How Not To Take A Compliment.

January 30, 2018 ~ Joanne Sarginson ~ 11 Comments

I am not very good at accepting compliments.

My brain doesn’t know how to process them which is silly because receiving a compliment should be a relatively simple process:

1. Receive compliment.
2. Thank person who gave you the compliment.
3. Enjoy boost in self-esteem produced by compliment.

However, I tend to be quite self-critical and therefore I sometimes struggle to align compliments with my vision of myself.

As a result, whenever I receive a compliment, I tend to freak out and do everything in my power to deflect it.

I am trying to get better at handling compliments by reframing how I perceive them.

After all, a compliment is basically a verbal gift.

If someone bought you a physical gift, refusing to accept it and saying ‘no this is not right for me TAKE IT BACK’ would be incredibly rude.

Therefore, even if you don’t 100% agree with a compliment, you should just accept it anyway – out of respect for the person giving the compliment and also yourself.

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The Problem With Inspirational Quotes.

January 17, 2018January 20, 2019 ~ Joanne Sarginson ~ 20 Comments

When I am browsing (aka. procrastinating and generally wasting my life) on the internet, I frequently come across inspirational quotes on various social media platforms.

I’m sure lots of people find these quotes empowering.

However, I tend to find them a bit overwhelming.

Although I think that self-belief is a positive thing in many ways, I sometimes find that relying on myself to be the sole engineer of my own success can cause me to put a lot of pressure on myself.

I sometimes feel underqualified to deal with the task of leading my own life as if whoever is responsible for bestowing the gift of life forgot to include the instruction manual when they gave one to me.

I often try to be more proactive and make plans in an attempt to map out my future in a structured way.

Making plans makes me feel momentarily powerful as if I am the sort of person who can effectively navigate life and exert control over the things that happen to me.

However, what normally happens is that I end up sitting with the plan in front of me with absolutely no idea how to implement it – which is a bit like trying to use a map with faulty navigation equipment.

I tend to make most of my life plans in January.

Like most people, every January, I decide that I am immediately going to reconstruct myself as a new healthier, happier, more productive human being.

For a brief period of time, I genuinely believe that I possess the ability to do this.

However, it soon becomes apparent that this is not the case.

It turns out that making a change in your life requires more than temporary resolve.

It involves taking your initial motivation and transforming it into habit – it is a commitment to continue performing behaviours that may initially feel unnatural and are sometimes the complete opposite of those that you have exhibited your entire life until they become integrated into your daily routine.

It is easy to make a strong statement on January 1st, experience a setback a few weeks later and immediately assume that your entire self-improvement endeavour is doomed.

So this year, I am resolving to not to put too much pressure on myself, accept that setbacks are part of the process and to remember all that I can really do is try my best to navigate life whilst attempting to be the most functional, together version of myself that I can be.

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I Am a Very Small Fish in a Big, Massive, Confusing Ocean.

January 8, 2018January 8, 2018 ~ Joanne Sarginson ~ 5 Comments

When I was in school, I used to feel quite important.

My social circle was quite small and I was confident that I was going to achieve all of my goals and everything was going to go swimmingly.

I was essentially was a big fish in a small pond.

However, as I have moved up through the educational system, I have gradually come to realise that this is not the case.

It turns out that I am a teeny tiny fish in a significantly larger body of water.

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I Think I Am Suffering From Holiday Season Withdrawal…

January 2, 2018January 11, 2019 ~ Joanne Sarginson ~ 9 Comments

January is quite a confusing time of year for me.

In the UK, the majority of holidays are concentrated between the months of October and December.

Although I no longer enjoy Halloween and Christmas as much as I used to when I was younger, I still like using the holidays as an excuse to consume a copious amount of food and drink before justifying the consequent damage to my waistline/ general health using the phrase ‘it’s *insert holiday name here* – I deserve to treat myself.’

In addition, the holidays provide winter with a kind of structure, helping to break it down into smaller, more manageable chunks.

