write me well

Tag: mental health

  • Oh, spring!

    Much in the same way that you cannot beat London in the summer, you cannot beat the PNW once spring has finally sprung. The sun wins a five-month-long battle with ceaseless cloud cover, the temperature creeps a degree or two above fifty, the sun stops setting at 4pm, and I genuinely think you can feel your soul leave your body (in a good way!) when you step out onto your front porch in the early afternoon to a blue sky filled with warm sunlight. I am a true believer in the seasons and I love them each deeply – but the first time every year that I feel sun-warmed skin might just be the best seasonal emotion.

    We went down to San Diego in March for a long overdue visit to friends and America’s finest city and it was a flashforward of the sunshine to come, and I appreciated it in my bones. (For the record, I think when it comes to city monikers, the tourism gods have chosen well when bestowing the title “Finest City”: the English city that boasts that distinction is none other than Norwich.) But after four beautiful days, we left San Diego in March and returned to Auburn in March, where it proceeded to snow. SNOW.

    It took about a month, but now, in the mixed bag of forecasts that is the month of April, spring is doing its damnedest to stay sprung, and I am revelling in it and all of the joy therein.

    What’s been bringing the joy besides the sunshine? So many things! Let’s make a list!

    One: Trips & trips & trips

      There was San Diego last month, then next month I will be going on a cruise to Alaska (a first for me and a very generous gift from a very generous friend), and in August Aaron and I are GOING TO ENGLAND & SPAIN!!!! I am SO VERY THRILLED! We will be there for 12 days, flying in and out of London, where Aaron will get his first United Kingdom experience and see all of the things and people and places I have fallen in love with over and over again. Is there something better than sharing what you love with someone you love? It is one of my most favorite things. Then we will set off for Spain, where we will see one  of my best friends and her amazing family, which will be so very wonderful. And then we will catch the total solar eclipse on the 12th. Jetlag and August heat be damned – it will be SUCH an adventure, I cannot WAIT.

      Two: Progress of many kinds!

      When we bought our house, it was almost entirely because of the potential on the property to host a shop for Aaron. We have just under half an acre, and on it sits a 24’ x 30’ reinforced cement foundation three-walled RV carport, making us one wall and an electrical plan away from a perfect shop. In the past five months, while the sun battled the ceaseless clouds, Aaron and I have battled the equally ceaseless King County permit department, and we are finally gaining ground, culminating in very exciting coming changes and, eventually, a full-permitted working shop for Aaron! This feels like some of the biggest progress we’ve made on the property since moving here, and I am very here for it.

      Then, there is health progress. I don’t think I have ever been a particularly unhealthy person, but the past year has seen the most consistent and least dramatic (which I think is fully the only reason this has been consistent) progress in the department that is Being Healthy. I slowed things down in the winter months, because goddamn the winter is long and dark and cold and hard, but now that we are springing, I can mark nearly a full year of running. I checked my old C25K app a few days ago to see when I first picked it up last year: on April 22, 2025, I did my first thirty minute workout of alternating 90 seconds of walking with 30 seconds of jogging. Last Friday I did a casual 4 mile run after work. I just love it and am excited to see if this next year brings any other fun ways to stay on the move. (And if it doesn’t? That is A-Okay! Running can absolutely be my personality if needs must.) (Jokes.)

      And then, there is driving progress! This will sound like a weird one because I didn’t really plan it and it’s not exactly on everyone’s list of things to learn/know how to do. But last fall, Aaron started teaching me how to drive a manual transmission car. There were many reasons for this: getting extra cache at work, because, well, car museum; feeling cool, because, well, feeling cool; and most practically, being able to jettison Rhonda the Honda, who has been my boon companion since I got back from London in 2021, but why have a car payment when you can…not have a car payment! It wasn’t until late January that I really decided to make the jump, after some months of casual weekend lessons and feeling like a small stretch of Military Road just outside of our neighborhood where I could hit fourth gear for all of two-hundred yards was the most I could handle without having a panic attack. But since about the second week of February, this gal has been daily driving a lovely little manual transmission 1998 Ford Ranger, and Rhonda has gone on to greener pastures (i.e. Carmax). Maybe I’ve just been spending too much time around car people, but I really do think there is something to driving a stick shift. I have been converted and absolutely love it and despite it being completely unplanned, this too feels like progress.

