That Big Kid Ellen #35: Paint my nails
Honesty time: I felt some serious overwhelm when trying to pick the next thing to do from the list. I kept thinking that because my first choice had been something creative that the next one had to be something movement-related. But I didn’t really want to do any of the movement ones. And are people even reading these posts? Does anyone actually care what I choose? *heavy breathing* … Welcome, anxiety.
I did what I usually do when anxiety takes over — I took a small step in the right direction. I went with an easy one because sometimes you just need to find your momentum and then everything else will fall into place.
And this may seem like a weird list item, but I assure you that there are a couple important reasons why nail polish ended up on my list:
I never have my nails painted as an adult.
I always had my nails painted as a kid.
Little kid Ellen freaking loved nail polish.
When I was young, I had a plastic medicine chest from The Container Store that held about 100 different bottles of nail polish at time. I also had multiple overflow shoe boxes for when I didn’t want to cull my collection. I would save up all of my allowance (primarily earned by cleaning up Cheerios that my baby brother threw on the floor) and buy the brightest, sparkliest, gaudiest colors I could find. Go big or go home.
I mixed and matched colors because one color just wouldn’t do. I would match my nail polish color to whatever colors I chose for the rubber bands on my braces, to the colors of my favorite sports teams, or to the outfit that I would be wearing to some special event. I was really into sticker sets that added little flowers or stars to each nail. I also experimented with using nail polish as a mood ring indicator — I went through a mini emo phase in 4th grade where I exclusively used black polish. Nail polish was such an easy, fun, and risk-free way for me to express myself.
Prepping for our first all-gender party, the 1998 Super Bowl (the boys we liked all rooted for the Broncos so we became traitors to our homeland and rooted against the Packers for a night)
And yes, there were mishaps and learning moments galore, as is the case with most creative endeavors. I once almost made myself pass out from the fumes of acetone nail polish remover when I was perfecting an intricate nail design in a tiny, non-aerated bathroom. Or the time that I really wanted to see how many coats of nail polish I could layer onto one of my thumbnails (I got bored around number 12, if memory serves). I also found out the hard way that polish remover doesn’t remove nail polish from carpet or clothes and ruined one of my favorite Limited Too velvet shirts while also leaving a big blue stain in the middle of my childhood room.
Now, as an adult, I keep my nails short because 1) I type all day long and I hate the feeling of long nails on a keyboard, 2) I am hella clumsy and somehow tend to scratch myself like an awkward cat when my nails are more than a couple millimeters long, and 3) because I’m boring *sob*. I guess somewhere down the line, nail polish became superfluous, and I decided that it was another creative thing that didn’t have a place in my life.
No more, I say!
To check this one off of the list, I knew that I wanted to go bold and I knew that I wanted something more than just a plain color. So last night, I took a trip to Target to see what kind of inspiration I could find.
I got overwhelmed again.
Help me.
After allowing myself about 2 minutes of crushing anxiety, I gave myself a metaphorical slap on the face and decided it was time to choose. I wanted this exercise to feel intuitive, not over-edited. I immediately gravitated towards the neon colors and grabbed the first three that caught my eye. I knew I wanted something sparkly and surprised myself when I chose a relatively understated silver shimmer polish. I didn’t see any stickers right away, but after combing the shelves I found one little pack that was perfect. Figured I needed a base/top coat and some nail polish remover and I was all set! Not too bad at all! No panic attack necessary.
My nail polish haul. Little kid Ellen would be proud.
When I got home, I brought my haul upstairs to our loft and set up a space to paint my nails. I also got the hairdryer set up with an extension cord so that I could dry my nails from the couch (work smarter, not harder). I put on the base coat, let it dry, and what do you know… overwhelm crept in again.
I was so nervous about committing to a color scheme and a design. I went and grabbed my iPad so that I could sketch something up before I dove into something as permanent as nail color (*eye roll*). As I started to draw my ideas, I decided that I had made the wrong decision in buying the orange color, even though that was the one that I was originally so excited about. I Googled “nail polish designs DIY” to see what other people had did. Overwhelming, over-thinking, I’m over-ing everything about it.
Little kid Ellen might have found this pretty strange, but it gave adult Ellen some comfort.
This time I literally slapped myself in the face and reminded myself that it’s just nail polish! Get on with it, woman!
