What have you been doing?

Yesterday, By the time I came home from running my daughter back from her college class and doing a number of errands, I wanted to just sit.  I mean, my body was kind of hurting from working out at the gym the day before and I just wanted to do nothing.  Of course, it was 5pm and every one of my kids wanted to eat.  A mother’s work is never done.  So, I made dinner.  (Which oddly enough I think came out pretty well…. who knew Dollar Tree steak fries, that I seasoned, frozen broccoli and some garlic chicken breast would turn out so good… but, I digress.)  Where was I?

Oh, after making dinner and actually eating it, I sat down at my computer desk and thought

“Okay, maybe I’ll play some Fallout New Vegas.”

I proceeded to look for the controller and get the Xbox One all set up. About ten minutes in I was like

“Nope, not what I want to do…”

So, I changed the HDMI over to my computer screen and loaded up Netflix on a new tab.  Don’t judge me but I literally can have like 6 or 7 Chrome tabs open at any given moment.  (No wonder my computer hates me sometimes..)

Now if you haven’t had a chance to see the show Mindhunter and actually like weird shows about serial killers and why they turn out that way, this show is for you.  It isn’t way up there on my Oh Let’s Watch This List, but hey, I have been binging (is this how you spell this?) a ton of stuff lately and I’m still looking for something really good.  For now, this works.  But then… it hits me.

I’ve done “NOTHING” creative in a while.  I ponder this for a few moments…

“What have I been doing with all my time?” 

As I said before, binge-watching shows being one of them.  Also, Facebook, have you ever noticed how much time you spend just scrolling down that feed?  Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with looking to see what your family and friends are up to.  Honestly, some of my friends and family have way more interesting lives than I do.  But then I ask…

“Why is that?”

Why is my one high school friends always going to all the nerd shows?  Comic-Cons, Steampunk conventions, Themeparks and other neat nerdy stuff.  What about my cousin who is always searching for new places to do her daily walks.  I mean, I could (in theory) do these things right?  Do I want to do these things?

“What AM I doing with my life?”

GaryVee ( Gary Vaynerchuk if you aren’t following this guy and want a push to get you into gear, you should be, he’s on like all the social media sites) posted this the other day on Instagram… which kind of hit me in the face and it has been simmering there ever since.

• garyvee  THIS .. is mindset shit .. too many of you lost before you started cause you were looking for the excuse! Lets go … no one gives a shit about your problems, they’ve got their own ..focus on the good, look for he opportunity, ponder the alternatives, deploy perspective.. lets go …

I realized that the only thing stopping me from doing the things I want to do… is me.  I don’t feel good enough and keep using excuses not to do things. I know, you are probably saying to yourself, “Well der Em, we all know that!”  Me realizing this is huge though.

So, what did I do?  I kept the Mindhunter show playing because well, I need some kind noise when I’m being creative, and I started working on a drawing I’ve been thinking about for a couple of weeks now.  I literally had already done few quick sketches of it to see how I wanted the composition to be in my sketchbook.  This was around 8:30pm or so.  Around 1am, I looked up and realized I needed to go to sleep as I had to be up at 6am (You can see the previous post to see why that insanity is a daily thing..)

So, this is what I ended up with for my roughly 3.5 hours of work.

 

So yeah, instead of just sitting here vegging and doing nothing with my life for that time, I was able to actually produce something that kind of makes me proud.  So now, this begs the question…

“What have you been doing lately?”

Till next time…

~em

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