Hey there, it's Susan Peirce Thompson, and welcome to the Weekly Vlog. I've been sharing about all the anniversaries that have come up recently, and it dawned on me today as I was trying to figure out what to shoot this vlog on that it's nine years ago this month, I think the beginning of August 2015, that I started releasing a weekly vlog. I got out my calculator: 52 weeks, nine years. It's like 270 vlogs, and I almost never miss, I mean, I don't even miss once a year. I don't even miss once every other year on average. I've missed releasing of vlog on Wednesday, but either three or four times in those nine years. Really not often. For all intents and purposes, I am always shooting a vlog that comes out every week, and I thought I'd give you a little insight into how that happens.
I usually film the vlog that will come out on Wednesday of that week on Monday morning, and I've got a 10:00 AM Zoom that happens, so I have to get it out. I have to shoot it before 10:00 AM, so I have to shower and get the vlog shot, and I've got just a little window of time to get it done. Then the team does all the processing and stuff that they do for the vlog. My job is to go into my basement, roll the camera, take the little memory card, upload the video to Google Drive, and tell the team that it's ready.
I have ways of coming up with topics. In my phone, I've got an Evernote, which is basically just a running list of thoughts that's called, “Future Vlog Topics.” It's a long note. I mean, if I scroll down to the bottom of it, it goes way back to thoughts I had years and years and years ago. I try to remember to delete topics that I've used already on there, but I just capture thoughts when they come to me or I add links to articles that people send me that would be good to talk about someday or whatever. Then people write in topics and that's separate. The team collects those. We get an average of one a day of those. If you do the math, I'm not doing 30 blogs a month. I'm only doing four or five, so most of those topics will never get used. They get put on a spreadsheet, the team organizes them by ones that stand out to them as being really good ones, and they highlight those or put them on a separate tab. There's a big Excel spreadsheet in the sky that I refer to sometimes if I need a topic. Often, I come up with a topic just out of my week, something happens, and I have a topic. That's part of it, is sort of having a thought of what to talk about. Sometimes I really want to talk about science. Sometimes I want to share a life lesson or something that has dawned on me through the week. Then other times, like today, I come to the vlog in a state, like an emotional state where I don't feel like it's so easy to talk about anything.
Shooting the vlog for me feels like truth serum almost. I come here in front of this camera, I look into this lens, there's a little red dot above the camera lens, and I look into that camera lens, and I feel you there. I feel thousands of people, I feel you, and whatever I'm going to say, it has to come from a very deep, very genuine place, or I just can't do it. If I, I'm a very emotional creature, extremely so. I mean, if you look at my astrology chart, it's just watery. Just four things in Cancer, sun rising sign, Saturn, Mercury in Cancer, moon in Scorpio, Jupiter in Pisces. It is just so much water. That's kind of how I am. I'm very deep, very emotional, very watery. And if I'm affected by life, it's hard for me not to bring that into the vlog. I mean, one of the vlog titles that I remember most clearly is the morning after a binge, because this was way back 2015 or 2016. I just binged my brains out, and I was so hung over from the food I could barely function, and I had to shoot a vlog that morning. I just talked about where I was at and the eating and how I was picking myself up from that eating. Thank God I haven't been there in a lot of years.
Anyway, today though, I'm affected by, I just spent the weekend with a very, very dear friend who's dying. And although she's a very, very dear friend, it was my first time meeting her. We met remotely because she sent me a Facebook message during a launch, and I responded, and we just struck up conversation and we became very close. She lives in Appalachia, and she just drove up for the weekend and she's dying, and she's not yet at peace with dying. We don't know how long she has, but not a year, days, weeks, months. Hard to say, right? But she's losing her functionality very quickly.
Then this morning, I got a call from someone who was really affected by something I said about their weight. I mean, come to me for help with their weight and their food plan. I'd made some sort of comment of like, well, you could stand to lose a little weight. I didn't mean like you're fat. What I meant was you're eating a lot of food for your height and your age and your size and your weight is trending down already anyway, and by the numbers. I know her, I've met her. It's reasonable to think that it would be healthy if she let some of that weight come off, but she was feeling really comfortable in her body, and it sent her reeling that I said that, and I'm so glad she brought it to me. I will shoot a vlog on that topic at some point, but I'm not ready to yet. I'm not. This is one of the things, is both of these things, my friend who's dying, I will shoot a vlog on her. I've asked her permission. She wants me to shoot a vlog after she dies, and I will. This topic of body image and weight and how much society's norms have crept into my mind and our collective minds, and how much we need to make sure that Bright Line Eating® is not just a cult of thinness and how hard that is in this society anyway, these are both topics that are not even half-baked. I can't shoot today's vlog on those topics.
By and large, I only let myself shoot a vlog topic once, and I have to make sure that I would not regret shooting it because I'm not going to shoot it again. I have to know that I've said at least the preponderance of what needed to be said on that topic before I do a topic. I thought, actually today I was going to shoot the vlog on the book, “ON THIS BRIGHT DAY.” I need to shoot a follow-up vlog to wrap up the whole ON THIS BRIGHT DAY launch. There's some things that have happened in that book launch process that are important and need to come out to the community and just the, I want to share with you the amazing follow up things that happened with the contest winners and stuff. But I'm not ready to shoot that vlog either, because I have to talk to the team and make sure that I know everything I have to say because I only get one shot at it, and there's a bunch that has to go into that vlog. So, all this is in me as I'm showering this morning, getting ready to do my hair and do my makeup and get ready to shoot this vlog within this tiny window of time. And the pressure's on. And I started scrolling through my vlog topics in my Evernote file, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. Can I talk about this? Can I talk about that? I sit down naked at the foot of my bed when I get out of the shower and I cry for a little bit, and I'm scrolling through this file. What could I talk about today? I get to almost the end of this file. Really, I must have put this into that file literally years ago. It's not attributed. I don't know where I got it. I'm imagining maybe I got it off Facebook. I don't know. I don't know who said it. I don't know who posted it. I have no idea. But I finally found something that I could talk about today, and here it is. It's a bunch of bunny slipper mantras:
• When I have an extra hard day, I will take extra good care of myself.
• When I'm under a lot of stress, I will treat myself with a lot of kindness.
• When I feel more overwhelmed than usual, I will take more time to rest than usual.
• When my emotions are strong, my self-compassion will also be strong.
• When I'm feeling additional tension, I will make space for additional relaxation.
• When I am feeling deeply, I will also practice accepting my emotions deeply.
• When I am really tired, I will be really gentle with myself.
That's all I could resonate with this morning. I'm giving myself permission for a kind of piece together with duct tape and chicken wire and a rubber band, little vlog topic here. And it's okay. It's okay. We have such a sensitive community. I'm so sensitive. We're all just showing up as best we can for this Bright Day. Sometimes that day is vlog day, and so it's just got to be okay exactly as it is. So, on this Bright Day, I made extra space for an unusual little vlog topic on bunny slipper mantras. I hope whoever posted that, if you're watching or listening, make yourself known. We want to give you credit. I want to give you credit. I'm sorry for not capturing where this came from, but that's the weekly vlog. I'll see you next week.