So I picked up the pink and started painting. I immediately realized that this polish was trying to be like a fancy gel polish — something I was not used to. It was super sticky, not going on smooth at all. Bubbles started forming on my nails. I got the polish all over my skin. Some spots were thick and others had bare nail poking through. I was struggling. But I kept going because, well, it’s just nail polish and it was pretty. I painted my left hand all pink and my right hand all blue, took a step back, and decided that it was looking pretty good. Vibrant, in fact.
Because my overthinking tendencies extended this whole process of putting on just one layer of paint to a couple hours, I called it a night at that point. I stared at the pink and blue colors for a while and realized that I was grinning ear to ear. When I was moving around, getting ready for bed, I would find myself catching glimpses of the colors, smile growing and spreading.
When I woke up this morning, the smile was still there. I started the day off differently because I now has this extra splash of color motivating me to add more vibrancy to my day, to my life. I let the dogs outside, had a slice of banana bread, and sat down at my kitchen table to finish what I had started.
This time there was no hesitation. I found some blue painter’s tape in the garage and starting wrapping the nails on my right hand in an attempt to create some straight line designs. I painted some of the pink on top of the blue, and oh buddy, it looked great. I was getting the hang of this gel polish and my creative juices were sloshing around in my head, at a NutriBullet energy level. I grabbed the hair dryer to set the color and got all giddy waiting for the reveal.
Oh, you naive sweet lil child.
I pulled the tape off and half of the polish that I had just added came off with it. Just when I had thought that I was able to manifest my ideas into reality, this damn gel polish betrayed me. I ran to get some toothpicks to see if I could salvage any semblance of straight lines, but it was just so sticky and clumpy and unforgiving. I laughed. How could I not? I was done trying to make these nails look perfect. They were still making me smile, still getting me to try something new and colorful — they were doing their job.
I finished up my left had with significantly simpler yet still colorful designs. I slapped a couple nail stickers on for some texture, which made the whole thing look a little scattered, but we were past the point of no return. I added a final top coat once everything had dried and then stood back and looked at what I had done.
Look at those cute lil thick fingies!
Does it look like a 5-year-old did it? Yes. Do I regret every single decision I made to get us to this point? Yes. Will I be telling people that an imaginary niece did this for me? Yes.
But you know what? I’m also so darn proud of them. This whole process has been the poster child of creative work and getting over creative blocks. Sometimes, at the beginning, you just have to do shit work. But it’s work, you did it, you now have proof that you can do it, and that will hopefully catapult you forward into do more work that’s hopefully a little less shitty and little bit more you.
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That Big Kid Ellen #19: Write a poem
My incredibly dedicated mother is a scrapbooker. And boy do I mean she. is. a. scrapbooker. Goes to scrapbooking retreats, buys specially designed books and stickers, has a suitcase of scissors and cutters and pure nostalgic magic. She saved just about every scrap of paper from my childhood, printed off copious amounts of photos, and when I graduated college she gifted me three big, beautiful scrapbooks of my life from age 0–18. She is who you should thank for so many of the visuals I will be including in a lot of my posts this year (thanks, mom!).
After writing my intro post for this blog, I combed through the artifacts of my life in a sort of sad treasure hunt to find out exactly when my creativity died.
Thanks to my mom’s hoarder-adjacent tendencies, I found the exact moment where it all started to go downhill.
The beginning of the end for my creative endeavors
In 5th grade, I was deemed “accelerated” in math. Sadly, the only creative thing about accelerated math was the fact that I got to decorate my slightly-hallucinogenic Lisa Frank spiral notebook that was *needed* for this course (their emphasis, not mine) with scratch-and-sniff stickers and my crushes’ names written in cursive with gel pens.
There was (and still is) tremendous pressure on schools to get young girls into STEM fields — science, technology, engineering, and math — to close the gender gap in these career paths later on in life. And I was an exceptional young girl who easily made sense of numbers since I was very young. Of course it was exciting for my family and school to place me into this trajectory and watch me succeed. It clearly made my mother proud enough to keep this scrap of paper. (There’s also a whole tangent here on the history of math and statistics in my family, including my grandfather taking a job as a human computer for the Navy in college, but I won’t drag you through right now. Just know that it runs deep, and I deeply wanted to make my family proud.)
However, 5th grade also seemed to be the peak of my creativity as a young child. I was a part of the 5th Grade Creative Writing Club, and poetry was my jam.
