Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast, vol. 10
Where I share some thinky thoughts
Hello and welcome! This is Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast, and I hope you pull up a chair and stay a while.
Onward!
1. Consider:
“Every small positive change we make in ourselves repays us in confidence in the future.”
- Alice Walker
Confidence. Is that the true tender of the soul? Perhaps, at least of the mind. With confidence, you can move forward. With doubt, you’re forever falling back into the muck and the mire.
So what is the coinage we use to invest in our confidence? Only “small positive change(s).” That’s within everyone’s power. There’s not even any limitation on the areas for the changes.
2. This week, I did a cost/benefits analysis of continuing to entertain suicidal thoughts. This is a tool I learned from DBT—Dialogical Behavioral Therapy. You have four sections to your paper: the cost of doing the behavior, the benefits of doing the behavior; but then, the cost of doing something other than the behavior, and the benefits of doing something other than the behavior.
After weighting my answers, I discovered that I weighed the benefits of not entertaining suicidal thoughts at a 40, and the benefits of continuing with them at only a 17.
There’s power in numbers, and quantifying things.
I have high hopes that this will help me kick the unwanted thoughts to the curb.
3. I’ve been warring with my cat Nyssa. She’s a youngin’, only 3 years old or so, and she hates being locked in my room with me. My sisters demand that she be contained because she starts fights with the other two cats who live here. That doesn’t stop her from wanting to escape every. single. time. I leave my room.
I’ve noticed, I’ll bend over backwards not to have to go chasing after her. I take all my clothes and phone and purse and glasses into the bathroom in the morning, to avoid having to come back in the room. I’m hardly drinking anything because I’m worried I’ll run out of liquid. And I now hoard small amounts of food in my room, in case my blood sugars drop.
It got me to thinking: what crazy lengths will we go to in order to avoid something we don’t want to do?
And how much does this distort us?
4. This song link is for John Perovich, but I hope you enjoy it too. We were talking about the work of Laurie Anderson, the performance artist/musician/storyteller, and how she changed the landscape of playwriting.
Check out her drum dance/Smoke Rings from Home of the Brave. Her homemade violins, which play tape recordings, are of particular interest and can be seen at the end of the video.
5. Want a laugh-out-loud song remake? Check out Ricardo Queso’s (that’s Richard Cheese to you) remake of NIN’s Closer. Not for the easily offended—but then, neither was the original, so.
This is the toy piano version. Score!
6. Here is an article I wrote this week that you might like:
What Are the Qualities of an Excellent Mentor?
I’ll be taking a little time off, but I’ll be back soon with more impossible things.
Thanks for reading!
Ilana