After a month or so of not feeling quite right, and definitely not myself, I came to the conclusion that I needed to start putting myself and my mental health first again. It feels as if I have been wandering in the woods with no map, slowly succumbing to a mildly terrifying panic that I don't know where I'm going and the knowledge that it's too late to turn back and ask for help. However, last week I found my bearings (sort of) and discovered an iron-clad determination to find my way out of the trees and back to civilisation. I decided that I needed a new challenge - nothing focuses my mind in times of stress like having something to work towards - and an excellent article in last month's ELLE had the answers I was looking for.
Entitled "How to change your life in 30 days", Debbie Morgan outlined her plan to spend the last year of her twenties doing a series of 30 day challenges, from learning the guitar, to going vegan, to going an entire month make up free. I don't know if it was because it suddenly hit me that I'll be 25 next year, or because I was feeling particularly eager for a challenge, but I knew instantly that I wanted to do the same. I don't know quite how long I'll last with this, but I grabbed a notebook last night and planned out several options to take me to the end of 2016, all incorporating a long list of things I've been meaning to do for ages but that I've been expertly avoiding starting like the plague. Some were new ventures like learning to code and trying to master calligraphy; and others were rather more basic, such as reading every day, cracking open my Pixar colouring book once more and actually finishing my cross-stitch. Either way, the list is extensive and I thought it would be beneficial for me to actually plan doing them before I receive my masters in procrastination. There is no end goal: at the risk of sounding disgustingly cheesy, this is about the journey and not the destination.
Self-help articles often preach the virtue of doing something for 30 days to help establish it as a habit. While some of the activities on my list definitely have a 30 day limit, I hope that the 30 days will nudge me into adopting others into my daily routine without me realising it's happened! Each month I will be writing an update on the last month's challenge and outlining my plans for the next: as this method has helped each Tuesday, I figured it'd be a good place to start here!
My plan for April is 30 days of reading for at least half an hour a day. I have piles of unread books and cannot be unleashed in a bookshop unsupervised as I always leave with more. As such, I figured that attacking my book shelves would probably be a good place to start!
(GIF SOURCED FROM www.buzzfeed.com)
So, 30 days of reading... go!
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