Fall 1998 Creative Writing Club roster (notice the over-representation of females)
Going through the scrapbooks, I found some absolute *gems* of my poetic creations. I tried out different rhyming schemes, haikus, cinquains, and varying verb tenses like a wild woman! I was totally unafraid of creating, and I was somehow equal parts startlingly philosophical and downright goofy.
5th-grade Ellen was a silly gal who didn’t like veggies
Throughout the years, my prose and vocabulary matured. My poetry morphed into something a bit more heavy and foreshadow-y. I started to hide (behind a very, very thin veil) my insecurities and inner demons with extended metaphors. I screamed to be loved and seen and understood. And… I figured out how to use Clip Art.
8th-grade Ellen dropping some deep truths
However, creativity slowly took a seat on the bench. It hung on for a bit as an escape from the rigor of academia, but it wasn’t praised or nurtured and it started to fade. I was told that my brain would bring me success, and I started to get lost in what other people wanted from me to the point that I forgot what *I* needed.
As is the tendency of over-achieving kids who crave love, I started looking for my next quick fix of approval with certificates and awards and top grades. My last creative moment was in an art class in 9th grade where I drew an incredible self-portrait of myself with a mini basketball, but after that, my life was run by sports and AP classes and the pursuit of success.
Achievement became more important than expression.
No bueno.
I recently started thinking more and more about writing and how much I want to do it all the time. I uncovered a lot of mental blocks keeping me from producing, the biggest being that I didn’t have any current proof that I’m actually any good. The last poem I wrote for an audience other than myself was in 8th grade, and although many people have told me that they enjoy my writing, I didn’t have the self-confidence to fully believe them.
Then I heard an extremely profound yet simple thing. In March 2021, I virtually attended a panel with Glennon Doyle at the California Conference for Women called “Untaming your Career.” She stated that people who aren’t writers don’t think about writing. The people who have dreams of writing books are already writers! I don’t dream of being a cyclist like my husband does (guess what he is), just like he doesn’t dream of writing (guess what I do). So just by dreaming it and thinking about it and wondering if I could do it, that makes me a writer.
And hey, look! I’m writing! Dream, meet reality.
So let’s get back to it. To check off the first thing from the list I’ve created, I wrote some poetry.
This specific idea came to me like most ideas do — in the shower. I actually couldn’t believe that this is where my brain went, but I ran with it because it made me laugh and filled me with such pure, playful energy.
Here’s the backstory for this crazy idea. My husband is an incredibly talented person, but writing has never been a forte. For our wedding vows, I was prepared to blow him out of the water with my heart-felt, well-edited words, and I had accepted that his might not be all that deep or grammatically correct. I thought our families would fawn over my carefully selected words of love and commitment, and that we would eventually frame our vows as a keepsake. These were the expectations I created for myself, expectations based on achievement and not expression (red flag).
My matron of honor read over both of our vows the night before our wedding and made the very cryptic and absolutely terrifying comment that I should probably read mine first. She wouldn’t tell me exactly why, but that she thought it would be for the best. In a sweaty panic, I rewrote my vows, OVER-editing them, taking all of the heart and soul from them, and was left scrambling to make sense of my deeper intentions just hours before reading them aloud.
The plan of me going first with the vows didn’t reach our officiant, and during our small wedding ceremony, he asked Derek to go first. A storm of swear words rained down in my head, but I kept my cool, still not sure what to expect.
What came out of my husband’s mouth were the most intensely beautiful and thoughtful vows that I have ever heard. He had ever single person sobbing with his authenticity and endless love for and understanding of me. I have had him recite his vows to me multiple times so that I can burn them into my memory and remember just how much this man loves me.
Well, shit.
Y’all, mine sucked. They really, epically sucked. And it’s something that I’ve never gotten over. It’s embarrassing on so many levels, but the most impactful one being that I feel like I wasn’t able to fully explain to Derek how much I love every single thing about him and will always love everything about him.
So, below, you will find a trio of poems that I wrote for Derek. They are a part of a larger poetry anthology that I call “A Body of Work,” and it is with every intention that I show my husband that I love literally everything about him, even the things that he might not like about himself. They are minimally-edited, pure expressions of very intimate moments of our life, and I don’t care if you understand them or appreciate them — I’m writing for me now.
1.