      Three: The Little, Beautiful Things

      I’m not going to go fact-check this statement, but if I had to hazard a guess, I would say that tucked into the first or last paragraph of every post I’ve written since November 2024 there is something along the lines of “ignoring the fact that the world is on fire”. That’s because it feels inherently bad to write a whole lot about what is going well when everything on a macro level is, legitimately, the worst – even by millennial, unprecedented times terms. But the truth is I don’t think that you can really keep on keeping on if you don’t have some good to focus on, and I feel that no less now than I did in November 2024. And so much of that good is the little, beautiful things. (Baseball caps & also, kindness. That sort of thing.)

      Back in my Tumblr era, there was a trend of listing Very Good Things. It might just be because I’m listening to the They Were All Making BANGERS playlist that captures the moustache-laden hipster whimsy optimism of the early 2010’s, but I think we could all benefit from bringing Very Good Things back. We all desperately need Very Good Things, and the most wonderful part of Very Good Things was that sometimes, it was something as simple as really good plate of spaghetti. Or a fan-fucking-tastic playlist. The stakes were low: if it brought you joy, even in the tiniest amount, it was a Very Good Thing.

      Whether it’s in the form of a pair of yellow speckled plates, of laughing at something incredibly stupid, or of realizing people are capable of changing feelings at any giving moment, this sentiment seems to be all around my life right now. And like the sunshine on my front porch, I am revelling in it. May everyone, world on fire or no, have more Very Good Things meet them left, right, and center, wherever they are.

    1. Baseball caps but also, kindness

      Half a post a month is not my finest average. Don’t take it personally, 2025. I’ve had worse statistics, and this is most certainly a case of it’s not you, it’s me. In fact, if it makes you feel any better, there’s a notebook sitting somewhere in my house that has, at most, been visited three times this year. (Future Kathy: stop trying to make stone paper notebooks happen. The advertisements are slick but the paper is not. You will always hate writing in them.) 

      Even though it is impossible from a mathematical perspective for there to be fewer days of December before Christmas from one year to the next, this year the impossible feels possible. We’re as many days into the month as we are away from Christmas, and most of me feels like it’s still September.  

      This is for several reasons: aside from the atmospheric river we had this week, it has been a very mild fall/winter, so more than a few of our neighborhood trees still boast a thick mix of orange and red leaves. I’m also spending more time outside in our neighborhood, so it feels like a bigger deal than it probably is. Then we got our Christmas tree pretty early (in November!), but it’s a potted tree that we belatedly realized was dead dry, and we ended up needing to undecorate it and leave it outside in the rain for a few days. It’s been back inside since Tuesday, I think? But I haven’t really felt the Christmas spirit inspire me to redress it, so it is still naked, just two feet of very off-putting pokey needles, sitting by its lonesome in the window.  

      I guess that’s not exactly several things, but it’s enough. That and the universe being all universe-y have conspired to make it feel like Christmas is anything but a week from this Thursday.  

      Ignoring the fact that technically, it is not the season of winter, I have to say that winter as it feels right now is the most ridiculous thing. This is my third winter in the PNW, and my (pauses to count) ninth (NINTH!) one on this latitude, if you count all of the time I spent in the UK. When we moved here, I didn’t think that the short days would be all that much of an issue because I’d done it before, for years at a time, and been just fine. 

      What I did not reckon with was the longitude. In this particular part of the world: 1. The sun is not a £50 flight away. 2. Even if it was, you don’t get enough paid time off to buy the flight, take the flight, and go enjoy it. In short, it makes handling the dark days and the lack of sun a helluva lot more challenging.  

      The goal this winter is to be nicer to myself about being annoyed by that. It’s okay to do less and achieve less when all your body wants to do is…nothing. The progress gained over the past eight months of running is not undone by the fact that I’m only squeezing in two-ish runs a week right now. Because really: two-ish runs? In this lighting?? That is something to be celebrated! (Plus, brief flex, those runs are now up to a cool four miles each. Still feeling very Who Is She but I love it.)  

      In other silly and shouldn’t matter news but feels, well, very big? Is that for the first time in almost twenty years, I am growing out my hair. This is primarily an exercise to see just how white my gray hair will get, and it is going the best it has ever gone. I have made it through the most painful phases, the ones that do not bear describing, but I’m now stuck in the endless un-pony-tail-able bob phase that requires no fewer than eight bobby pins to be on hand at any given time (unless a hat is present). Because my hair is curly, it feels like all it has done for the past two months is grow outward and upward – every direction but the one desired. I have discovered in myself a love of baseball caps that I never thought possible (we’re all about the impossible in this post, I guess) and it makes me feel absurdly glam, the source of which I’m choosing to trace back to Princess Diana.  

