How to impulsively thrive
When you live ADHD Hermit Life and want to incorporate novelty
This Hermit likes to stay at home
I try my best to embrace novelty while staying in my comfort zone. By that I mean the convenient, air-conditioned, cool region of my room. Which I never really want to leave.
But there is the one place in this world which I also rather enjoy spending time in, which is the National Library of Singapore.
In the spirit of embracing tiny experiments, I got out of my house, took a long trip out to the National Library and even strolled around a mall I have not visited in 7 years.
This is an evolution of my week long tiny experiment to do A Zettel A Day, it is a concept from
’s book Tiny Experiments. The goal is to discover what activities bring you energy and what drains you. Discover what kind of lifestyle suits you & excites you through tiny little experiments for a fixed period of time.Field Notes
Ending the Day with Food
Here's a sense of the atmosphere. It is not exactly quiet, but it is nice and I have a little booth to myself so I can finally get away from the rest of the world.
This meal cost me around $16 SGD which is a bit pricy.
For comparison, I finished off with a bit of dessert. This is a red bean bun that cost me $1 SGD.
I also found these ensaymadas, which are a foreign dessert to me. And I kept seeing these on YouTube.
So I bought a Frosty Ensaymada and I am eating it now as I edit this article. They are a bit sweet, but it's really interesting to have cheese be part of my dessert and the saltiness actually really Goes very well with this treat. I find that the bread is a little bit too difficult to chew away, which means that the cream inside makes a mess.
Window Shopping
I also took a quick trip to the supermarket because I finished drinking my bottle of mineral water and I needed to go and get some water. This actually happens to me pretty often when I go outside because I get through the bottle of water I bring really fast, and there aren't always water coolers available. I think it's also because Singapore's weather has been really warm recently.
Tiny experiment field note observation on energy levels: I actually feel a lot better after walking around in the supermarket.
I think it is seeing all the food and just like a volume of goods that are around that gives me this feeling of everything is plentiful. I don't actually feel the urge to buy any of this. It's just nice to walk around and see that there's lots of stuff that I could go and buy if I really wanted to.
Travel Home
Even the trip back on the MRT brought interesting observations because I'm finally looking around at the world instead of being absorbed in my phone. I just noticed that the floor of the train actually has drawings of foods that you can eat in Singapore.
That said, this journey did rather exhaust me. I always feel rather tired when I finally get home, when I can finally shower and cool down after the trip from outside and part of that if I'm being honest is just the fact that I have to wear a bra when I'm outside for decency’s sake. Even a sports bra can be rather uncomfortable. It is warm (Singapore is so hot) and it feels kind of tight because if you want any sort of support, it has to be tight.
Also the most exhausting part of trying to get home is coordinating for pickup, it is a bit spoiled to get picked from the train station but without a car for the last stretch, I feel suffocated by heat exhaustion and there is the petrol fumes all around.
Conclusion
I am really glad that Morning!Pamela was so inspired and actually got out of my room to go out, do things and see things. This trip to the library is a bit like an experience that I'm glad I had, even if I don't feel up to doing This again for at least another week.
I feel very inspired by what I've read. I want to watch some YouTube videos on sewing and maybe practice. On a piece of cloth, because I've never actually looked at the bias of the cloth before. I just sewed something together and made a singlet that I could wear. It didn't look very professional, people could tell, but I just needed something that was functional + customized to my size.
Reading these two books today really was not about the knowledge that was in the books. I didn't actually get that far in the philosophy of history. Book, and this sewing book is more about sewing techniques and the absolute basics of hand sewing. When I actually want to learn about how to do chaotic sewing (more intuition-based) instead of working with patterns and with a focus on altering existing pieces of clothing so I can make them suit me (my curvier body) instead of trying to make a piece of clothing entirely from a pattern or start with what kind of fabric I want to use. This book is a bit too advanced for me and also a bit too basic at the same time.
But just the process of reading alone inspired me to think so much more deeply and I'm mostly thinking about things that were already in my head, but I didn't connect up the very Ideas until I had the stimulus of the philosophy history book, and then I had questions. I had something to build off of, to poke out ideas that had been lingering in my head and it gave me a push to go down rabbitholes in my own way.
The conclusion of this tiny experiment is that I absolutely benefit from going out to a different setting, the physicality of books and the ability to browse through different topics (move from topic to topic as I stroll through shelves) is really good to inspire me.
Realistically, I shouldn't try to aim to go to the library more than once a week because the entire process of going out is very tiring, but I can actually treat it as exercise because my blood sugar really did go down a lot more easily today on its own, even without me taking medication despite eating a carb-heavy meal that spiked it really high. I think it's the heat exhaustion and just that I'm moving a lot more than I usually do.