To help me be more consistent and curb writers block, I’m doing the “30 Day Killer Journaling Challenge for Self Love and Self Discovery” created by Isabelle Dias. If you’d like to take the challenge yourself, click the link for a full list of prompts. What is your favorite childhood memory? Why is this your favorite moment? “ Birthday’s are hands down my favorite childhood memory. Growing up, we never went without, but we didn’t have money for frivolous things like brand name clothes or that peanut butter jelly that was mixed together in the same jar, but my mother always made sure we had a birthday party. She’d get a boxed cake mix and candles, and let me help decorate (because that was my jam). At my brothers birthday in July, she’d put up the little kiddie pool in the back yard and all the cousins and neighbors would come over and splash around in 2 feet of water having a grand old time.
The absolute biggest thing my mother did was rent out the skating rink for my birthday party. I was not a popular kid. I was weird and got picked on all the time. Kids were mean, but on that one glorious day, all that got put aside. I got to invite my entire grade school class and of course most of them showed up because it was the early nineties and no one turned down a chance to skate for free! I chose that party knowing that it would mean that was the only present I would get from my parents, and that Christmas would be slim too because I was sinking all the gift money into this one shining moment. To this day, I am still filled with nostalgia and a warm fuzzy feeling when I remember whooshing around the rink to some sweet tunes surrounded by all my classmates and cousins. For one day, I wasn’t the weirdo or the kid with divorced parents, or the kid who couldn’t afford anything name brand - I was the kid who was queen of the skating rink. I still celebrate my birthday with cake, and I make sure to celebrate other people’s birthdays too, because everyone deserves to have a little magic in their lives, even if it’s just for an afternoon. Want to tackle this journaling challenge together? Come join us in Conk’s Community. To help me be more consistent and curb writers block, I’m doing the “30 Day Killer Journaling Challenge for Self Love and Self Discovery” created by Isabelle Dias. If you’d like to take the challenge yourself, click the link for a full list of prompts. Question of the day: What do you absolutely love about your life right now? THINGS I LOVE ABOUT MY LIFE RIGHT NOW:
Want to tackle this journaling challenge together? Come join us in Conk’s Community. To help me be more consistent and curb writers block, I’m doing the “30 Day Killer Journaling Challenge for Self Love and Self Discovery” created by Isabelle Dias. If you’d like to take the challenge yourself, click the link for a full list of prompts. What are five things you love about your personality and attitude towards life overall? FIVE THINGS I LOVE:
Want to tackle this journaling challenge together? Come join us in Conk’s Community. To help me be more consistent and curb writers block, I’m doing the “30 Day Killer Journaling Challenge for Self Love and Self Discovery” created by Isabelle Dias. If you’d like to take the challenge yourself, click the link for a full list of prompts. Question of the day: Why are you starting this challenge, and what things do you hope to change during those 30 days? I’m tackling this challenge because I’m already in the midst of a challenge to write a blog post every day for 100 days (and I’ve been spotty and a tad forgetful). I also know that getting started is sometimes the hardest part and maybe by sitting down and doing the damn thing, I’ll encourage someone else to do the same.
The second part of this question is a little trickier. I think I’d like to be a little (or maybe a lot) less hard on myself. My neurodivergent brain constantly gets frozen in analysis paralysis and then I get judgey with myself for being trapped in the cycle. I tell people all the time to embrace who they are and live life authentically and unapologetically but I don’t always follow my own advice. In the next 30 days, I’d like to have a clearer picture of what I want for my life in this moment, what will make me happiest, and maybe even have a plan for how to finally get the ball rolling downhill. Want to tackle this challenge together? Come join us in Conk’s Community. I brought this on myself,
with an impulse purchase - hoping to make some positive change - to move in any direction that isn’t stuck on my ass in my pajamas ADHD paralyzed. So, in that regard, I suppose this is progress. And who doesn’t love a quest? Who knows, I could still encounter a dragon, maybe even a luck dragon - this 80’s kid can dream. I finally found my tracker and realized that if I don’t post at the start of the day, I wander off or forget by evening. I’m going to do my best to continue to be consistent, but instead of going for a straight 100 calendar days, I’ve decided to continue this little experiment until I have 100 posts. This experiment has me contemplating the world from a much broader perspective. If I miss a day, how can I reconfigure both my expectations and the process as a whole? Thus writing 100 posts even if there is a small gap here and there.