      So really, I have achieved lots of things this year. Two very specific things that have plagued me as impossible for many years, and a handful of other things. What I’m trying to tell myself in this glummy winter vibe is that resolutions in the plural are rather insane things. It is absolutely okay, and to be expected, to really only achieve a thing or two. I have many years ahead of me in which to achieve more things. Who’s to say I don’t continue this habit, and each year tackle 1-2 new resolutions? Multiply that out across a lifetime and that is SO MANY THINGS! We should all be nicer to ourselves. We should not take it personally when we don’t make everything happen on the timeline we envisioned, en masse and concurrently and as if just getting through to Friday is not, some weeks, a big-ass achievement. 

      Bringing this full circle, much of this is coming from my sensitivity to the fact that I have not, indeed, written very much at all this year. I truly thought I’d found a project earlier in the spring but it has since died a death, and no other writing projects have come to take its place. And if I am being honest, I really wanted that to be one of my Achievements this year. Whereas growing out my hair or starting to run are exciting new things that I can add to my identity roster, writing has been so long a front-row feature of that list that it’s becoming really hard to not take my lack of writing personally.  

      But there is so much time to fix that. It’ll come back around. It’s not you, writing, it’s me. I’ll figure it out. I’m being kinder to myself and celebrating the small wins, like right now: when I dropped by the library to return a few books, and instead of walking right back out, I sat down at a computer, tabled my purse and my plans to grocery shop, and for the first time since university spent time writing at a library, writing this post.  

    2. New Year, Old Feels 

      I am usually not a big January fan – I once wrote here that “grim is a rather nice word for January”. But this year I was here for it.

      Fall felt long and hard and exhausting, the way life can be sometimes. When January arrived, I was ready to shove all of the emotions and struggles of the past four months into a box right next to our Christmas decorations and move right along.  

      The Christmas decorations I knocked out in a single morning, a simple task aside from getting so increasingly annoyed at how long it was taking me to remove the lights from our Charlie Brown-sized Christmas tree that I just threw the thing out on our deck to deal with later. (I eventually aggressively stripped the lights by spinning the tree itself like a reverse Fruit Roll Up, pine needles flying and Kevin watching in horrified curiosity from inside.)

      The emotions and struggles? Not so easy. Life has no regard for seasons and will continue to put you through the wringer at its leisure, and the only course of action is to decide what to do with the time that is given us (I see you Gandalf). Sure, The White Wizard was talking more about the impending end of Middle Earth (and Tolkien was talking about the horrors of a world war), but the statement rings no less true in the context of each of our tiny little lives, wherever they may be.  

      Sometimes, life is just real hard. You can be surrounded by people you love, life can seem super simple and settled, there can be no tangible thing to hone in on as the Cause of All This Stress, and stressful it will be. You will still have to wake up each morning, find a thing that will motivate you to get out of your bed, and choose to give the whole racket a go. Add on that the state of the world has been doing THE MOST to destroy the ability to “give it a go” on a daily basis, and fuck, bro, that is just really tough to do. 

      So, despite knowing full well this is the way of the world, what did I decide to do at the beginning of January? I tried to pack away all those autumnal struggles with some New Years Intentions.  

      I called them intentions, because as a deeply grayscale person in a society that’s out here acting like everything is black and white, resolutions are far too resolute for my own comfort. But regardless of what I called them, given my mindset, writing down any long-term optmistic intentions seemed a bold-ass strategy for tackling my emotional exhaustion, new year or no.

      BOLDER STILL, the more I thought about them, and about what to write for my first post of the year, I decided to share them here.  

      Because the truth is this: the stupidest, tiniest little attempt at developing who you are as a person or the things that surround you? For me? That is just one of those things that never ceases to have the capacity to motivate me to get out of my bed. I don’t care if it is THE lamest cliche on the earth. An itemized list of things to aim for? SIGN ME UP.

