clown shoes squeaking in the distance

“In conversation, do you have a tendency to jump in before the other person is done speaking? You might be an interrupter — or you could be what linguists call a “cooperative overlapper.”

Like interrupting, cooperative overlapping can be perceived as rude or dismissive in certain settings or among certain people, but the intent behind the behavior is anything but. According to Georgetown University professor of linguistics and author Deborah Tannen, who first introduced the term, cooperative overlapping occurs when the listener starts talking along with the speaker, not to cut them off but rather to validate or show they’re engaged in what the other person is saying.

“I coined the term to distinguish this type of talking-along, which encourages a speaker to keep going, from interruption, where a listener starts to speak while another is speaking in order to take the floor,” she told HuffPost. (She also uses terms like “enthusiastic listenership” and “participatory listenership” to illustrate this concept.)

     Doing stuff sucks. Whether it’s because of sensory issues or executive dysfunction, even the most basic tasks can sometimes feel daunting and insurmountable. The following are a few tips that I’ve found make it a little easier for me to reach the finish line, and I’m hoping they’ll be able to help a few of you out, as well.

“I need to have a shower. Why can’t I just do this? It’s so simple.”

     This was the thought going through my head this morning. I have since had my shower, but it was not this sentence that finally got me to do it. I’m going to break down how I altered this thought to be more manageable.

    First thing is to remove the self-berating language. If a finish line in a race was on fire and covered in spikes, I wouldn’t want to be moving toward it, so I remove the spiky language from my metaphorical finish line to make the task more inviting.

“I need to have a shower.”

    As a sentence, it makes sense. However, the simplicity can be misleading. Instead of thinking of it as “having a shower”, let’s break it into more specific steps.

“I need to take off my clothes and get in the shower.”

“I need to rinse myself with water.”

“I need to lather shampoo in my hair. Then I need to use body wash on my body.”

“I need to rinse off all of the soap.”

    Needless to say, this was too many steps and my brain wasn’t in the mood to cooperate. The finish line felt too far away, so it couldn’t muster up the motivation to even try to reach it. I could try to reason with it: “You know you’ll feel better once you’re clean”, “if you do it now you’ll get it over with”, but ADHD and ASD don’t always care about reason.

    So I moved the finish line.

“I’m going to rinse myself off in the shower.”

    My brain was fighting me on this, so I needed to compromise. Suddenly I was staring down only half the number of steps I had just a few minutes ago. And two, compared to the previous four, didn’t sound quite as bad. My brain and I had reached an agreement that wasn’t perfect, but was better than nothing.

(As a side note, changing “I need to” into “I’m going to” is also something I find helps me get motivated to actually follow through on a task, as well as actually saying the statement out loud. Your mileage may vary.)

   The thing is… once I was in the shower, I was able to complete all four steps. I was already halfway there and my routine instincts kicked in to carry me the rest of the way. Will that always happen? Probably not. But in that case I’d still at least have done a partial job.

Sometimes, just getting started really is the hardest part.

    I’ve used a similar strategy with other tasks, as well. “I need to do the dishes” became “I’m going to wash a fork”. Once I had the dishcloth in my hand, I realised it would be way more efficient to wash multiple forks at once, and once those were done, I already had a soapy dishcloth ready so I did a few plates, too.

    Sometimes, even the modified finish line ends up being too much. This morning I told myself I’d do a workout just for the duration of a 4-minute song. By the time I was 3 minutes in, I decided I was done. And hey, that’s still three more minutes than if I had done nothing.

We toss out over 80 pounds of textiles each year. These textiles are often made of plastic materials (polyester, nylon), made in unethical conditions, dyed with harsh dyes that often get put into the rivers, etc. Even a single cotton shirt releases carbon emissions and uses tons of water. 

So the best thing to prevent the unsustainable growth of the fashion industry is to make sure that your clothing lasts as long as possible. To do so, mending clothing is a must. So here are some resources to help you learn how to do various things, such as sewing a button, to tailoring clothes, or even upcycling old clothing into new styles. 

* How to sew on three different types of button

* How to hand sew on a patch on a torn pair of jeans

* How to sew up a hole in an old shirt

* How to sew a simple T-shirt

* How to upcycle old clothing into new clothing

* More upcycle and sewing techniques

* How to repair a damaged sock

* How to do an invisible stitch

* 3 different stitches to work with for different results

* How to make a T-shirt smaller so it fits you better

* How to make repairs to your shoes

These are just a few of the things that you can do in order to make sure that your clothing lasts for a long time. Nobody wants to keep buying new clothing, as it is expensive and wasteful. 

me: