Encountering something three times wakes you up to the idea. I’m making the third time.

The first time came in the form of a comment. On the post about Ava DuVernay’s speech at BlogHer, Mrs. Gamgee said something that resonated with me. She wrote:

I have been pondering this idea too for some time. I have come to the realization that a lot of my hesitation to ‘take’ my dreams stems from how I was raised. When I was a kid it was drilled into me that I could only do what I wanted to do after I did what I should do. Want to go to the mall, or hang out with friends? Clean your room, do your homework, and help out with the household chores first. Not a bad plan, really. But I find as an adult, there is never a time when my should-dos are actually finished, and that makes it very hard for me to take the time to do the things that I want to do. I’m trying, for the first time in my adult life, to figure out a way to balance the stuff that needs to get done with the things that I want to (need to?) do to feed my soul.

Oh. The shoulds. I have the shoulds, too.

Then I encountered it a second time. AnaBegins spoke about what she learned from vacation, and how to apply it to every day life.

The “shoulds”. This is my issue. I just can’t relax until everything is done, and there is always something to be done! … My brain just runs through the list and calendar I keep in my head (they are copies of the actual ones I keep, I DO write things down!) — home, work, kids, dog, others — making sure I haven’t forgotten to buy a wedding present or schedule a dentist appointment (two things I need to do today!).

The shoulds again.

Until I read it in these two places, I hadn’t really put my finger on this division: the people ruled by the shoulds and the people who give equal weight to the shoulds and the everything-elses. Josh is really good at carving space for himself so that when he tackles the shoulds, he tackles them productively. Whereas I am so focused on checking off each item on the shoulds list that I often get to the end of the day and realize I have done nothing for myself. My entire day was lived to do work and take care of the house and take care of things for other people.

Here’s the thing: sometimes I note this fact and feel resentful, which is probably a sign that I should have set aside the shoulds for a bit and played a game or read a book. But other times, my day goes the exact same way and I feel good getting into bed knowing how many things were checked off the to-do list.

The problem is not knowing which way my brain will process my loyalty to the shoulds.

Does your day feel ruled by your shoulds, or are you decently good at setting aside the shoulds from time to time and prioritizing other things?

I’ve known about the podcast Start Up for a while now.  Josh listened to it as each episode went up and encouraged me to do the same.  But I’m not a business person.  I’m not interested in business.  I’m not interested in listening to people talk about investors and legal wranglings and everything that goes into making a lucrative endeavour.  I like money insofar as what it can get me, but I don’t really want to hear about it.  At all.

But the twins’ camp is an hour and a half roundtrip drive, twice a day, so I needed something to fill those three hours.  I listen to two other Gimlet Media productions — Reply All and Mystery Show — and decided to give Start Up a chance.

I really wish I had listened to this sooner*.

It’s about starting up a media company, but it’s not really about starting up a media company.  It’s more about finding the energy to believe in your idea, in taking big risks without knowing whether you’ll totally regret them in the future.  It’s about getting other people to buy into your vision.  It’s about letting other people in and being creative and finding your audience.

It’s about being really really really vulnerable.

There are so few times in life that someone holds open the door and allows you to see the stumbles and falls that brought them to their success.  I mean, yes, there are plenty of artists and entrepreneurs who give a line or two in a larger interview alluding to the fact that the road wasn’t smooth.  You get a sense that they may have had nights here and there where they were filled with doubt.

But this is an entire podcast where the emotions on every step of the journey are laid bare.  It can be confusing when we only see the highlight reel from someone else’s life and it doesn’t match with our experience.  So I’m grateful for this podcast; for letting us peek inside and see it all.

Alex Blumberg allows us to listen to him bumble through his first attempt at securing an investor.  He tells us all the naming ideas that ended up in the reject pile before they settled on Gimlet Media (and how they even came to that name in the first place — hint, sometimes you need to turn to outside help despite feeling like you should do everything yourself).  We get to hear him negotiate a relationship with the man who became his business partner, and both of them give us access to their private conversations with their wives, discussing their feelings.

As you listen, your insecurities begin to feel normal, like they’re part of any creative process and their absence would be detrimental to your success.

My friend, Jill, tried to convince me recently that all of us are entrepreneurs.  That I’m a novelist entrepreneur, and other people are breastfeeding advice entrepreneurs or depression support entrepreneurs or baking entrepreneurs.  That getting paid is what separates work from a hobby.

I’m not sure I agree with her, and I still wouldn’t call myself an entrepreneur, but there is a lot of crossover between creating a business and creating anything else in this world.  So I’m really grateful for Alex Blumberg for putting all of it out there over the airwaves because it has definitely made me feel more confident in my endeavours, or, at the very least, not so alone when insecurity hits.

