3 loads of mental laundry.
Finally got through 3 loads of laundry that had been accumulating over the course of weeks yesterday. My pile of dirty clothes, on its way to applying for its own zip code by the weekend’s end, needed to be dealt with. And immediately.
In tandem with bath towels, socks, and button-ups, here are the mental loads I’ve also been sorting through lately:
Load 1: My mediums.
The laundry: My towels, graphic tees, light jeans, yoga pants, and sweats.
The load: The unique financial challenge of my generation. There are more ways than ever to make money, however, with the speed of technology, no job is truly safe. Gone are the days you could secure a position at a company and expect to move up the ranks of it. If it’s not tech making your skills obsolete, it’s a change in the algorithm that moves too quickly for you to keep up. Existing alone is expensive enough, let alone reaching things like marriage and starting a family, making many people in my generation delay these milestones.
I’ve been thinking a lot about money and my relationship to it, if I’ll have enough of it to live the kind of life I want down the road, what that number is, how I’ll make it, and if there’s a more grounded way to exist in a capitalistic society or not. Just some thoughts always rolling around in my head.
Load 2: My lights.
The laundry: Bedsheets, pillow cases, two of my three white shirts, and an assortment of socks.
The load: Speaking of money, I’m seriously contemplating purchasing a drip coffee maker but am agonizing over it. I’ve been making pour overs for myself every morning since working at home, and I’m tired of babysitting the brew. Or if I want a second cup, I’m annoyed I have to start the process all over again. I spent 4 years making other people coffee for 8 hours a day, so I really just want to click a button and walk away. Let me brush my teeth and pee in peace and come back to the kitchen for my completed cup of joe when I wake up.
What a dream!
Clicking on this coffee maker once has inevitably made the algorithm shove it into my feed somewhere around 30,000 times a day, so I really have not been able to escape thinking about it. Is it the best drip coffee maker I could buy? No. Is it as bad as a Mr. Coffee maker? No. After working in specialty coffee for years, do I feel a little like a sell-out buying a budget-friendly machine? No because who cares?
My hesitation is that it’s truly not a necessity in the slightest. I have a decent collection of coffee aparatuses. I don’t need this. I just really want it.
Load 3: My darks.
The laundry: 90% of my wardrobe. Black jeans, black tops, intimates, socks, and pajama shirts.
The load: I’ve been thinking a lot about the time and attention it takes to build anything substantial and lasting.
Incremental growth, I’m more convinced than ever, is the most sustainable key to transforming anything. A year from now, if I’ve sat down to write 365 times, even if I wasn’t trying terribly hard, I will undoubtedly be a better writer.
Where do you want to be a year from now? What’s one thing you can practically practice, create, or do every day that’s heading in that direction? What a year from now will you be happy you started today?