Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast - Or The Impossible List.

I recently came across the idea of the Impossible List. I like the idea and I want to expand on it a bit here, what I believe it to be about. I linked to College Info Geek's post about it because I like his video, but he has a link to the official page too.

I think it's about writing down ALL of your goals, from those which are easy to those which seem impossible. It's about seeing how your perspective shifts. It's adaptable, which I love. I like the way goals can be broken down into smaller, manageable steps and when they're achieved, they can be expanded to add newer, bigger ones. It's almost a gamification of life, which is quite nice.

Anyway, here's mine.

My Impossible List

Professional Goals

• Go to and graduate from university 
• Run a How To Talk workshop online
• Pick small, private audience (July 2017)
• Look through the book to establish topics
• Start discussion thread (abandoned 2017)
• Finish chapter 1
• Evaluate helpfulness
• Run a How To Talk workshop in person
• Have 20 posts on my parenting blog
• Teach a parenting course
• Publish a book
• Attend an ELT workshop or conference
• Do a TYLEC
• Do a DELTA
• Get one week ahead in lesson planning
• Have all my folders organised with sections
• Have a collection of tried and tested lessons which work well
• Get my transcription ratio down to 1:3

Skills Goals

• Get my driving licence
• Take driving lessons (Summer 2016)
• Try a new driving school
• Become fluent in German
• I can communicate and hold basic, stilted conversation (2017)
• Complete Duolingo tree
• Complete online German course
• Take a German course in person
• Become fluent in a third language
• Maybe Afrikaans or Dutch
• Learn to read another script
• Learn to swim underwater

Financial Goals

• Make at least €1000 a month
• €520ish (Jan 2017)
• Finish paying off driving lessons
• Get a month ahead in budgeting
• Save €5000

Family Goals

• Raise a family pet
• Train a dog using positive methods
• Have my husband adopt my son
• Contact a solicitor
• Complete a Love Languages for Kids challenge
• Have two children close together
• Read all the Harry Potter books with my son
• Philosopher's Stone
• Chamber of Secrets
• Teach son to swim
• Hold a family Achievement Goal Weekend

Creative Goals

• Display my own photography
• Play guitar at a party with friends
• Be able to play 5 songs from memory
• Learn to fingerpick
• Learn how to play Spanish guitar
• Make more than 10 blog posts in 2017
• I made 8!
• Make more than 15 blog posts in 2018

Lifestyle Goals

• Complete The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up
• Develop my wardrobe/sense of style
• Have a harmoniously decorated home
• Live somewhere with outdoor space
• Coming February 2018!
• Live in a house
• Own a house
• Overcome fear of injections
• Get my ears pierced
• Donate blood
• Travel to a country which requires extra vaccinations
• Get to a point where I feel my ADHD is manageable
• Help reduce male violence/domestic violence
• Help reduce financial inequality
• Visit America
• See the Harry Potter Studio Tour
• Meet J. K. Rowling

How to get up in the morning and not hate life

I am not a morning person. I don't think I will ever be. But I've recently changed my story about what getting up is or should mean and I think it's made it easier.

I used to think that most people (or morning people, if you like) just got up easily and sprung out of bed feeling refreshed and not wanting to sleep any more, and I spent a long time trying and waiting for that to happen to me. It never did, so I concluded that perhaps I was just shit at getting up or I wasn't a morning person or whatever that meant, and that was okay, but it did mean that for a long time my story about getting up was "Nobody has as hard a time as me and/or enjoys falling back to sleep as much as me, therefore I have it harder than everyone else and I should get a free pass."

It wasn't really a conscious thing, I don't think I was genuinely assuming that I was unique and special in hating mornings or loving to snooze, but by believing that it was particularly hard for me allowed me to keep making excuses and keep letting it be hard while also being annoyed at myself for finding such a simple and common task hard. I don't remember where I first came across the idea that getting up just actually is an awful sensation for most people, it could have been reddit, or it could have been College Info Geek, but anyway, I read somewhere that snoozing is counterproductive specifically because waking up from sleep is the hard part. Now, I'd read lots of times, as I'm sure you have, that snoozing is bad, but it never really seemed to make sense before until I read this. When you wake up from sleep you've done the hard part. Why would you then repeat that by snoozing and forcing yourself to go through that again? I do know why - it's because falling back to sleep is just so absolutely delicious and doesn't feel the same when you're meant to be doing it e.g. at night. So I now have the following morning routine:

Alarm goes off exactly 18 minutes before I need to be up. It starts very quietly, almost imperceptibly, and slowly gets louder. There's nothing alarming about it, no vibration, no sudden sound.

I'm allowed ONE free pass, one glorious moment where I can hit the default snooze (10 minutes) and slide back into that creamy, soft, warm sleep. I stand by that. It works for me. Snoozing isn't the enemy as long as you're in control.

Next alarm, snooze, more conscious, 5 minutes. This is where the hard part starts but I'm allowed a little fail on this one - I try to keep my eyes open and look at my phone. Sometimes something interesting enough will be happening in the world to engage me, but mostly sleep wins.

Lastly my final alarm goes off and - this is crucial - I cannot turn this one off without getting out of bed and carrying my phone to the bathroom (it's barcode deactivated - lots of free apps do this), and from there I do all that morning stuff - toilet and teeth and face and hands. I hate this. I cannot describe to you how horrible and arduous it seems. But by the time I've finished brushing my teeth something miraculous has happened, it turns out that I've done the hardest part and I don't have to do it again until the next day - as long as I don't let myself go back to bed. But it's done - almost without thinking, without really being awake enough to be aware. And so I can also pat myself on the back for getting through the hard part because I genuinely know that it is hard and that's not some kind of moral failing of mine. I'm managing self-reward now - are you reading this, me from 5, 10 years ago?  There was a time when I really felt that I was incapable of that, but now I realise that I just wasn't admitting to myself that it's okay to find things hard and that hard things really are worth rewarding.