* If you do start listening to it, they’re on their second season.  So go back to the first episode of the first season to hear how Gimlet Media came to be.

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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Wired had an article a few years ago (written by Jonah Lehrer, so it may not be as factual as I wish) about a pill being developed a la Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  He writes,

Even more startling, an equally small family of compounds could turn out to be a universal eraser of history, a pill that we could take whenever we wanted to forget anything.  And researchers have found one of these compounds.  In the very near future, the act of remembering will become a choice.

As someone who constantly fears about forgetting things, I’m not sure I would be able to bring myself to swallow the pill, but I suppose my feelings would change if I was trying to forget something incredibly traumatic that was impacting my day-to-day life.

Would you use it if you could erase one memory but have all the rest of your memories remain intact?

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored posts.

Truman has pneumonia.  Remember a few weeks ago when he had a respiratory infection, and the sneezing didn’t go away with the antibiotics so I tried changing to a 100% more delicious bedding?  On Thursday he started wheezing again, so I took him back to the vet for chest x-rays.  One lung is completely filled with fluid, and they needed to give him oxygen.

(What does a guinea pig look like on oxygen, my friend asked.  I don’t know.  They wouldn’t let me go back there.  Maybe because I was crying.)

Pneumonia is better than cancer, which was the other idea they were entertaining.  I felt sick the ride out to the vet, but she reassured me that the fact that his appetite and personality are normal is a good sign.  He’s on another course of antibiotics.

She also told me (not to brag) that he is the sweetest, most easy-going guinea pig in the world, and that he is quite the little lover.  I’m assuming she meant that in the platonic, loving sense of the term.  He is a little lover.  The Wolvog dryly informed the vet that Truman is my third child.  She gave a nervous laugh, thinking he was joking, but the kids stared at her, hard.

He is my sweet baby boy.  And hopefully he’ll be better soon.

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Josh fixed our freezer.  We had an appointment for someone to come over and fix it (the freezer drain was clogged with ice), but I looked up instructions online and wanted to try it ourselves.  So after a day of guinea pig chest x-rays, we emptied the freezer, unplugged the machine, and spent a half hour trying to figure out how to remove the back so we could get at the drain.

It took about an hour to take everything apart, clean it out with hot water, and put everything back together.

The freezer is totally quiet.

I called to cancel the service appointment.  When the guy answering the phone asked me why, I crowed, “because we fixed it ourselves!”  He was not nearly excited enough.  So I said it several more times.  He still didn’t show proper excitement.  Then I gave up.  And I’ll say it to you:

We fixed it ourselves!

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The twins are huge fans of Welcome to Night Vale.  But imagine their horror when signs went up around the neighbourhood announcing a Street Cleaning Day.  The ChickieNob immediately shrieked, “run, run, stay calm, run!”

This is the episode:

Run!

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Someone erected a small cross on the side of the road near our house.  I would have missed it if the kids weren’t in camp; it’s not a direction I normally drive.  The cross is gone.  Or, rather, it’s on its side in the grass.  I sometimes think about stopping my car and setting it back up except I don’t know why it’s there.

The cross doesn’t look like other crosses that sometimes mark the place where a car crashed.  There are no flowers, no teddy bears, no neat white wooden cross purchased at a craft store.

This cross is made out of sticks and the base is a styrofoam block painted black.  There is black fabric draped over the crossed sticks.

I wonder who put it there and why.  And why they haven’t returned to set it upright again.  Or how it got knocked down in the first place.

Side note: Tomorrow is #MicroblogMonday.  Get writing.

We were at the pool and Josh leaned over and said, “Mark Zuckerberg’s wife is pregnant.”

I hummed to let him know I heard, and then he continued. “She’s pregnant after many miscarriages, and he talked about it in the post.”

At the time of writing this, 893,860 had liked the post. There were 23,967 shares. That means a lot of people — almost a million people — read it on Facebook. Additional people read about it through the news outlets.

Which means a lot of people in the world read this:

We want to share one experience to start. We’ve been trying to have a child for a couple of years and have had three miscarriages along the way.

He explained: “You start making plans, and then they’re gone. It’s a lonely experience.”

And later, he pointed out that the silence surrounding miscarriage needs to end: “In today’s open and connected world, discussing these issues doesn’t distance us; it brings us together. It creates understanding and tolerance, and it gives us hope.”

Thank you, Mr. Zuckerberg, for writing this post.  You’re right; we do need to talk about it with each other.  And, really, is there a better place to do that than online?  Congratulations on your baby; may it be an easy pregnancy and an easy delivery with happy first days.