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.

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.

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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