🔥💩This one is hot trash

I honestly have no clue what to tell you right now. It happens sometimes.

“GARBAGE! THIS IS GARBAGE! EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE!”

— Me, after doing the digital equivalent of crumpling up my first two attempts at writing and throwing them in a bin.

There are just times when nothing I write seems helpful enough, funny enough, wise enough, or bite-sized enough. Ok, let’s be real I’m almost NEVER bite-sized, am I? 😂

It’s because of me, of course.

It’s because sometimes I get a full blown scarcity-mode-attack (a very special kind of panic attack that afflicts us all, imo).

There were so many hurdles on the road to “actually doing this” - “this” being the thing that leads me to actually putting my thoughts in a public place where other people I know can see them (eek!).

It’s the same kind of tension that sometimes makes it hard to start a design or a project, and it goes a little something like this:

My brain: “This is going to be SO HARD. It is going to take SO LONG. I need to make something GOOD! I need to impress people! THIS one needs to be THE ONE!”

Me: *procrastinates and hates everything, leading to it ACTUALLY taking a long time.*

Even though I literally make 1,001 “design things” a day in the course of a workday without getting too “in my head” about it.

I’d be willing to guess that this happens for you, too.

Frankly, I don’t like having my brain restrict me in this fashion. So let’s flip the script on it, okay?

What if you were WILLING TO ALLOW something you made that was “absolute garbage” into a place where humans could see it?

What if you got EXTRA CREDIT for spelling errors and wobbly lines?

What if it looking like HOT TRASH were a GOOD thing?

What kind of possibilities could that open up?

What kind of ways might you stop censoring yourself long enough to see some new strangely beautiful things come to the surface?

Try it and let me know. Set a timer for 10 min. Make a super fast scribble or weird stanza of poetry, and post it to your IG/FB the second the timer goes off…and then tell me how it went! Feel free to blame your non-sequitur post on me for suggesting it, ha.

Okay, time to end this decidedly-not-bite-sized-hot-garbage ;)

Until tomorrow,

Cathy

P.S. Here’s my latest Save the Darlings progress. I am a little bit more than halfway through my self-imposed challenge and I’m REALLY excited about the results of this experiment in time management and drawing so far. More on that later.

P.P.S. I made this meditation. It’s a weird and unique type of exercise that I’m going to guess you’ve never done before. You basically use “intentional drawing” to guide your brain to a place of confidence…about anything you want, anything that you’re having a struggle with. “Hot mess” drawing only, no fancy stuff allowed :P