It always starts with a smile
A smirk, really
Your golden tiger eyes glimmer
With that smirk
It becomes
A bit of a preemptive apology
That cheshire smile of yours
Because you know
You truly know
How much I hate what comes next
Even though
I laugh every single time
I can tolerate a lot of things
But this one does worry me
Delights me
But really, really worries me
That smell
Is identical to what you ate hours ago
Hours ago
Not just the essence of it
But as if it were right in front of me
A literal blast from the past
To say that it erupts from you is cliche
It is a part of you
It is you
It is wild and untamed
And you are completely unabashed
As you express it proudly to the world
Before smugly blowing away the evidence
Away from my face
With one dramatic exhale
Through pursed lips
That come back to form that same smirk
The burp smirk
2.
While giving me a massage
Practicing what you have learned
Or rather
Showing what you already intuitively knew
Somehow
While watching the latest superhero movie
Action scene after action scene
Anticipation building
Mind racing to predict
The next scene
While playing video games
Doesn’t seem to matter which one
Feeling like you’re a part
Of something bigger
Creating your own reality
There they are
Quite a pair
Oh how they blossom
They are passion
Possibility
Exertion
Slightly annoying
But there they are
Pit stains
3.
I know it’s not fair
The ultimate inconvenience
Devilish in fact
A trade that was made in a previous life
A sacrifice for all of your many talents
But not giving willingly
A prisoner in your own body
Always weighing the options
Between comfort and pain
Between richness and blandness
Between fleeting joy and lasting destruction
The ultimate balancing act
Sometimes you choose
To be the bigger person
And not let it win
Not let it dictate your life
And suffer minimally
Other times you give in
To temptation
To sweet, sweet temptation
And suffer deeply
To deny yourself for too long
Would be wrong
Just a little couldn’t hurt
But it always hurts
It hurts my Italian soul
It hurts you in every way
It always ends in a sprint
To deal with the consequences of your actions
Maybe not right away
But eventually
You race away
Trying to hide your original sin
Until you can’t conceal it any longer
Until you release
Into the world
Garlic diarrhea
(I love you, Derek!)
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That Big Kid Ellen: The List
Some inspiration from little kid Ellen
(Check out my intro post for context!)
Here’s the list of 100 things that Big Kid Ellen plans to do in 2022 (in no particular order):
Climb a tree
Complete a coloring book
Rock some colorful overalls
Jump rope, double dutch
Make a robot
Play foursquare
Play tetherball
Create a magazine collage memory box
Make a science fair entry (complete with trifold poster)
Decorate my bike and have a bike parade
Pick out a bag of geology rocks
Write a fan fiction story
Barrel roll down a hill
Decorate cupcakes
Eat frozen hot dogs and peas
Make homemade root beer
Plant a flower garden
Go sledding
Write a poem
Play with a puppy
Host a themed birthday party
Braid a gimp keychain
Braid a friendship bracelet
Braid someone’s hair
Do a handstand in a pool
Jump off the high dive
Roller blade
Use a piece of grass to whistle
Paint a self-portrait
Make a sand castle
Ding dong ditch
Prank phone call someone
Buy a pack of basketball cards
Sculpt something totally useless
Paint my nails
Paint my face (or someone else’s face)
Read a Goosebumps book
Go to a book fair
Wear a bunch of different watches at the same time
Make a short video
Go to an aquarium
Go to a planetarium
Go whale watching
Catch lightning bugs
Play Scrabble
Watch Malcolm in the Middle with my family
Eat Blue Moon/Superman ice cream
Play a game of “calabaloos” at night
Play with Nickelodeon slime
Make homemade popsicles
Run through a sprinkler
Have a water balloon fight
Slide down a slip and slide
Make homemade paper
Twirl a baton
Make an ironed bead art design
Make an embroidery project
Play a game of HORSE
Buy some crazy, colorful shoes
Play an old video game
Do leaf rubbing art
Jump on a trampoline
Star gaze
Invent a sandwich
Hop scotch
Build a fort
Ice skate
Go camping
Put on a puppet show
Play dress up
Compete in a pie-eating contest
Skip stones on the water
Fly a kite
Dance and run around in the rain
Catch a fish
Go apple-picking
Get buried in the sand
Swing on a rope swing
Raise butterflies
Learn a card trick
Do kitchen experiments
Play Spud
Make up a handshake
Have a picnic in the park
Feed the ducks
Get someone to sit on a whoopee cushion
Interpret my dreams
Memorize the lyrics to an entire song
Design a treasure hunt
Hit a piñata
Make a fortune teller/cootie catcher
Send a message in a bottle
Hula hoop
Make an obstacle course
Have a Field Day
Play a game of mini golf
Create melted crayon art
Play M.A.S.H.