      So, copied directly from a brand new notebook (because where else would I have written them), I give you my intentions for the hot mess that very well may be the year 2025: 

      1. Write more! So much more. Would love to start a new project. 
      1. Add something new to my life routine. Who knows what this will be. Some ideas: Sewing. Knitting. Skating?? Language learning. DIY-ing. Something…musical? 
          1. Reduce sugar intake. Basically, stop buying a weekly dessert item. 
          1. Paint something (or multiple somethings!!) in this house. 
          1. Find something that makes me appreciate my amazing silly body. Some kind of movement. It has done a fantastic job of getting me this far. I should probably return the favor. 
          1. Be a better communicator. Stop stewing. Share your thoughts. Even when they are scary or feel dumb. 
          1. Narrow career goal. Tough to do with a sort of unknown long-term (i.e. potentially moving to Europe), but at least figure out some over-arching goals. 
          1. Be okay with prioritizing small beauty and finding ways to bring it into every aspect of my life. 

          Will I actually do any of these things? It is entirely possible I will not. Did writing them down in a new notebook achieve anything? Not…not really. But stay with me here. 

          The horrific fires happening in LA have produced some harrowing imagery, and a particular story that came out of them has stuck with me. An artist had posted a video a few days before the fires started, a simple tour of the home she and her husband had created and the studio within it. The original intent of the video was just to record and celebrate the home they had created, and how much they loved it, and within days, it became a record of a place completely and unexpectedly destroyed by a fire. And they re-posted it in the aftermath with the added caption: “I wish I had known this would be the last week we would spend in our home.” 

          Sure, a home (especially a beautiful one) is a pretty universal thing to find joy in and be motivated by. Nobody looking at that video would be surprised that it brought that artist a huge amount of joy. But the tragic one-hundred-eighty-degree twist of that video just really drove home for me that we do not know what is going to be here tomorrow, what we will need to find next week to get us through the tough moments.

          It doesn’t matter what you need to focus on to get you through the day, what motivates you to get out of your bed. Do what works for you, take the video of your house, appreciate your silly little body, write more. In whatever way makes the most sense, decide what to do with the time that is given you.  

        • The Apocalyptic Thing About Change

          It’s been a good eight months since I last camped out at Foyles. Considering this was an almost weekly haunt of mine before the world imploded back in March, it’d be surreal sitting back down here even if it wasn’t in a room where everyone is distanced in their support bubbles, masked and sanitized and hopefully not infected. Needless to say, the then-and-now difference is hardly just linear.

          How different is my life since I last sat here? Very, but again, not just because of COVID. On a personal level, so much has changed in those eight months. I started a new job, my first outside of true retail (the word retail still hovers, linking me to the past decade of my work, but there are other words in my job title that will hopefully lead to the next decade). Not only that, but I’m a month into a part time masters’ course at Queen Mary University, something that still feels a little wild to me, if I’m honest. Less so now than it did in my second lecture at the end of September, when one really-not-that-silly question suddenly made me feel so deeply out of my depth that I spent the next seventy-two hours scrambling for an eject button. But still wild.

          I like to blame my whimsical Piscean flighty-ness when it comes to my love of the eject button (nothing says commitment issues like an inability to go on a second date nearly seven years after I left my last relationship), but the truth is I think it’s a pretty natural reaction. As much as you think it’s going to be a comfort to discover the thing you want to do with the rest of your life, it’s actually fucking terrifying. My genuine love of castles and Empress Matilda and medieval anything sustained me through the application process, the visions of my rural English future in the heritage industry suddenly validated when I was accepted into QMU’s Heritage Management program in July. But the reality of taking steps down a new professional path shook me more than I was prepared for, and I’ve had to do a fair amount of talking myself down (read: panic texting) since logging into that first virtual seminar.

          On an emotional level, the last eight months saw the last two-thirds of being in therapy. I had two major blows that kicked off that particular journey: first, the sudden death of my dad last July, and second, being forced to step down from my job at Regent Street. The death of a parent is traumatic by nature, and I wrote an essay about why my personal experience of it was such. But in a different way, my demotion shook me even further. For someone whose only adult concept of commitment was to work, suddenly being told you’re not nearly good enough at your job (whether true or not) makes you doubt what you’ve been doing with yourself for the last ten years. So the two experiences, which happened within two months of each other and were equally blindsiding, kind of, y’know, crushed me.

          Being a natural optimist, almost incapable of seeing “cons” and described on more than one occasion as sunshine personified (a favorite compliment I will remember until I shed my mortal coil), I did not handle being crushed particularly well. When my best friend suggested I look into therapy, I listened. Therapy looks different for everyone, and I worked through a goodly amount of my struggles from January to July of this year. I think more than anything the lasting benefits of knowing what it’s like to be heard and give yourself space make therapy for any amount of time worth pursuing.

          So, again still ignoring COVID, we have a career change, the discovery of a new life passion, a return to academia, and the finishing (a loose term) of therapy.

