Notes On: Spicing up this week
A birthday week special
Let’s start with a vibe check. This week is for cinnamon sprinkles on your coffee, for saying ‘yes’ and sipping sparkling drinks at 5pm on a Friday and looking up towards the sky at any chance you get. Here’s how to make the most of it.
First, I want you to take some time this week to re-asses your life. We spend so much time worrying about things that don’t happen, and not enough time carving the kind of life we want for ourselves.
This week, take 30 minutes and sit down with a pen, and a notebook, and ask yourself the following questions:
Which morning routine makes you feel most equipped and calm for the day ahead?
What techniques are currently working for me that I should do more of?
What are my top five motivations?
What about my working life makes me feel most anxious?
What do I wish I had more time to do?
With these in mind, set some achievable goals for the next three months: how can you get to where you want to be, by January? Or, at least, on the pathway there?
It’s not an easy exercise - it forces you to look inwards - but let me remind you that nothing worth doing ever feels easy: that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing.
At some point this week, I want you to read something that makes you feel inspired. This might be a poem by Mary Oliver or some Hozier lyrics or even a postcard that you received from someone you love. For me, it’s The Opposite of Loneliness: every time I re-read this book, I feel this incredible sense of the beauty and tragedy in this world, and also how lucky I am to get to live this life.
Set a boundary, or three, this week. If you’re anything like me, boundaries don’t come easily to you. But they are - and I can’t stress this enough - the key to a peaceful life. So: SET. THAT. BOUNDARY. Afterwards, I want you to indulge. Get yourself something that you wouldn’t usually: a packet of sugar-dusted doughnuts, oozing with jam, perhaps. Or a candle. Or a magazine. Something that reminds you that you’re worth indulging in, because at the end of the day, we are all we have in this life, so you may as well treat yourself.
I’m not sure why (actually, I am, but I’ll get to that later), but this week is also about being a little bit reckless. Breaking the rules and noticing that you are still intact, that sometimes you have to fracture something to make something else. I’m not sure what this means for you, but for me it means: financial freedom. Saying yes to ideas, to plans, to opportunities, instead of no. Living in the moment, instead of planning for the future, because if we spend our whole lives with one eye on tomorrow, we might find that we wake up, blurry and disorientated in twenty years’ time, realising that we never enjoyed a second of it.
You may have picked this up, already, but this week is possibly the most magical week in the year, for me, because it’s my birthday week. It’s also that wonderful, misty, enchanted time when autumn starts to really take force, in all its auburn glory. To me, it feels as though possibility itself is lifting those leaves, lilting on the air. I just LOVE it.
And this week? This week I’m turning thirty. I’m looking back on my twenties and forward to the rest of my life and it feels huge and exciting and honestly? Quite scary. Because there are so many expectations placed on women, as we cross this threshold. We’re expected to have everything sorted: to be married and financially secure and have successful, stilettoed jobs and to know exactly how to transition a look from daytime to evening and also have a plan for children (if we don’t already have them). It’s overwhelming, and exhausting, but it’s also an opportunity to rewrite the narrative: to open a fresh page and decide, for myself, what I want my life to look like. To re-asses, to ask questions - of myself, of others - to set boundaries and read things that inspire me and let myself indulge and remind myself how wonderful it is to exist in this world that holds so much art, and beauty, the night sky like a velvet canopy, cocktails that turn the cobblestones sepia-toned, friends that make me want to grow old with them, who reflect me back to myself, sequinned and remind me, when I’m tearful on the end of a phone, that the best is yet to come.
Thank you so much for being here with me, over the past few months. I can’t wait to spice up my thirties (!!!!!)
N. B. This is part of my ‘spicing up’ series, which I post every single Sunday on my socials. A lot of you may have come from there (in which case, THANK YOU!). But some of you won’t ever have read those editions of ‘Notes On’, so in honour of my birthday week, I thought I’d post this one on here, too (because I just love this community so much). I hope you have a gorgeous week!
My birthday is on the 20th, Libra gang lol happy birthday!
Happy Birthday!! Hope you have most magical week (and year) 💫