If. If you’re like me and you get a project
like 80% done and then just leave a little bit to the end,
you may feel bad about that.
But I’m about to give you a reason to
maybe not feel so bad about leaving these projects unfinished and, like,
pushed to the side. Okay,
I’m gonna reframe it for us.
Yesterday was my day to finish two projects
that were just really close to being done.
This one had been sitting in languishing for literal months,
and I just needed about 30 minutes
to an hour’s worth of stitching before it was ready to be done.
Super cute. Amazing.
It’s done now. And then this one,
I started it last weekend,
and I just needed a power through
and go ahead and finish it and knock it out.
I have a couple other things on my shelf right now
that have not even been on the work in progress Wednesday radar
because I just haven’t been actively working on them.
They’re this close to being done.
Maybe an hour, two hours worth of stitching left,
but, um,
not. Not close.
Ellen, a few months ago,
challenged us to revisit these projects
that just needed a little bit of time in order to finish them.
And at the time, I was like, oh,
I can’t do it. But when I finished both of these projects yesterday,
I observed that the rush that I felt
as I was stitching the last Stitch was just amazing.
I was. I stitched the last little bit,
and I was like, oh,
my god,
I’m done. And it just felt so,
so good. If you have a brain like mine,
you wanna just keep starting new things,
because the, like,
fun of starting the new things is, like,
very shiny and enticing at the time.
And so, like,
you get about three quarters of the way done,
and you’re like, okay,
I’m kind of over this. I wanna do something else.
You know what? That maybe just delaying some gratification, um,
and allowing you to come back to this for a future dopamine hit
that you maybe didn’t realize that you had.
Because what I. What I experience from finishing these two things
was just this intense euphoria,
and I’m like, oh,
my god. Like,
what if you just do need an easy win, right?
Like, what if there’s a day where you feel really down
and you don’t really know what to do,
but you just feel like something’s off?
I feel yucky. I just need to do something for, like,
an hour or two hours. If you have one of these languishing,
unfinished projects that you know you can knock out in an hour or two,
that can be your easy win for the day
that you don’t even really have to think about.
You don’t even really have to plan in a hat.
Plan ahead for, like,
everything’s already kidded. It’s already Ready to go.
I just need to sit down and knock it out really fast.
And then you feel that intense sense of accomplishment once it’s done.
I will admit last week was a really hard week for me, and, um,
I’m still experiencing a little bit of that, like,
angst as I’m coming into this week.
And so this
yesterday I had this feeling of paralysis late in the afternoon,
and I was like, I don’t know what to do.
I feel really overwhelmed.
Everything feels like it’s crashing down on me,
like the weight of the world is on my shoulders.
I just need, like,
to accomplish something
so that I feel like I did something with my day.
And this was the answer. And then I.
I ended the day on a high instead of a very negative low.
If you’re like me
and you’re using needlepoint to kind of hack your mental health
and to help you emotionally regulate,
then why wouldn’t you use the rhythms and the flows of your own brain
and your own creativity to help you
where needed
and to hack what you need to hack when you need to hack it
in terms of your dopamine hits?
Let me know if this is helpful.