect that makes your life a little peaceful, a little more joyful, a little happier, gives you something to focus on that you're like, hey, you know what? I did that. Good for me and good for the person that I care for.
So look for some of those things in your life and see what you can do. I will then continue to check in if I make anything fantastical, fantastical, like I don't know, some of the cars from the Horton, here's a Horton, here's a Who movie that my kid loves. He would appreciate having some of that stuff. So if I manage to 3D print anything that is absolutely whimsical and amazing, I will of course share it with all of you here in the cadre sphere, just as I appreciate you sharing your time with me.
Hopefully, between me and all the other contributors that we have here and the wide variety of content that we have, we're giving you some little tastes of what it is that you need at the time that you need it. That's why we try to make sure that we're very searchable. That's why we try to be our version of consistent. It's as good for all of us as it is good for you. That's something that we've all shared because being able to have this space where we can build community with one another really does fuel many of us, including myself.
m. Central. We will see how that goes because I have a gig farther out of town and I might end up making it home kind of late. The goal is to join you and I might have stories to regale you of the great fundraiser that I did on Sunday night in the wonderful city of Fargo, North Dakota. So everyone, please continue to make some space for yourself. Everything that is going on right now deserves all of the feelings that we give to it, but we also deserve time to have respite from that. because that is how we continue to move forward.
That's how we continue to be here, not only for ourselves, but for the people that we care about and who we care for. So give yourself some space for that. Solve what you can today, and we'll solve the next thing and the next thing and the next thing as they come up. Don't think you have to solve everything by 4:00 PM. That's a little bit too much for all of us. I appreciate all of you. I am always happy to be part of this community and to just share a little bit of my day with you. I'll see you this Saturday everybody.
I hope that the day treats you well. If it doesn't, shame on it, not shame on you. See everybody soon.