There is always an occasion to prepare for and, up until the end of December, it is possible to propel myself through the long dark months of cold miserable weather on a tide of festive merriment.

However, eventually January comes around and I am suddenly released into the new year with nothing on the immediate horizon.

I never know what to do with myself without the incessant stream of holidays that have kept me occupied since late October.

new year

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How I Learned The Truth About Santa Claus.

December 24, 2017January 15, 2019 ~ Joanne Sarginson ~ 18 Comments

When I was younger, my main ambition in life was to own a dog.

Unfortunately, my parents were reluctant to buy one because they both worked long hours and thought that looking after a dog would be impractical.

When I was seven, I decided to take matters into my own hands and actively wrote to Santa asking for a dog.

At the time, I thought that I was being really crafty .

I thought that I had devised a cunning plan to outwit my parents by going behind their backs in order to obtain what they had previously denied me. As a child, I had a very intense and vivid imagination and invested heavily in fantasies and delusions.

As a result, I had complete faith in Santa’s ability to provide, not only free 24-hour delivery of a live animal, but also a complimentary kennel construction and installation service.

I was therefore slightly disappointed when all that I received on Christmas Day was a DVD of Disney’s ‘101 Dalmatians’.

At this point, any sensible child would have learned to monitor their expectations and set their sights a bit lower.

Not me.

In fact, the following year, I decided to up the ante.The prospect of having a magical flying unicorn excited me – not only would it be an efficient mode of transport but it could also act as a symbol of my inherent coolness which I could use to improve my social status on the playground.

Christmas day arrived and I rushed downstairs, only to find a distinctly non-unicorn sized package waiting for me under the tree.

Attached to the package was the following note:Inside the package was a ‘My Little Pony’.

I’m not going to lie – the ‘My Little Pony’ was a MASSIVE downgrade from a magical flying unicorn.

I told my Dad that I ‘ho-ho-hoped Santa was very disappointed with himself’ but apparently this was ‘slightly out of tune with the spirit of Christmas’ so I brushed the hair of my ‘My Little Pony’ and tried very hard to look as if look like the process of doing so filled me with festive merriment.

Over the course of the following year, I discovered the Harry Potter books.

My favourite Harry Potter book was ‘Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Askaban’, mostly because I was borderline obsessed with Buckbeak the Hippogriff.

As a far as I was concerned, a hippogriff was a cooler, edgier version of a magical flying unicorn.

I decided that I wanted to go to Hogwarts and buy Buckbeak off Hagrid.

My dad once told me that if you want to get anywhere in life you have to learn to work your contacts so, that year, I wrote a letter to Santa asking him for a letter to Hogwarts.At the time, I thought that relying on a fictional character to help me escape into a fictional world was a completely legitimate, logistically-sound plan.

However, on Christmas day, I was once again disappointed when I received a copy of ‘Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire’ along with a note that explained that all I needed to go to Hogwarts was my ‘imagination’.

By this point, I was getting quite frustrated with Santa.

However, despite repeated disappointments over the course of several years, I still fervently believed that he was real.

In fact, my brother, who was two years younger than me, discovered the truth about Santa before I did.
Evidently, I thought that Santa was having some sort of confidence crisis and that my pep talk would provide him with the self-esteem boost to cement his place in concrete reality.

I was quite upset when I didn’t receive a reply.

I saw it as a personal rejection.

After all, I had made the effort to write a letter to Santa and, even if he wasn’t real, the least he could do was write back to me to confirm his lack of existence.

I obviously couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that this lack of existence may have somewhat impaired his ability to reply to me – in fact, in order for him to reply to me he would have had to sent me a message from an alternate fictional dimension, something that would have essentially involved defying the laws of existence.

Nowadays, I have a better understanding of the boundaries between fiction and reality.

That being said, a small part of me still kind of believes Santa Claus is real.

However, I know that if he does exist, he is probably struggling to update his business model in order to remain competitive in an overly saturated, technologically-advanced modern market.

If you enjoyed this post, feel free to check out some of my other posts. For more blog posts and drawings, you can also follow me on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.