          Mixed in with the life-altering nature of the pandemic, there’s the resurgence of Black Lives Matter, and the personal stock-taking of privilege, being party to, and engaging and benefiting from systems of oppression and learning how to become an ally. Of expanding my awareness beyond the borders of these personal things that have happened to me in the past eight months and processing the experiences of others.

          I remember posting about Ahmaud Arbery back in March, making my first calls to a DA office to leave a voicemail, and being terrified of doing it “wrong”, and almost letting that fear stop me from talking about it. Fast forward to Breonna Taylor. To George Floyd. To it becoming belatedly apparent that staying silent in the past was to be complicit, that to be “apolitical” is (and always has been) synonymous with “my life isn’t effected enough to care, and I don’t care that yours is”. What kinds of changes has this wrought in my life? Adding antiracist reading to my regular book stack. Educating myself on systemic racism, and diversifying my feed, my shopping, and my cultural consumption. Learning that you never stop learning, and that it is a privilege that my education in this subject is academic and not physical.

          And then, we have COVID.

          When I finally got the call that my Italian citizenship had gone through back in 2014, I spent the next few years hemming and hawing about actually making the move back to England. Those were the days before Brexit seemed remotely possible, so instead of being plagued by potential red tape, the primary case I made for staying in the states could be narrowed down to one thing and one thing only: the movie Seeking a Friend for the End of the World.

          Really? you ask, understandably judgemental of the fact that a plot that involved Keira Knightley and Steve Carell as a plausible romantic couple could make me feel anything other than bafflement. Yes, really. For those unfamiliar, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World is a black comedy that chronicles the last days of earth, after a final attempt to stop a meteor flying towards our home planet fails (…emphasis on the black in black comedy). Keira Knightley and Steve Carell live in the same apartment building, but they don’t meet until he happens upon her, crying on the fire escape, because she has just found out she missed her last chance to fly back to the UK to see her family before the world ends.

          Call me crazy, but that movie and that circumstance really fucked me up. I empathized with Keira Knightley’s character, because choosing to live across an ocean from most of the people you love does relinquish a certain degree of control you have over your life. Sure, it’s unlikely that if I lived in Philadelphia and needed to get home to my family under emergency circumstances, that I’d be able to do so on foot. But if it came down to it, physics wouldn’t stop me. You don’t need a plane (or a pilot, for that matter) to make that journey. If I moved to England, though? That was no longer true, and, ridiculous or no, that fact kept me stateside for years.

          Obviously, my feelings eventually changed. Not my feelings towards that fear – it’s still deeply rooted within me. But my practical side caught up with me, and egged on by the nagging dissatisfaction I had with my life back in California, I made the move to the UK in 2018. I figured the chances of an apocalypse that would somehow stop me from visiting home and seeing my family was too absurdly unlikely to sacrifice my dream.

          Writing this in October of 2020, I think I owe my past self an apology. COVID may not be the apocalypse, but as impossible as the possibility seemed then, we do now live in a world where any minute my ability to go home can suddenly be, well, disabled. More likely than not, it’d only be a temporary problem, but still. Talk about things you never saw coming. (Or did. But wrote off because it seemed like the thing to do at the time.)

          So, now, not ignoring COVID, it’s been a long eight months. A whole lot has happened and I am grateful that if nothing else, Foyles is still standing, and I’ve been able to return after all this time, in this unfamiliar world, to something familiar.

          Change has many guises and I don’t know that I have anything more philosophical to contribute to the discourse than that. But it would be remiss of me to sit in this café and not share the experience so as to commune even the slightest bit with that old life of mine. I’m pretty busy these days, whether with work or study or just existing, but I’m going to do my damnedest to try and be here a little more. Despite everything that has happened and continues to happen, writing brings me joy, and we can all use a little more joy, right?

          And while all that means in the context of this blog is that I’ll post a little more, I’m not sorry. As Carl would say, I will not apologize for art.

        • Emotional Listerine

          Last night, one single Watermelon Margarita and Pornstar Martini in, a friend and I decided that when it comes to relationships, the term “palette cleanser” doesn’t come close to the level of reset needed come the end of a truly bad partnership. Two months, two years – when you’ve been dealing with someone for whom it turns out the word shitstain is a nicety, you need something a little more intense than a fruit tray and a sprig of mint to get you to the next round. And a cleanse isn’t gonna do it either.

