Lix Hewett

Late and brief this time. I feel like my #1 weekly wish this week should be: do not sleep any more days away! Because I kind of slept right through Monday. I’m so sorry, world. I’m so sorry, me.

How I did on last week’s wishes: I blogged every day! I vlogged twice, too. I stretched on and off, which is something. But I totally failed at taking pictures regularly. I may not have taken a single shot. I am a disaster. But the weather’s getting better (read: cooler) and that can only mean good things for my productivity and general ability to behave like an adult human.

This week’s goals:

1. Keep up the daily blogging! I’ve been doing well, but I want to keep this as a daily wish another week or two, just in case. I’d like to put up a couple more videos this week (maybe one with singing! and guitar! I’m thinking one of the April Smith songs I know well, to start with), and I want to pick an outfit challenge to start in September (help me choose?). I’d also like to figure out how I’m going to approach the sponsorship thing going forward – it’s totally new to me and yeah, sidebar ads are easy enough, but there’s gotta be more than that! Need to think on that.

2. Make a big dent in my product photography to-do list. Super important! Exclamation point!

3. Work exercise into routine tasks. This occurred to me on Sunday and I started doing it right away. Basically, exercise – especially the little-bits way I do it – doesn’t have to be its own thing, and it’s easier for me to do if I integrate it into other tasks. I can do straddle stretching while I’m working on my laptop in bed; I can do the butterfly while I play with my iPod; I can stretch my knees while I wash my hair or wait for my coffee to heat up; I can do batches of dips when I walk in and out of my room (I put my hands on the footboard of my bed). So I’m going to try and do that.

4. Go to sleep before 2 AM. As to avoid, you know, yesterday. And all those times I’m awake at night and sleep in the day. I can’t force myself to get out of bed in the morning (I have a really hard time doing that, anyway) but I can make myself go to sleep at a decent hour. I am not an owl! Also, I like mornings. Also, I need daylight for most of my work. So let’s be awake during it.

5. Open my graphic design shop on Etsy. Fill out the policies, come up with something to list so I can open the thing*. Any ideas? (Want me to design something for you? Let me know! You could be my first listing!)

* I used my own referral code to sign up as lixhewettdesign – that means my first 40 listings there are free, and when the shop opens, I’ll get 40 free listings for my photography shop as well. I really, really want those so I can list more photos (like the ones I’ve used for Weekly Wishes art) and phone cases. I know listing fees are small, but they seem kind of scary when you’re as broke and lacking in a regular source of income as I am.

You’ll notice that looks a lot like last week’s list – and that would be because it does. Still working on building back those good habits. Normalcy wasn’t built in a day, and all that. I did feel human again for a few brief moments last week, so there’s hope!

What are your goals for this week? Go here to link them up!

I haven’t done Weekly Wishes in a few weeks, ever since I failed catastrophically at doing any sewing at all, but new laptop, new blog, new motivation! At least a new attempt to find some in the depths of this heat-induced laziness I’ve fallen victim to. Yes, let’s not blame me. Let’s blame the summer. Let’s be real, in large part it is the summer’s fault. That’s why this week’s image is some yellowed leaves in October; I am turning my back on the season. Indiegogo shares some of the blame, too, for giving my anxiety so much time to be paranoid that I had to take it slow and stay calm to avoid a full-on meltdown. I maintain that they should give me a gift card for therapy or something. I’ll probably vlog about this.

While I try to remember how to be a functional human being, I’ve been thinking about the past year and how much has changed for me since I started taking antidepressants last August. I sort of quit writing altogether, which had been stressing me out more than it had been making me happy for some time, but for six months – until Etsy ate my life – I kept up with my daily to-do lists.

My daily to-do lists basically started three years ago in the hope that I’d eventually fix my sleep schedule. Technically, I just ran one long to-do list, and every ten-twelve days, I listed six new tasks with the days listed next to them in a row. I’d circle each day if I accomplished its respective task. At the end of the ten-twelve-day period, if I’d managed the task a majority of days, I marked the overall to-do item as complete (with a checkmark and color marker); if not, I marked it as unfilled (with a cross and no color).

Before I gave that up for the new year, I was doing a fairly decent job of keeping up with the four middle tasks (self-care, reading, exercising, and playing guitar), and my usual awful job of accomplishing the frame two (get up and go to bed early).

All this to say my weekly wishes for this week are in the vein of those tasks. I’m setting three goals for myself that I’m hoping to do every day for the next week. Was it The Happiness Project that had a line about how things are easy to do if you do them every day or only once in a while, but not if you do them every other day, or once a week, etc.? I know I read that somewhere. Which is not to say it’s true, but it’s true for me that doing things every single day without skipping any is the only way they become close to a habit and therefore easier to do.

These are the habits I’m hoping to build/regain this week:

1. Take pictures every day: We’re talking take pictures of things, mainly, because I owe a ton of product photography to Etsy sellers I’ve traded with; my old laptop wouldn’t cooperate when it came to editing, so I kept putting off the shooting part until I had the new one, and like I mentioned above, Indiegogo made me wait forever for my funds. So there’s a lot to shoot (fun, as long as I’m awake during daylight), and there’s a lot to model (which is the hardest part sometimes, putting on makeup and doing anything that requires me to step out of my room in this heat), and there’s a lot to edit (which is blissfully smooth now that my laptop doesn’t freeze every minute or overheat and shut down on a regular basis).

2. Stretch every day: I want to get back into exercising daily, but I don’t particularly have any intention of doing proper workouts. When I was doing well in this area, I was basically doing sets of stretching/sit-ups/dips/leaps/etc. scattered along the day – low time commitment, no sweat (literally). My energy levels are too low for strength conditioning at the moment, but there is one thing I can do, and that’s stretch. By which I mean pike stretching and straddle stretching (and stretching as warmup, but that’s not the goal). Last year I came so close to the splits! Now that I can watch gymnastics on my laptop again, I’m hoping that will motivate me.

3. Blog every day: This overlaps with #1 in a way – it would be nice to get back into fashion blogging! But mostly I want to get into blogging in general, and this is really something that only becomes a habit if I do it every day. Otherwise I’m prone to let two days become two weeks, at which point I feel like I should apologize for not being around, and that’s no way to build a blog.

I also want to start vlogging – I’m not shooting for doing that every day, but if I could get a video up before, say, Thursday, and then another one before the next Weekly Wishes, that would be pretty great. I just need to zero in on a subject, or decide to do an intro vid once and for all. Do any of you guys vlog? How did you get started?