Hey nerds1,
I have an all powerful vacuum, like the eye of Sauron. One pass for cat hair, fluff, bits of paper from my daughter's crafting, beads, you name it, it's fucking got that shit in its grip. However, I’ve spent the PAST SIX MONTHS complaining about the degradation of its suction.
Of course, I forget this brutal truth until I pull the very heavy vacuum from the basement upstairs, unwind the cord, move everything off the floor, and start vacuuming to remember, oh that's right, this bloody thing isn’t working!
And of course I don't have time to deal with it because I've got company coming over and if there is one hill I’ll die on it’s not seeing gross cat hair stuck to the bottom of my guests socks.
I'm in a rush so I do a sufficient job (this would not make my mother happy) and I put the beast away grumbling and make a mental note to check the vacuum and figure out what's going on.
This has been happening FOR SIX MONTHS.
This is the kind of thing I call a little niggle.
Little niggles are things that have a repeated impact on your daily life, and yet you don't do anything about them because you don't have any time. And because they’re little you rationalize it’s not worth your time to fix them.
Little niggles have a huge compounding impact on your life. Let's extrapolate my vacuum little niggle: Six months, say 15 minutes per vacuuming session, once a week and Google tells me I’ve spent 390 minutes being annoyed by a vacuum!
I have spent 6.5 HOURS of my life being annoyed and then shaming myself every time that I STILL HAVEN’T FIXED THE FUCKING VACUUM. That's a bloody big niggle.
When my husband went away, (read my routine went out the window so I could smoke weed whenever I felt like it), I actually sat down to look at the bottom of my vacuum. I thought there might be a couple of hairs or threads…
um…..just a couple of threads.
I sew my own clothes and 95% of this is self inflicted by throwing loose threads on the floor and thinking the vacuum will pick those up later.
I spent eight or nine minutes with scissors clipping and cleaning the vacuum head, and man, was it satisfying.
This pile of thread and dust made me feel like I’d run 10K!
Not only did the act feel great, I was also incredibly proud of myself for actually doing the thing!
Subconsciously and consciously for six months I've been dreading vacuuming because of the "this thing doesn’t suck" dance.
And now I feel a little bit lighter and my carpet is so god damn clean you could sniff coke off it.
So that’s the little niggle I fixed this week. I want to hear from you about your little niggles.
With love and less vacuuming frustration,
Annabel
xxoo
If you made it all the way down here (thank you!) please hit the ❤️ button at the top or bottom of this email. Maybe if you really loved it share it with a friend, or leave me a comment below. Any of these actions support my work and make me feel like I’m not shouting into a fucking void. Word! ❤️
🔔 Subscribe for posts about mental health, perimenopause, world’s shortest book reviews, and lately witches.
I’m using nerds in the best possible way. Nerdship: How we love a thing with such verocity that we annoy others, and then one magical day we find other people who feel the same way about the thing we love. That is nerdship.
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Lol I loved this. And making me so excited to be back in the land of legal weed in one short week!!