5: New Month, New Thing to Try

Happy actual fall!! It’s the first Monday of the best month, and in honor of this, I am choosing a cozy microrisk.  Now what does this mean? Isn’t the whole idea of risk that it’s supposed to fall outside of your comfort zone?

These are very fair questions that I’ve projected onto you, so please allow me to explain. 

My initial plan for this month was to take the risk of finally making some of the mini movies (short films feels like a strong word when the goal is to pack as much silliness into two minutes as physics will allow). But I’ve been reflecting a lot on the root causes for some of my struggles last time around and I think a big part of it was/is my state of mind.

This is something I’ve been struggling with for probably about half my life now. Getting out of bed, getting dressed. Sometimes just drinking a glass of water feels impossible. With these seemingly small things feeling like such high hurdles, a little voice found a perch in the back of my head, there to whisper every time I didn’t meet an expectation. And she was a bitch.

But she knew how to command a room and oh boy did she have my attention. Soon her perch grew into a stronghold. She upgraded from the back of my mind to a first class seat. Nothing I did was right. I was fat, my skin was gross. I was lazy, uninteresting and unintelligent.  

There wasn’t anything she wouldn’t say to hurt me and she had sold out shows every night.

My grades suffered, my relationships. My room was never clean, my projects never finished. And even though I’m using past tense here, she is still a very present feature in my life. 

But what I’ve learned in therapy is that I put her there. I gave her center stage. This isn’t blame. It isn’t anything I did on purpose, but not knowing any better, I handed this voice a microphone and paid for tickets until she could afford total monopoly over my thoughts. What my therapist is teaching me is how to access a microphone of my own. Not to shout over her, but discuss with her a better and more constructive way she could relay her points to me. Or, maybe some days, to tell her to shut up.

So what does any of this have to do with the plan for this month’s microrisk?  I don’t want to fall into these ruts as often. The not getting dressed, working from bed all day, only seeing the sun because I have to walk the dog kind of ruts. 

My microrisk is going to be my attempt bringing myself out of this in as permanent a way as possible. How?

By ritualizing my life! 

Right now getting out of bed, removing my three day old mascara, they’re all chores. They shouldn’t be. What it really is, is self care. So I need to make it feel like that. I need to cozy-ify it.

This month I’m going to develop a morning ritual that will hopefully jumpstart my brain and allow it to operate from a more positive and energetic place, which then by extension will allow me to pursue my goals without being as hindered by pesky chemical imbalances. 

Why is this a risk?

Funnily enough, a friend of mine texted me about the blog today. We talked about how hard it really is to change how we talk to ourselves. 

The truth is, I’ve tried to get myself into to ritualize self care a few times now and I haven’t been able to stick with it. Every time I don’t, my voice is back to tell me that, of course I wasn’t going to stick with it and also my left boob is just a little bit smaller than my right boob. The risk here is really the same as all the others. I might not do it. I might not follow through and if I don’t, she is going to be such a dick about it. 

This time around feels like it could be different though. Taking lessons from all the times it hasn’t worked, I know I need to start small. Whatever I might want my ritual to look like in the end, it doesn’t need to— and shouldn’t— start out that way. Even though I have an idea of what I’d like these rituals to ultimately be, I won’t give that any of my focus. Instead I’m going to say that for this week, every morning, I want to:

Get out of bed at my first alarm

Make my bed (required to not immediately get back into bed)

Make myself a mug of tea. 

That’s it! 

And if I don’t, if one of these mornings my alarm goes off and I just roll over, that’s okay. My voice won’t have anything nice to say to me and that’s okay too. She can have her own view on this and it doesn’t have to be mine.

I’ll let you know how it goes, signing off with great purpose and intention!