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Ducks and Chucks,
First of all, I'm ducking sorry that it's taken me so long to write this ducking post! Honestly, we've been at sea a little—and not in a flipper-tickling way. On this sea, the happy salmon were not caressing my underside and I felt no salty breeze on my plush feathers. Instead, there was much seaweed and stressed beak-hole picking.
The problem? I lead two lives. In the first, I'm a pond manager at a busy pond. In the second, I'm an emotional support duck for my human, Star. And recently, Star has been feeling stressed. Why? Because they try to do about seventy things at once and have no ducking idea what will work and what won't! This leads to entrepreneurial non-plush panic.
As a result of supporting Star through their maze of emotional pondweed, I've had to think about why the duck I'm writing this blog. And you know what I came up with? To feel better. So that's my blog-goal from now on:
Let's consider ways of feeling super-ducking better.
To help with Star's stressed beak-holes, I ordered them an old book called Calm At Work by Paul Wilson. In that old but awesome tome, which Star first bought approximately 120 years ago when they were still living in England, I duckscovered the following exercise: Pretend to B.
At the risk of ducksplaining a thing you may already know, Type A plushies/humans like me and Star tend to feel like we're on the clock. We're usually highly competitive and judge ourselves a lot, and we don't like to stop working. (Star even works when they're sleeping. They wake up with work ideas.) This can cause us a duckload of stress, which, for my own part, explains why I wear out my office butt-cushions at a rate of about one per quarter—because when I sit on my tail, I stress-wriggle like those non-caressing salmon who skitter straight into your underside when you're going for a "leisurely" dip.
Type B plushies/humans like my best frenemy Sir Mallard tend to be more relaxed and easygoing. In general, they're not so swayed by competition, which is why Mallard enters the Coolest Plush Duck of the Year contest every year—even though he knows he won't win it—just because he likes the process of taking lots of color photos of himself wearing pageboy caps and pastel-colored bows (which he tends to suck). Type B ducks also tend to stay alive longer. (Sir Mallard claims to have been alive since 1856).
You can read more about Type A and B at Simply Psychology, ducks and chucks.
So, this week, courtesy of Paul Wilson's Calm At Work, Star and I are "pretending to B." In other words, we're pretending we're Type B individuals as a way to re-train our thinking. Star is walking around the apartment with a smile on their lips, thinking to themselves how lucky they are. "Look at how fortunate I am right now," they say out loud. "I'm going to take a nice, long break. After all, I have food, a fridge-freezer, a roof over my head, an Etsy store with printable cards and calendars in it, and seven of those gingerbread cookies we bought for New Year."
Actually, there are only six. I'll be breaking this news to Star later.
Care to join us with this "pretending to B" thingy? If you're already on top of all that, perhaps you could pretend to B something else, like a plush reindeer, Pooh Bear, or Lizzo. Up to you, really.
Anyway, I'll report back shortly. I'm hoping to blog here in small or bigger ways at least once a week. And friends, whether you're human, plush, plastic, terracotta or something else, please remember you deserve some peace.
I'll be on the pond doing a quacker-meditation. Don't forget to love yourself/your plush.
More soon, I promise.
Loves ya,
Duck T.