🗑️ Throw it all away
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Hi my friend. I want to share with you my most recent Google searches:
How to cleanse negative energy out of your life.
What to do when you think you’re cursed.
How to not let another year of your life pass without doing anything about your goals.
Exciting things to do with a pound of broccoli (An outlier..)
What to do when you feel such heaviness in your heart.
I know that 2024 isn’t over yet, but I can confidently say it hasn’t been one of my favorites.
Every idea I had for myself and my life this year has felt trapped inside a metal safe. I know the combination to open the lock and yet, I haven’t.
I’ve faced a handful of moments of bad luck, freak accidents, and deep sadness.
Of course so many good things have happened too. But I want to focus on the bad because that’s what has caused me to Google search things about how to rid this fog of blaaaahhhh out of my life.
Most of the results told me to hire an energy cleanser ($500), do reiki ($180), sage my apartment (I think I’m allergic), or read self-help books. But I don’t time for those. Plus, I love quick fixes to deeply rooted problems. Don’t we all?
So I ghosted Google, left my computer behind, and sat by myself for a dozen minutes.
👋 Welcome to the Monday Pick-Me-Up. It turns out you don’t need to spend a penny if you want to really make big changes in your life. You just need a few garbage bags and a vacuum. Here’s what I mean.
The opposite of heavy is light
I have set myself up for failure. Perhaps you have too.
I wanted to do so many things this year and I haven’t.
My list included:
Write a book and finish an old one that just has one chapter left to write.
Get in the best shape of my life (lol).
Grow this Monday newsletter and welcome thousands of new subscribers
Visit all of my best friends who live in other states for solo trips.
Fix my finances
Okay, I’ll stop there. You get the point.
So why the heck did I not do any of those things? Not even finish the book that has just one chapter left to write — which would take me maybe 5-6 hours?
Because of two things:
It's hard to move forward in your life when you feel like you're walking around with weights strapped to your chest. You get more done for yourself when you're light and airy, not when you're carrying around so much emotion, stress, and anxiety — whose cousin, depression, sometimes stops by as an unwelcome visitor.
I didn’t have an actual real plan to get these things done. I wanted to be in the best shape of my life. But thinking that thought won’t make that happen. I had to first have a plan and all plans to change your life start with something so obvious — clearing out the BS (that stands for bull shit),
So when I looked back at my year so far and flipped through my inaction and then thought about the bad luck odd things that happened instead, I decided to start with the BS. I decided that if I wanted to start at step number one, I had to first find lightness.
To do that, I had to make space in my life.
Here’s my adventure toward doing that.
I’m cleaning out every single inch of my apartment and going through every single belonging. It helps that I’m moving in a week. But if I wasn’t, this is still so important to do because when we go through our stuff and figure out what can be tossed out, we make space. That space might feel invisible but it’s not. When we’re not around clutter, we can think clearly. We can move around our space more freely without worrying about stepping on legos or pizza-stained jeans that are two sizes too small. To do this, I made a list of every area of my apartment: laundry room, bathroom, coat closet, etc. Every night, I pick an area and tackle it. I remove every thing from that area and put it aside. I deep clean the area and go through the stuff. I only put back what I absolutely need. Everything else, I donate, toss, or sell. I just finished doing my bathroom and tossed two garbage bags worth of stuff.
I’m doing a phone cleanse too. I spend so much time on my phone and it always overwhelms me to see that I have 368 missed calls and 45 unread text messages. I’m going through and clearing out those missed calls, reading those texts and responding to the ones still relevant, deleting apps, and etc. For fun, I’m also deleting the numbers of people in my phone book I don’t know anymore. It’s surprising how good that feels.
I’m working on how I feel mentally. I’m having more honest conversations with people about life. I’m forgiving myself for things I didn’t do right this year. I’m working on finding ways to create space in my brain — and that looks like saying no to things I don’t have the energy to take on and spending less time BS’ing on my phone at night.
This is just step one of my game plan of how to answer my Google searches. Step two will be other actions. Tell me what you think I should do next:
How can we make changes in our own little lives if we're lugging along so much? It turns out when we start to clear out our space, our hearts, our brain, our phones, we don't just feel lighter, we see things with a freshly colored bright gaze. Right now, I'm cleaning out the kitchen and quickly, I'm noticing how this simple act of decluttering is shifting my perspective. As I sort through forgotten items, I feel a weight lifting. I see a night light coming in.
Instant Pick Me Ups
📖: I went to a wedding this weekend and my go-to question for everyone I met was: Tell me about a book you can’t stop thinking about. Of course, this is the one I told people about. But a few people mentioned this book, so it’s next on my list.
😊: Obsessed with:
Loving this lip gloss. I just keep reapplying it to my lips.
I wore this dress to the wedding this weekend. I got a lot of compliments! It’s a bit pricey but it’s 25% off right now and I plan to wear it to three weddings this year.
A delicious and healthy snack that I can’t stop eating.
It’s the time of year when I find myself searching for the best pair of leggings. So far, these take the cake this season. I got them in blue.
📝: Ps. if you (or anyone you know) needs a wedding speech this season (vows, officiant, maid of honor/best man, father/mother of bride/groom, sister/brother of the bride/groom) — I built these really awesome speech writing tools. Also, a eulogy tool (though I hope nobody you know needs to use that).
⏰: Go through your kitchen and toss all the expired items. Do the same with your medicine drawer/shelf.
😊 My Real Life:
I’m moving next Monday! I can’t wait to tell you where i’m moving and how the whole thing happened — and of course there’s a catch to it all. I’m too superstitious to share until I have the keys in my hand so expect an update next Monday. Until then, I’ll be packing up five year’s worth of stuff that we’ve slammed into this tiny one bedroom apartment. Wild that when we moved here, we had nothing. We had just spent two years living in new cities every month. We settled into this apartment thinking we’d be here for 6 months and hop around the world again. But we loved it and stayed, like the song goes: first came Brooklyn apartment, then came Goofy, then came marriage, and then came Gemma. I’ll be a mess saying goodbye to this box that I’ve called my home for the past handful of years.
Someone emailed me asking to connect them to people on Linkedin that I was connected to because they need help finding a job. I almost wrote back: sorry, I don’t actually know these people so I can’t help. But that felt lazy. Yeah, I don’t know them. But why not message them anyway? I wrote up a message that said: Hi Laura, we’re friends on Linkedin and don’t actually know each other — how 2024 is that! A friend of mine applied for a role at your company on your team. I wanted to share her info and resume in case you can help her land an interview. She’s super impressive and would make a great fit at [NAME OF COMPAY]. I sent two of these messages and one person wrote back and said she’d help her get an interview! Yay!
Followed your lead and deleted so many phone contacts this morning 💕💯 next up is the closet, which has been staring me down since at least May… as always thank you for the great ideas 🙏🏻