It’s amazing how doing something you actually care about can improve your mood so drastically. Today was such a downer of a day for me. I had no desire to do anything, but wanted so badly to be productive, so I broke out my timer method, which goes something like rest for 10 minutes, clean for 15, repeat until motivated. I never actually hit motivated, though my house is cleaner than it was before, barely. I hit such a low, that while my husband was getting Cute Stuff to sleep on his lunch break, I was napping. Now there’s nothing wrong with napping, sometimes it’s necessary, but my night time sleep hasn’t been too bad lately, and it just wasn’t something I wanted to do today.
So, when my husband and I had to switch off getting Cute Stuff to sleep so he could go back to work, I sat there, cuddling my baby, thinking about how in the world I could improve my day. I certainly had no desire to fall into a week of despair just because of one bad day. (I do that sometimes.) Then I remembered a blog I had stumbled across sometime last month, while in one of my weeks of despair. Laying in bed, completely miserable, I googled, “I’m sad. Make it stop.” The first entry was Alison Gresik’s blog about walking depression in creatives. She specifically is an author, so it was right up my alley.
Using the What Kind of Creative Are You? Quiz, I realized that I am the Dutiful creative, which means that I try to get everything I’m supposed to done before I do my creative things. As a mother, I can tell you, this means that I never get to do my creative things. When I first read all of this, I decided to do at least one creative thing a day before I started all the other things I was required to do. It worked great, but then life happened, and I became caught up in serving everyone else again, so I found myself completely bummed with life today, as my list included lame stuff like laundry and dishes. Yuck! Who wants to do that?
So, while snuggling Cute Stuff, I pondered over and over about what I could possibly have enough energy to do that would be creative enough to pull me out of this bad day. I thought to my 101 Goals, and decided that writing notes to friends would be a good one, and I would get the satisfaction of working on my goals. And here, you see the fruits of this depression killing technique I have stumbled across. After writing only four notes to people I love, I am able to crank out a 450 word prose about the remedy to my bad day. I’d say it worked pretty well.