The "Don't think of..." Game

I came up with a game to help calm myself down whenever my brain won't shut up. There are endless projects and things I want to do so I get stressed about how I'll manage to fit all of them into my life. I think it's good to think things out as much as possible, but sometimes (like when I'm trying to sleep) I just want to distract myself. As I was driving and thinking about how annoying thought can be, it reminded me of a conundrum someone once told me: If you try not to think about something, you will think about it. The example he gave was a rhinoceros and immediately a rhino popped into my head (his horn poked my hippocampus). As I drove I tried to think of the silliest things I could, and my brain conjured up the images afterward. "Don't think of... hippies playing frizbee with onion rings." It made me smile and calm down. Maybe if your brain is misbehaving you can enjoy this game too. Here are some other things I came up with:

 

 

 

 

I drew all of them except the tomato-helicoper, David did that one and I inked and colored it in. His helicopter knowledge exceeds my own.

Baby Steps

On September twelfth I met my goal of getting my Etsy store back up. (And just realized how hard it is to spell "twelfth"). A couple days later I wrote a draft on here about how the store was up, but forgot to post it. So I'm late to tell you that I was late. I could beat myself up for not getting those things done on time but that wouldn't accomplish anything.

What did make me feel bad about myself was not meeting my original goal for this blog (picking up trash every day). I've only been doing it about every three or four days. No matter how good the excuse, I felt guilty whenever I didn't do it. I thought doing one simple thing every day shouldn't be hard, but it is. As important as I know it is to take baby steps, I got excited about this project and thought about all the other things I wanted to do. That quickly became overwhelming. It reminds me of my years-long struggle against bad posture. It sounds weird but at some point I forgot how to not slouch. I'd lock my knees and stand as upright as I could, but my back would start to ache and I'd devolve back into a slump. Later I read what I'd forgotten- don't lock your knees! If you let them bend a little your back won't hurt and you can stand up straight. It's the same thing with any sort of self-improvement. You have to give yourself a little room to bend or you'll wear yourself out. And don't allow your failure to keep you from standing up straight in the future.

To help myself succeed- because I'm not giving up on the goal- I decided to take even smaller baby steps (prenatal steps?). I'm giving myself the goal of picking up trash every day for just this week. After that hopefully it will become a habit. I joined that thing the kids call Twitter so I can post my progress on that and other challenges. I'm three days in so far and already I have to walk farther and farther from home to find trash to fill my five gallon bucket.

Here is a picture of some things featured on my etsy shop:

Here's a link: https://www.etsy.com/shop/NoblePURSEsuits

And my Twitter: https://twitter.com/WC_Brandenburg