My time management skills used to be phenomenal. I don’t mean to brag, but really, they were. However, following my ‘breakdown’ last year (when I came off my medication and was hardly functioning for months), I’ve struggled to claw back my time, and now it seems like I have less of it than ever before.
If there’s one thing that I’m determined to do this year, it’s get back to the level of effectiveness that I built up over 30 years. I’m not complaining about my life, hell no. I love it! I’m writing and getting paid to write, and friends, you know that’s all I’ve ever wanted. What I don’t like is that I want to be doing what I love more effectively, so I’m able to do more of it and to a better standard. I also want to carve out some time to concentrate on improving my embroidery.
My first piece of cross stitch in 2017 inspired by a pattern I found on Pinterest.
Had a play around…’morn’ means witch in Icelandic….
‘Skrock’ means superstition in Swedish. Find out how I learned this word here.
Whenever I end the day with only half of my ‘to do’ list done, a little part of me dies. I used to have the mornings, but now they’re taken up with SFI. I can’t blame that though…I mean when I get home I find myself sucked into Facebook, then led down the BuzzFeed rabbit hole. And hello…the sun which had just peaked over the horizon has already fucked off, and I’m still looking at photos of the world’s angriest cats, and everything I ought to have done is still waiting for me. At which point I want to reach for the sanctity of my cross stitch. I never used to be like that. I was excellent at avoiding distractions and moving with swiftness from one task to the other.
When I’m with my cross stitch though, everything stops. I’m completely and utterly absorbed and peaceful.
The aim was to create a new cross stitch every day of this year. I really, really wanted to do that. The plan hasn’t really gone down all that well though, and tbh, I’m quite sad about that. Actually, I’m very sad. Sticking to my goals was also something that I was highly effective at. I need to re-train myself in the art of achieving as well this year. But that’s alright. I know I can get back there.
Since I started cross stitching at the beginning of the year, I’ve worked on three pieces. While they’re tiny, I’m proud of them and they all have stories. Yesterday I was going through a Swedish/English dictionary, looking for dark, strange words that I could stitch. My list is several pages long now and still growing. Next week I’m going to stitch a new Swedish word every day. A word is manageable for now, while I bring my time in from its wanderings and tell it that it needs to stay home now.
Celebrating the strange and the shadowy, the damned and unseen 