The Frazzled English Woman

Tag: blog

  • New Year (Old) Me

    New Year, new me?

    More like New Year, old me, annoyed that I haven’t magically transformed into a glorious, organised, put together New Year’s unicorn.

    Let’s be honest sometimes New Year can really suck.

    It reminds you of all the ways you are not perfect and definitely not the New Year’s Unicorn. At best, I felt like a Hogmanay Horse, feeling a little bit shitty that my life had a long way to go before I was even close to hitting the resolutions that I had set for myself.

    Sandra had just had a job promotion, Rita was engaged, and Mary was ‘finding herself’ in Thailand. Me? I was trotting round in circles, wondering what to do with my life and why I always had to pick friends whose names featured in ‘Mambo No. 5’.

    How could I escape this feeling of mediocrity? How could I start hitting some of the goals I had created for myself?

    Then it hit me!

    (Not through an actual moment of brilliance, just stealing someone else’s idea off Instagram)

    Maybe before I became the New Year’s Unicorn, I actually needed to enjoy being the Hogmanay Horse.

    Ok, unicorn and horse aside (even I have no idea what I am talking about now), sometimes you have to make the best of the current situation to spot the opportunities which are waiting for you.

    Neuroscientist Emily McDonald (Insta tag emonthebrain) has some useful advice when it comes to training your brain to see the positive.

    Emily says that, when you are stressed about the way that your life is (or the way that it isn’t in my case), the amygdala ‘hijacks the process your brain uses to construct reality’. Your brain starts ‘flagging neutral things as threats’ and inventing ‘problems which are not actually there.’ Stress ‘narrows your focus’ and makes ‘you less open to possibilities.’

    So how do we start seeing these possibilities? How can we use this new insight as a tool to create our ideal lives?

    Emily suggests that we ‘slow down, pour into [ourselves] and surrender to the flow.’

    By letting go of all the ways we feel that we are not good enough, we stop stress from narrowing our field of vision. We start to notice more of the positive. We are relaxed enough to be creative and think constructively about what we would like to do with our lives, instead of beating ourselves up about not being as successful as Monica, Erica, Rita, Tina, Sandra (in the sun), Mary (all night long), Jessica (here I am)…

    Sorry, no more ‘Mambo No. 5’ references- you get the picture.

    Paradoxically, it is being ok with the way that we are, which lets us transform into the person we want to be.

    See, it must be working. I started off this post using a unicorn and horse analogy, and now I am using words like ‘paradoxically’!

    So whilst I am very happy for Sandra and her job promotion, I am also happy about my very imperfect and slightly wacky life.

    So if you take any advice this New Year…

    Say hello to the Hogmanay Horse!

  • Pushing Past Perfectionism: An Exercise in Deliberate Imperfection

    In classic Frazzled English Woman style, I created this blog 5 months ago and have a whole 2 posts to show for it. Where are the blogs, you may ask? Well, the answer to this is plain and simple: I don’t know.

    It was never the perfect time to sit down and write; I was always a tiny bit tired, a little bit distracted. The perfect conditions for the perfect article had never aligned.

    But as we know, this blog is not about being perfect. Here we laugh in the face of perfection and champion ‘the messy,’ ‘the disheveled,’ ‘the silly,’ ‘the shabby’ and ‘the imperfect.’

    Eww, I just got the ick from myself, but you know what I mean.

    So, in a sudden strike of inspiration, I set myself a challenge: to write a whole blog- with no editing or rewrites- and post it in the same sitting. It did not have to be good; it just had to be posted.

    I felt so devious, so mischievous at the prospect of creating something that was deliberately bad and posting it on a website open to the public, even if it was only for two viewers (my mum, and then my mum again).

    I felt slightly nervous and nearly changed my mind almost immediately. But then I noticed something very curious indeed. The less I cared about the words I was writing and the standard I wanted my writing to be at, the easier the words flowed from me. The opening few lines of this blog (which would usually take me a good half an hour to think about) flew by. I wasn’t reading and rereading, dwelling on the past errors I had made, the clumsy blunders in my punctuation or choice of words. All I was thinking about and am thinking about are the words on this page, the present moment.

    But it did make sense. If I imagined my written words as people, it was no wonder they were more willing to come out when they were not being scrutinised or judged, moved around in dizzying orders before I finally settled on the right place for them. I was welcoming any words to the page wholeheartedly, even if they were, frankly, a bit ugly.

    Perhaps then the resolution I should be taking from this exercise is this: there are no perfect conditions, perfect timings or places to do what you want to do. The only person creating the rules is you. It is possible to push past the perfectionist voice in your mind, but first, you have to become comfortable with all the ugly bits too and accept the process as a whole. Otherwise, as we have seen (in the sparsity of vlogs on this website), things simply will not happen.

    So, there you have it. A rather unconventional, imperfect blog. Do I want to edit every single word of this? Yes. Will I delete it later? Probably. But it does not matter. For now, I have conquered my inner perfectionist.

    However, it will be interesting to see if I heed my own advice on this one. Maybe it’s safer to expect the next instalment in, let’s say…

    another 5 months?