Help me, help myself

It’s been a year now since the world seemingly stopped spinning. A global crisis, let alone a pandemic, which at this point has killed 2,720,329 to date worldwide. The vast majority of us were in lockdown for at least three months of the past year.

In the past year I have been through all the stages of everything that no one wants to go through. For the three and a half months that I was unemployed because my position was not considered an essential staff member at my job while they were temporarily closed and then open for takeout only. During this time I attempted to learn a language, Scottish Gaelic. During the entire course of the year I managed to read 19 books, which is a feet for me, and I binged, I lost count of how many movies and TV shows. My passion of duct tape crafts was reinvigorated. Creating larger bags and different styles of bags, a new design of wallet that is also a phone case while continuing with the original two designs of wallet I started with trying out all different kinds of color combinations.

Since January when The Minimalists second documentary came out I have felt like it is exactly what I needed at the exact right moment in my life. I watched Less Is Now and then found Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things. I have now watched both twice as of this blog posting. So now I have not only been slowly chipping away at my room with my new journey of minimizing but I have watched countless documentaries on Netflix and Hulu. Here I am laughing at myself thinking about how many I have watched just thing weekend let alone this year. A few weeks ago after going to theminimalists.com for the first time I started following them on social media and reading their blog posts. Now for two weeks I have been listening to their podcast on Spotify. It is a fascinating journey with many beautiful thoughts and points of view. They teach a lot about money and how they got out of debt and the difference between one’s needs and wants, essentials and nonessentials.

Yesterday was the first day of Spring and I decided that it was a nice day to take my Fall/Winter clothes out of my closet and put away my Spring/Summer clothes from my bins under my bed (I have a serious problem I have no idea how to tackle) into my closet. Plot of the story is that I know very well that I have entirely too many clothes. My issue is that I am not only stuck in my ways of only liking/rotating the same handful of ‘normal’ clothes. Also now that I took my weekends back from work (progress) I wear a grand total of seven black shirts and two black pants (there was a bleach incident with the other two I had) while working Monday through Friday. So I have said before that I still live in my childhood home with my mom who pushes all of my buttons even when she isn’t saying anything because I know exactly what she would say about most situations. When I started bitching about all my clothes and not wearing but half of them in almost four years let alone the last year when I know most people lived in PJs or sweat mom brought up the fact that I am “stubborn” and “need clothes for interviews”. Not exactly sure what universe she is pulling said interviews out of but whatever. Right now I am stuck in this job and at this point in my life I need to stay here until I can learn to help myself.

Some people think I am super detail oriented while other find that even if I do 99.99% of my work that .01% is the worst of all. All in all I am just overthinking everything and knowing that it might look like I got 99% of the job done for the day I have only done half of all I thought about getting done during the day. Unfortunately I have always known that I am a people pleaser, a yes woman, and while that makes for a very convincing hostess voice it makes me angry at myself for letting the world walk all over me. When I worked on Saturdays I had no time to slow down and make simple decisions about taking one thing at a time. It was always all or nothing with me. My one manager called me the hardest working person in the restaurant at a team meeting and while it was flattering it was also embarrassing (I could never take a compliment). I just have a constant fear of failure and being fired for doing something so stupid that I will never bounce back. Last but certainly not least I always over plan my day and when it doesn’t go the way I think it will in my head I tend to procrastinate doing the things that need to get done. Knowing that a table needs bussed and menus need wiped but instead constantly looking at various apps on my phone.

Well now it is Sunday night and I have work in the morning. Mondays can be hit and miss these days. Plan for the best and expect the worst or vise versa. Whichever is your cup of tea. Stress relief tea sounds like plan right about now after getting all of this out on the World Wide Web.

Good night blog world.

Remember…”you can’t CHANGE the people around you, but you can change the people AROUND you.” – JFM