I find these days that snoozing too many times on days I don't need to get up early is less fulfilling or enjoyable than it used to be, perhaps because that one controlled snooze just...works. I'm still not a morning person but it is manageable, and all it took was that changing of the story - from "It's too hard, I can't do it, I'm not the right kind of person" to "Yes, it's hard and it's okay that it's hard because I'm going to get over it like this."

I wonder how many other things in my life I need to change the story on.

What I learned this week.

I have decided I am going to do a weekly post summarising things I have learned each week, on a Sunday. Because why not. And because Renegade Mothering used to do it. And I think it will give me a reason to write once a week and perhaps fuel more writing in general,which would be nice.

Since it's not Sunday, I'm not doing one right now. I'll just blurt some other stuff out, instead. That might be useful.

I re-learned another Secret of Adulthood, which I keep learning and keep forgetting. It is that when I feel like napping, it really means that I need to work out. This is HUGELY not intuitive, because it's the last thing I feel like doing at that point. Which is probably why I keep forgetting it. But if I write it down, perhaps I will remember.

Every time I think about myself exercising, I feel totally and utterly confused. When did I become a person who exercises? How does that happen? And yet it works. It somehow gives me energy, stops me feeling cold in the 20+ degree house and makes me feel motivated about stuff. I call it my happy pill. Nobody who knew me in high school would believe that. I don't really believe that.

Fourth secret of adulthood: The dentist doesn't actually hurt, and isn't anywhere near as scary as you make it out to be.

I have some thoughts... about parenting, about organisation, about everything. There are some things going down around me which are so overwhelming that I can hardly think about them and yet my own life - totally normal and routine and uneventful - continues to overwhelm me. I need to be in order in case a disaster happens, not just keep hoping for the best.

I want to buy a guitar. I miss singing.

Real life isn't about grades, it's about passing or failing.

I had a bit of a realisation today. It was sort of inspired by a discussion in an online parenting group about always wanting "that A+" in parenting, and coming to terms with the fact that it's not really possible or desirable.

Something that really resonates with me - and I suspect, a lot of people who did well at school but then struggle with adult life, is this feeling that the top grade should be within reach all the time, and a sort of constant bewilderment that it is not. I am not the only person who I have spoken to who has experienced this, but it's like when you are top of the class of your very small school, and then you go to university and here are lots of people who are top of various classes, and somehow now you are just average. It's a strange feeling, humbling. Hopefully, of course, most people go on with this experience, find their place in the world and understand that it's just the way that things are.

When it doesn't really work is when you are going about your everyday life and still trying to get a top grade on things where grading really, honestly, is never going to matter. For the absolute vast majority of things you encounter in adult life, in fact I would argue ALL of them, aside from education, and not even all of that relies on grades, for all of those the imagined "grade" that you get in that area is absolutely meaningless. What matters is pass or fail. That's it. Everyday tasks, individual interactions, pass or fail. Nobody cares if you put your absolute all into something and made it perfect, or barely scraped by. Nobody is going to notice if you have made a personal improvement in something, unless it passes from fail into pass territory. If a pass is a C and anything lower is a fail, it doesn't matter if you get a C- or an E or an F. Same thing. C+ and A+, same result. Pass. Fail. Of course somebody might notice once in a while if you really go all out and pull off an A+ type of manoeuvre, but most of the time they won't, and most of the time it won't make any difference anyway.

So perhaps it helps to give some real life examples. Take arriving somewhere on time. You are either on time or you're not; it's still going to piss people off to be left waiting for ten minutes as for thirty. It's a pass/fail. Parenting, discipline issues for example. Look at the outcome - did you manage to communicate the message that this is not an appropriate or acceptable way to act? It doesn't much matter whether you used the super duper fantastic perfect parent way, or the lazy way, as long as the end result is the same: Was this information about behaviour communicated to your child? If yes, pass. If no, fail. Of course, if you get really mad you could pass this one while failing another (Am I keeping my children safe from harm, as far as is practical? or Am I modelling healthy ways of dealing with strong emotions? for example.)

But anyway, I found this realisation both freeing and depressing, in some ways. Hard because it means that except to people very close to you and perhaps yourself, those small steps don't really mean anything at all. They might bring you closer to passing at something, but they are not of worth in themselves to the vast majority of people that you are going to interact with. That's sort of okay, though, it just means don't look for validation for them. Past school age, it ain't gonna happen. Secondly, stop spending time and effort making everything perfect unless it actually brings you significant joy to do so. Passing is what counts. Make it pass, move on to the next thing. Save that energy for the things you don't pass at so easily.

Lastly it's that failure isn't the end of the world. When it's black and white like that, you're not on a treadmill which seems to be getting faster every time you feel like you're getting into the swing. There is no such thing as tiny improvements, there only is, or there is not. When you fail at something (and you will, so get used to that, and don't angst over it. Did I make the point already that real life bears absolutely no resemblance to school?) you should think "Huh, that didn't work so well." work out what stood in the way of it working, whether it was external factors (can you build in anything to mitigate them?) or your own weaknesses (so you build those up, no big deal) or a simple oversight. You won't ever get to a point where you never ever fail at anything, but you can be a lot more successful in general, and a lot less self-punishing if you can look at failures as learning/improvement experiences rather than some kind of proof of your own incompetence.

So that brings my Secrets of Adulthood to 2. I'm going to add a section on my about page.

1. Groceries (and other supplies) can also get used up by other people that you live with.
2. Real life isn't about grades. Most things are a pass/fail kind of deal.