Play with a Skip-It
Keep a Tamagotchi alive
For each one, I will document my experience — I’ll let you know why little kid Ellen loved each activity and how Big Kid Ellen fared in attempting to recreate the joy.
And remember: if any of these sound particularly interesting to you and you want to participate with me, please let me know! I’d love for a secondary outcome of this project to be reconnecting with my community after two years of isolation.
Cheers to being a big kid!
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That Big Kid Ellen: Intro
Little Ellen through the years
Here’s your TL;DR upfront (because I like you): Adult Ellen has allowed fear and anxiety to rule her life for too long. I’ve decided that the antidote for this pattern is to start a blog that documents my experiences completing a list of 100 things that I used to love doing as a kid in an attempt to kickstart joy in my life. I’m going to turn into that Big Kid Ellen.
Now, let’s start at the beginning.
Right now, it’s almost Jan 1, the time for the ambitious-yet-fleeting New Year’s Resolution. Almost every year for about a decade, I have had the same two resolutions: exercise and journal consistently. I aspired to be like early 20s Ellen who was fit and well-documented. But, by Jan 10th or so, I usually lost interest in journaling and told myself that I’d start over in February, and then never did. I tended to keep up the exercise promise, but never enjoyed a minute of exercising — dreading any training I would force myself to do for some race or event that I had signed up for to keep myself motivated. Last year, I realized that there was something severely flawed with these resolutions — something had significantly changed within me thanks to COVID — so I decided to look a little deeper. Well, a lot deeper.
I am unable to enjoy exercising because I have always viewed it as a means to lose weight. Always. The equation has always been Exercise = Weight Loss. It has been a tool that I have used to shape my body into something it’s not. I’m a big person, literally. I’m a hair under 6'1" and I have curves. I’ve had curves since I was young, and I was reminded that I had curves by family, friends, coaches, neighbors, strangers, anyone who had the audacity to think that they could comment on a girl’s body that wasn’t their own. So I tried to not have curves. I did sports in high school, spin classes in college, boot camps in my early 20s, and even took up running in my late 20s and triathlon in my early 30s. Anything to keep my curvy body in check and to not drift into the *gasp* overweight BMI metric. Over-exercising was coupled with restrictive eating and binging over the years, and honestly, most days I hated my body, no matter how it looked or how I treated it.
During the summer 2020, when I realized that all my two-a-days for a Half Ironman were pointless because every race was being canceled, I began to confront my exercise demons and realized that I just flat-out hated moving my body. It didn’t feel good when I moved it, I was afraid to be seen in public moving it, I hated exercising in the Texas heat, the list of fear and anxiety grew… so I just sat still. For 18 months.
Now, because of this fear of moving, and the endless work-from-home culture coupled with the potent emotional cocktail that is Millennial anxiety and depression, I am heavy. The heaviest I’ve ever been. You might even call me fat. I sometimes look in a mirror and don’t even recognize my face. During those 18 months, I experienced some of the worst body-shaming I have ever felt. I didn’t know how to love myself in motion or not in motion.
I began to immerse myself in the anti-diet culture on social media. I saw influencers on the ‘gram loving their bodies exactly as they are — squishy and pocked and big and gorgeous. I heard them say that always trying to lose weight isn’t bad, just extremely misguided, and exactly “what the patriarchy wants.” I felt vindicated in my rebellion against exercising. Maybe I could I love myself if I didn’t exercise (because reminder, in my mind, exercising = losing weight = cozying up with the patriarchy = not my cup of tea).
It didn’t work.
The anti-guilt eventually turned into anti-anti-guilt, which *news flash* is just guilt. Now, uncomfortable in a heavy body (unable to bend and move in basic ways, knee pain, back pain, lack of endorphins, etc.), I actually wanted to lose weight to feel better physically. BuT I tHoUgHt LoSiNg WeIgHt WaS tHe EnEmY?! There was now shame being blasted at me from the anti-diet, anti-fatphobic culture when trying to get out of my fat body. All I wanted was to be able to take my pants off without somehow straining a muscle in my neck. How could I both want to lose weight and not want to lose weight? Clearly social media was not the self-love beacon of hope I was looking for. So I hired a coach.