          Fuck that lemon juice and cayenne pepper – what you you really need, we decided, is emotional Listerine. And because the idea of leaving the emotional recovery process to a rebound is somewhere precariously close to high-risk and deeply nauseating, I’ve been thinking about what perfect combination of controllables would constitute the best emotional Listerine.

          Here are my findings:

          One: A Word Document / Notebook

          This is for the whinging. The rage you’d generally spew at your best friends, the cry-happy moments that come back to you and haunt you and make you wax lyrical when poetry has never been and will never be your strong suit.

          It’s just for you. Nobody ever needs to see this guy. You may write in it and never read it again, you might reread it start to finish every time you go to add ten new lines (it me). But I’m a firm believer that the process of mentally getting someone out of your system can manifest in a real, physical way. Pen to paper – fingers to keys – get on it. We can’t all be Stevie Nicks and get a Silver Springs out of our breakups, but a .doc file full of emotional nonsense? That dream we can achieve.

          Two: A Real Good Walk

          This might take you a while, because not everyone has the best walks at their disposal, and sometimes leaving the room feels impossible two (or ten) days into this process. But my god, THE THINGS A WALK CAN DO FOR YOU. Through your neighborhood, through the neighborhood six blocks over, through a park, through the fucking mall. I’m serious. Get your body moving. Remind your body of the little miracles it – and YOU – are capable of. This will go absolute miles in getting you to the next brain-phase. Walks take you places, man.

          You can use the Real Good Walk to call your friends, call your mom, and talk through how you’re managing. Everybody walks their own way. But since you’re reading my advice list, I’m going to go ahead and recommend you leave yourself alone with your thoughts. See what’s around you. And if you must needs have something to occupy your ears and mind, bring along Number Three.

          Three: THAT Playlist

          Oh, you know the playlist I’m talking about. Or maybe you don’t, in which case, let me educate you.

          This is not the playlist that’s going to make you cry. This is the one that’s going to make you run the FULL EMOTIONAL SPECTRUM. Do yourself (and me) a favor and put some really silly shit on this playlist. Put some really happy, ridiculous, you-MUST-tap-your-toes songs. The tunes that when you close your eyes transport you to that summer you spent on the lake or laying out in the grass in your best friend’s backyard. Then put some sad shit on this playlist. The crescendos that make your spine tingle. The lyrics that pull your heart strings like hot rubber bands stretching from deep deep love to full-moon-I-kind-of-want-to-cry-myself-to-sleep.

          This playlist will do for your soul what that walk you just went on did for your body. Because when you feel absolutely exhausted by what life (and specific humans) have put you through emotionally, music reminds you of exactly what extreme and beautiful notes you’re capable of feeling, and that however intense those low notes are, in the end they are as ephemeral as a two-minute, forty-six second Top 40 Pop Song. You listen to THAT playlist long enough, pretty soon you’ll be perfectly poised for Number Four.

          Four: THE Project

          The first thing to accept about the Project is that you might NEVER start, do, or finish it. The aim of The Project isn’t to actually to do any of the things. It’s to remind you of the good, old, pure fact, that if you wanted to, though, YOU COULD.

          My mental picture of The Project will forever be Gwyneth Paltrow starting her own boutique PR firm in Sliding Doors after she breaks up with her Fuckface Boyfriend Jerry, so I always associate it with painting big, blank white walls Tiffany blue and buying a new personal planner. And really, that’s the perfect mental image, because it comes with a very visceral metaphor (you PAINT THOSE WALLS with a fresh coat of emotional paint) and new stationery. That’s how the best projects always start, right?

          The Project doesn’t have to be as major or physical as starting your own PR firm. What’s most important to remember when picking and planning it, is for it to be yours. Do not let a single person in your life – not even your absolute best friend gives you advice on EVERYTHING friend – tell you what this project should be. It is 100% just for you and your emotinal well-being. The project should be the answer to the question “What would I do if nothing else claimed my attention? My time? My energy? My money?” It could be as simple as working out (SIMPLE, she says, not remembering the last time she worked out), reading a book a month, or planning that twenty-country trip you’ve wanted to go on since the first time you saw a globe.

          Don’t limit yourself. You might find that you’re capabe of more than you ever even realized.

          …

          And that’s it, guys. I reduced all of my findings to those four things, and I stand behind it. The good news is that it will burn a helluva lot less than actual Listerine, and the better news is that nobody’s here to judge your results like some #beforeandafter hashtag. It’s just you, and I am a VERY firm believer in YOU.