I don’t do Black Friday

Well 1 holiday down, 1.5 to go. I don’t fully count New Year’s because I’ve traditionally always just stayed home for that. When I was kid, when I was single, before kids, after kids…it was never a huge celebratory holiday for me.

As much as I was dreading the holidays, I’m clearly making it through right now. I mean, it’s still depressing but I’m really working hard to keep myself distracted with work.

It must be working because I’m actually making progress. The site prototype is done. I just finished designing my business cards, and even placed the order yesterday. As I type, I’m waiting for some new tooling I’m incorporating into my WordPress workflow this time around, to finish installing on my laptop.

Just a month ago, I was having an extremely hard time imagining just being at this exact point. I’m still a ways from where I need to be, but I’m so tired of dismissing the small victories in my life.

Lately, I’ve been feeling like that’s been at the root of what has held me back all these years. My whole life, if it wasn’t complete it wasn’t enough. So to combat this, I’ve started being very deliberate in allowing myself to feel accomplishment whenever progress is simply made.

So far so good, it’s keeping me more optimistic than I thought I’d be 30 days ago.

Another accomplishment that’s helping tremendously is that I am done with Christmas shopping.

I don’t believe in Black Friday, or even Cyber Monday for that matter. I feel like the sales are an illusion days, weeks, months in the making. And I think it is cruel to make people working retail, who already rarely get any holidays off as it is, leave their families Thanksgiving night to come deal with savages who will let their fists fly to secure some trendy overpriced toy for their spoiled children, who will break it or lose interest in the space of a week.

I make it a point not to leave my house on Black Friday, and that’s something about me that will never change.

Black Friday aside, I finished my entire list between Saturday and Tuesday. Most of it was online so the last of it is being delivered by Dec 2nd, and the last few things I was able to find quickly and locally while my kids were in school.

And guess what…the sales are still active as I write this on the following Friday. It seems like so many people just live to be whipped up into a pointless frenzy.

I’ll never understand that but, I don’t need to. My list, albeit short (immediate family and secret sister only) is done. Just gotta wrap it all. And to that end, I’m hatching a scheme to sneak things one by one so I’m not up till 3am wrapping it all the night before. We’ll see how that works out.

Well enough babbling, I need to drop off my kindergartner and get back to my tooling setup so I can finally start building my re-designed site. I’m more excited to do this than I’ve been about anything for a while.

Tags: #blackfriday, #cybermonday, #entrepreneur, #mentalhealth, #newapproach, #progress, #smallvictories, #webdesigner, #webdeveloper, #wingingit