I’m also reconsidering my perspective on my house. I had a vision for remodeling one room at a time, but financially, ripping out lath and plaster and replacing it with sheetrock isn’t in the cards right now. Let’s take the bathroom as the biggest “for example”. I attempted, years ago now, to start stripping the paint off all the woodwork. It proved much more difficult than I anticipated, thus there we are left with patches of partially stripped wood here and there. It looks awful and is somewhat depressing. It occurred to me the other day while soaking in the bath that I can in fact just refresh the paint for now and abandon my previous vision for now. I’m an adult, my husband and I own this house, we could put up wood paneling and turn this place into a pirate ship if we were so inclined (which I am definitely not). The point is, I’ve been thinking about the entire process too narrowly. I can make aesthetic changes such as paint, decorations, and curtains saving the major renovations for someday when we have more funding. There is no reason I have to lie in the bath and stare at partially stripped wood patches simply because I can’t afford to gut and remodel the entire bathroom. In fact, I’ve also found a delightful Instagram account that has inspired me! This is my home, and I can make it my home. Granted there will have to be some agreement between my husband and I, but he is generally gracious and not picky. Like me, he’d much rather be in a space that is beautiful and feels good than something cluttered and half finished. Right now, I’m in the pinterest stages and plotting my creation. Stay tuned. It’s day 23 and this is my 20th post, so I’m at roughly an 87% completion rate so far for the 100 day challenge. I’m alright with that considering I misplaced my tracker and haven’t been ticking off the days (visual aids are extremely important when your brain is disorganized). I got one of those monthly habit trackers that goes in a circle and I fell into a pit of despair after three days. Something about missing a day just makes my neurodivergent brain give up hope. I do better with things that aren’t linear.
Right now I’m staring down my coffee table that is perpetually gathering clutter and realizing that I have to be to work in less than an hour today. I’ve come to the end of my motivation to write, and sometimes we have to accept that it’s a bare minimum kind of day and love ourselves anyway. Anxiety is the worst. Sometimes it’s really hard to hold onto the positive when my brain gets overstimulated. Imagine being in a classroom trying to take notes for an important lesson while the marching band is practicing outside the window, your best friend is trying to share cat videos with you, there are two people chatting behind you, and you’ve got a splitting headache. That’s how crowded it gets in my head on the regular. I’m just one giant raw nerve and everything in the world around me is imploding at once.
Like right now, I’m trying to write this post, and I’m thinking “SHIT! I forgot to pay the lawn mowing bill. How overdue is that?!” And I can pretty much promise you that if I don’t get up this second and locate the bill, I will forget again. There’s just so damn much happening at once and this morning, while I was swimming at the gym, I was wishing that I were stupid rich so I could just do whatever I wanted and life would be chill. But you know what? Although money would definitely solve a bunch of shit on my list, it isn’t going to change the noise or the doom spiraling in my head. Truth. Case in point, what exactly do I plan to do with all this free time money is going to buy me? What do I actually want out of life and what could I be doing right now that doesn’t require money that I’m not doing despite having a lot more free time since going part time? I want to travel, make my podcast, and…well, that’s about as far as I’ve made it at this juncture. Look, I’m gonna give it to you straight, sometimes it absolutely is about the money - to make house repairs, pay bills, fund trips but more times it doesn’t have anything to do with the dollar dollar bills ya’ll. It’s about mindset and getting clear about what it is you actually want to do with your life. What will make you happy? What do you want to do before you die? What does a life well lived look like to you? We gotta dig deep and find the real answers to these questions inside ourselves. Not the bullshit we tell other people to make ourselves look good, but the truth that will set us free. That’s the reflection I need to be making. I’m going to think long and hard about it, figure out where I’d like to be heading and how exactly I’m going to get there - just as soon as I pay that damn lawn mowing bill. Tonight I offer up a haiku for the loves of my life, may they dream the sweetest dreams:
Their tiny toe beans Warm fuzzy little bellies My heart is so full Fell out of routine and missed a post yesterday, but I’m back at it swinging today. The older I get, the more I find that routine is incredibly important but also really difficult to establish with my ADHD. I feel better when I have routine, but I also fight really hard against creating it. I do something or a series of something’s for a day or two and then peter out because I would rather read a book or watch Netflix. It’s exasperating.
That’s another reason I’m forcing myself to sit down and write this damn blog. I wore the same dress every day for 100 days to simplify my life and prove to myself that I in fact could do something I put my mind to and now I’m applying that same sense of single minded focus to writing. The dress taught me that I need a lot less in my life than I previously thought and took the decision fatigue out of getting dressed in the morning. Writing is cathartic. Getting my thoughts out helps me process. I highly recommend it (even if you don’t post it on the internet). You don’t have to write something prolific everyday - today’s post is a glaring example. Just sit down and put your thoughts on paper (or Google doc). No quota, no criteria, no judgment. Hell, you don’t even have to write complete sentences. Grab a notebook and just free write what’s in your head for 10 minutes everyday. You might be surprised at what comes out. |
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June 2023
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