Note to Self: These Are the Signs That Mean "Just START"
#1. PUT THE CREDIT CARD AWAY.
#1. You want to buy ______.
Your planner isn’t working. You must need a new one. That one will fix everything and you’ll finally be organized.
You need a new notebook, not one of the empty notebooks that sits ready on the overflowing bookshelf. A new one because you just bought a writing-for-money course and need a place to take notes.
And of course, you’ll need new pens to go with the new notebook and new stickers to go with the new planner, which will require immediate decoration once it arrives.
Your office chair squeaks a lot, which means it’s probably not giving you the right back support anymore, which means you’re probably screwing up your back, which means you’ll have to go back to PT, so obviously the answer is: new chair!
What you really need:
to sit your butt in your old chair and open up your old laptop on your old desk and do the work
#2. You want to throw out ______ and start fresh.
(See above planner/notebook/pen/chair fiasco, and add…)
You bent over to pet the cat and noticed the skin between your breasts is suddenly, inexplicably, wrinkled. Dear god. You must fix this. Now.
Crepe Erase? Exfoliation? You spend an entire week googling crepey skin, wrinkles… You need an entirely new skincare regimen. You need to throw away hundreds of dollars of existing products and start over by spending hundreds more dollars on new products. And you need to spend two hours creating a new skincare daily schedule on Canva and print it out in pretty colors and tape it to your bathroom mirror.
(#2 and #1 are inextricably linked.)
What you really need:
to wash your face and moisturize using the hundreds of dollars worth of skincare products you already have and sit down and do the work
#3. You want to clean.
Stop right there, young lady (with inexplicably crepey inter-breast skin): you never want to clean.
You know this about yourself. You’ve talked to your therapist about it.
One of the subconscious reasons you married Joe is because he does want to clean, so now you don’t have to.
If you want to clean, you are avoiding something.
What you really need:
to sit down and do the work
(and if it’s really still bothering you…)
to tell Alexa to set a timer for 20 minutes, clean for just those 20 minutes, then sit down and do the work
#4. You want to watch Grey’s Anatomy.
It started out innocently. You wanted to revisit the days of Meredith, George, and Izzy all living together. You wanted Christina back. You wanted those McDreamy love gazes.
But now you use it to escape. It’s a drug. And you know going into it that you won’t stop at one episode. You’ll come to six hours later, depressed and primed for a medical-terminology category on Jeopardy!
Do not even start.
What you really need:
to put on some YouTube ambience and sit down and do the work. The dark-and-twistiness will be there for you when you’re done.
Spot on! You just have to do the work. As one writing book I read (you know, reading about writing instead of writing) advised: butt in chair, butt in chair...