Turns out, I was experiencing pretty severe exercise trauma. And this kind of body confusion was par for the course.
Note: If your first thought is, “oh, what a privileged trauma to have, lucky you,” then, politely, you can fuck right off. This is a shame-free zone, and I will not tolerate trauma comparison or shame of any kind.
While working with my coach (let’s call her Iona, because that’s her name), I came to terms with the fact that I have never loved my body, no matter how thin or athletic I had forced her to be over the years. I never moved her with the sole purpose of understanding or loving her. I had never listened to her needs or pains or joys. I was a head on a stick — totally intellectual, 0% physical. I needed to connect back to my body.
Iona’s coaching style got me to do that by getting back in touch with little kid Ellen, before she was bombarded with society’s not-so-subliminal messages that her body was unacceptable. Back when she ran around the neighborhood with friends, leaped off of swing sets, rollerbladed and biked all over town, and could impress just about anyone with her jump roping skills. Little kid Ellen had something that adult Ellen was missing — joy in movement.
Let’s jump over to journalling. This story is a little more straight-forward but follows a similar pattern.
Ever since I was a kid, I loved writing in diaries and journals. When I was young, the journals mainly consisted of information about boys that I had crushes on or rambling descriptions of dreams that I had (I was really into dream interpretations in middle school). Then the journals eventually shifted into travel diaries, documenting my many adventures abroad during college. I used my journals to capture day-to-day activities as well as my assessments of the injustices that I witnessed and tried to process. I still have most of those journals, and I even read aloud from one of my high school journals in front of total strangers at a comedy show many years ago.
I also used to love writing in a more general sense, mostly creative writing (but if I’m being honest, I even loved writing my graduate thesis). My first “novel” was written in second grade when I was really into writing Rugrats fan fiction, specifically about the character Chuckie Finster. My mom kept all of my poetry in various scrapbooks throughout my life, and I remember writing a short story during my first year of high school about a haunted doll that I was really proud of.
Sometime in high school, I stopped writing for fun. I was taking AP classes in math and sciences (since my school was herding me in that direction), and stopped taking art and writing electives. I veered so firmly away from the arts that by the time I went to college, I had convinced myself that I wasn’t creative at all.
And then sometime in grad school, I stopped journalling. The reasons were nuanced but devastating — I thought my life was boring, I was in a bad relationship with someone who made me feel very unimportant, it felt selfish to spend time writing by myself, I had a lot of work to do, etc.
At that point, my internal dialogue and self-talk had convinced me that writing and journalling wasn’t worth my time. I wasn’t good at it, it wouldn’t lead to anything, it was a selfish use of my time. I was also afraid that if I were to start writing about my life, I’d have to face some pretty big issues that I had been burying deep down inside of me for years. Extracting these fears and emotions and putting them into words would make them real, and facing them seemed harder than keeping them locked away.
Again, Iona reminded me of little kid Ellen and how much she loved writing. How she did it solely for herself, not for anyone else to read, and how she had fun with it. She wrote about silly and goofy things and let her imagination run wild. There was joy in writing.
Have you caught onto the pattern yet?
Adult Ellen = uncertainty, anxiety, fear, not really moving at all.
Little kid Ellen = silly, playful, goofy, full of joy. Unapologetically Ellen.
So we’re going to do something new in 2022.
We’re going to let little kid Ellen live again.
In 2022, I plan to do 100 things that little kid Ellen used to love to do. I’m going to be a Big Kid this year. I’m going to focus on things that get me to move my body and that allow me to explore my creativity, but honestly, I’m just going to do anything that I know little kid Ellen would have loved. And I’m going to write about my experiences as I work my way through the list.
My hope is that I can train my brain and body to move away from a place of fear and anxiety and more towards creativity and curiosity. I want to give my body the freedom to do what it wants to do — enjoy life. I want to hold myself accountable for writing again. And honestly, I just want to giggle more.
I hope that you’ll follow this kid-venture with me and cheer me on. Also, most of the things on the list involve more people than just me, so let me know if you’re interested in participating in one of them with me. I will make it work!
Cheers to the little kids that still live inside of us. May they never be forgotten and may we find joy in letting them live again.
Check back on Jan 1 for the official list!
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