Written in 2017, when my daughter was two and I was working full time:
Wow, I have so many feelings about this app. I committed to it deeply in my heart and soul, since I finished reading the Power of Habit and I felt that I can no longer go on “being a sleep walking murderer, gambling the family’s money away on the party boat and killing thousands of English people in subways by doing a shitty job at work.”
After reading the book, I started experimenting with the habit loop. It went poorly though.
I would get pretty excited and then think of 100s of changes I wanted to make to myself, and my life, and my home, “that day”… so surges of overwhelming change would happen, and then I would collapse in an overworked pile of shame and regret, mostly the same person…
Then I found the Fabulous app and it seemed like it would be a good way to start off, and then I would just keep going on my own, but I was so much more effective with Fabulous than I was without it, that I committed to using it for at least one year straight.
Lesson One from Fabulous: Don’t try to make more than one meaningful change at a time, my brain rewiring itself takes time.
Lesson Two from Fabulous: Don’t think I know how to make things work in my life, that I already know I have’nt made work yet… sometimes arrogance is a prison.
Lesson Three from Fabulous: Don’t work around poorly stored items, put what you need where it will be easiest to use without hunting around.
I started with the Energize yourself journey, because I felt too tired to think straight after work, the baby, and the work of a marriage. I had mixed success following what the app told me to do, but using Fabulous as a tool and brainstorming what I needed to do for myself to meet the end goal, I had complete success. Say what! Yes, I followed their program with my whole heart, but it left me short on energy, so because the desire and the commitment were real, I forged onward to find the caffeine drip system, that in combination with the Fabulous habits of drinking water, eating breakfast and exercising, did energize me enough to stop being a walking zombie-cow (cow because I breast feed all night and day so I can’t sleep or be a real human being – some of you know what I mean).
Next I continued being a better human being, with the Exercise Journey. I didn’t like most of the journeys that were offered, they weren’t all things I needed to learn (like weight loss, sleeping well). But I knew I needed the boundaries and structure that the app provided to grow my habit formation muscles. I hesitated to exercise more, because I didn’t see a reason. I am lucky to be healthy and at a healthy weight, so I really forgot that exercise affects mental flexibility, where I suck. Having a little mental flexibility really helps me not be as mean, to myself and others. If you are someone who always picks on yourself for not doing all 100 errands you were supposed to do, you may enjoy the life that mental flexibility can give you… but anyways, exercise has been really good at reducing my anxiety, helping me write, and helping me be mentally flexible to life changing what I need to, or get to, do that day.
For awhile I was on the Iron Will Journey, I made it a quarter of the way through, but then I fell off because I was having problems getting my check ins to count, I lost all my emotional momentum, and at the same time the Mental Fitness Journey came out, and I really didn’t want to have an iron will (I kind of know how to do that already… my parents were able to have an iron will at the cost of emotional connection to me, and I don’t really want to do that to my child…) so I would rather do the Mental Fitness Journey, which is where I am now, and it is amazing. Most of the suggestions Fabulous suggested I do are things I would not have done otherwise, but they really make my life better… it was a lucky coincidence that I ended up committed to trying whatever Fabulous says to do for two weeks to see how it went, but I now see that I would never have got my life unstuck, by doing what I thought would help, because what I thought would help created the life I felt dissatisfied within…
The concept I’ve been ruminating about the most over, the past few years: “Probleme kann man niemals mit derselben Denkweise lรถsen, durch die sie entstanden sind. Translation: Problems can never be solved with the same way of thinking that created them.” – Albert Einstein
It seems like if it is true, I can’t ever really solve my own problems and I need help, or maybe I can change my consciousness on my own?
Right now, I would rather have help, my consciousness is pretty steady, which has good and bad effects on my life, and my loved ones life. Yes, I am stubborn, my core is persistent, but the stubbornness that says something rude, also works hard everyday putting food on the table, one shouldn’t disregard all the good that comes of stubbornness. Farming is a stubborn way to produce food, being pregnant is a stubborn act, writing books is quite stubborn, when stubbornness is applied towards great things it produces the wonders of the world, the great wall of China ext. The key to really harnessing the core value of persistence, is to own the stubbornness, but learn not to use that one tool for every situation. What really makes stubbornness get out of hand is pride, if you can be humble and stubborn, you can do anything. If you can take the correction of the experts in every field, and stubbornly apply the knowledge, you can do much more with your life, than you could with only the knowledge you yourself bring to the table. But can you be humble enough to admit other people know more than you? Can you handle being wrong sometimes? Your teachers, parents, books, news ext give you incorrect information sometimes, you are wrong when you hold onto the misinformation, can you handle the emotional pain of being wrong? It’s hard to do, but I do because I want the fruit that comes from the pain of being wrong… I want to be better than am now, more than I want to feel right. I want to be right in the future, more than I want to feel right now.
Written in 2019, two years later:
I think it’s been about a year since I stopped using the Fabulous App, it helped me get my feet wet with habit formation and gave me a lot of great information about the science behind habits, but it didn’t offer me what I wanted. It had a lot of health options, but nothing specifically for art, writing, time management, family management, cooking, meal planning. I really benefited by knowing I could take ownership of my life and my time even with kids, but the paths that they wanted me to walk were not the ones I wanted to go down. It took a long time to make sure I wasn’t leaving the app because I couldn’t do what they asked, give up sugar ext. But eventually I realized that Fabulous didn’t allow me any leadership of my life and habits, only management.
Management is how you hack away at the jungle with a machete, leadership is if you are even headed the right way.
Eventually I had to stop managing my life filled with too many things people told me to do, or that I felt I had to do, and start living my best life filled with what truely matters to me personally and by then Fabulous had already helped me get the basics of habit formation down well. I really appriciate that I was able to start waking up early, make a daily schedual for the first time in my life and drink more water, but the eating and exercise recomendations were more pushy and less helpful and eventually taking the suggestions was getting in the way of doing what mattered to me and also taking up the free time that is a premium in my life.
Born to Be Alive 