Turns out, nothing bad happens if...

[HangingOver]

When I arrived into my thirties, like a lot of women I know, I experienced a dip in the amount of energy I found I had to allocate to fucks being given

Since then, I've noticed a number of Eureka moments when Ive realised, "turns out, nothing bad happens if..." and they are for the most part, joyful.

Here are a few of my favourites (personal to me, obviously, I'm sure people in other circs will disagree):

Turns out, nothing bad happens if you don't iron.

Turns out, nothing bad happens if you don't mow your lawn (literally or figuratively).

Turns out, nothing bad happens if you don't wear a padded bra (because I spent my twenties sadly trying to enhance my non-existent norks because "men would notice").

Turns out, nothing bad happens if you wash your hair with shower gel.

Turns out, nothing bad happens if you don't do a patch test 24 hours before colouring.

HBU?

Also...

You use your fingers to apply foundation
You don't rinse your hair with cold water
You're late from time to time due to matters outside your control (just apologise and explain)
You make a tit out of yourself when happy drunk (people are surprisingly fine and understanding with it, and you probably make them feel better about themselves so it's a win-win)
You occasionally cock up at work (again, just apologise and explain)

Nothing bad happens if you cut your own hair... apart from that time I managed to give myself a reverse mullet in my teens. Forty years on and my best friend still takes the piss!

Having said that my current "French bob" is DIY and has garnered many compliments.

You use your fingers to apply foundation

I've literally never done it another way

A friend of mine didn't do a patch test and ended up in hospital.

@Twentypast

A friend of mine didn't do a patch test and ended up in hospital.

Maybe I'd better change the habit of 20+ years then but can anyone tell me about leaving the bottle open once you've mixed a small bit.

You know a thought occurs to me about all the things we are discovering that 'nothi g bad happens' if we do or do t do them.

Where do we get the fear that bad things will happen in the first place?

I think my.mother is the main source of mine..

"Don't go to school in dirty shoes or headmaster will put you in detention..."
Followed by many lost hours scrubbing shoes before I go to school and more hours lost when scrubbing daughters shoes before she went to school.
Bit one day my daughter went to school with dirty shoes and no one cared... Nothing bad happened at all.

My mum would say
"You can't have the same meal 2 days in a row, it is bad for your health"
Nothing bad happened when I made a huge chilli and had it 4 days in row.

My mum would say,
"You must scrub the toilet twice a week"
Nothing bad has happened to me so far and I haven't scrubbed the toilet for 8 days.

I'm starting to think my mum was wrong about lots of things.

A lot of the things people have mentioned on this thread are things I wouldn't bother with anyway. I change my sheets because I like clean sheets and I cook proper meals because I like proper food not because I fear anything bad happening.

Love this.

My philosophy is that there are a few, a very few people in your life whose good opinion of you makes a difference. Including yourself. And unless something you do or don't do damages those relationships, nothing actually bad happens.

After a couple of bad traumas, I got unreasonably cross when my mum told me she had "really bad news" - a shoreline den in a tourist spot we visit had been destroyed in a storm.

I was angry because the last time she told me bad news, I spent weeks crying myself to sleep. I was angry that she made my heart lurch thinking it was the same level of trauma. And that made me decide that I'd never worry about the small things again. Only about losing what matters.

Nothing bad happens if you don't pick up the phone or text back immediately and call back or text them back a but later.
Nothing bad happens if you leave the cinema halfway through a bad movie.
Nothing bad happens if you don't iron (and I LOVE this part!!).
Nothing bad happens if you edit your photos in Photodiva a bit and remove those effing eye circles while still having them irl.
Nothing bad happens if you unfriend people you don't want having on your Fb page.
Nothing bad happens if you don't follow your everyday routine and leave some household duties for the next day.

Where do we get the fear that bad things will happen in the first place?

Mainly patriarchy I think, an awful lot are to do with appearances and being thought of as a "nice well behaved woman" which seems to mostly mean being a passive woman

Where do we get the fear that bad things will happen in the first place?

For some of the things listed...because its a reality that bad things can and do actually happen?

I've been colouring my hair for 40 years. I've never done a patch test - not once!

If you wash your face in the shower with cleansing milk that you think is probably supposed to be used with cotton wool but you didn't realise that when you bought it, thinking it was facewash.

@FinallyHere, and the other way round works too: hair conditioner as fabric conditioner.

Nothing (that) bad happens if your autistic 11 year old wears the same clothes day and night for 3 days.

Nothing bad happens if you seriously lower your expectations of your kids.

Nothing bad happens if you don't shower for a few days.

Where do these ideas come from, could it be our mothers?

I know lots of my ideas about life came from my mother. She was a SAHP in a very traditional marriage. She made decisions about colours in home furnishings, DF made the important decisions.

DM would teach me things as she went about her chores. One that always stayed with me was to wipe the bathroom basin after use, and polish as a cleaner would to 'show him what a lady I am'. She never had any sensible answer to my question how would he know to return the compliment if the basin just was always clean, as if by magic.

Stuff that for a game of marbles.

Patriarchy would not work if it were not reinforced by the women passing on things to the next generation of women, would it?

One thing I knew, was that I wanted to get to choose things myself

@99victoria

I've been colouring my hair for 40 years. I've never done a patch test - not once!

If you’ve been doing it very regularly, the risk is much lower. Lots of hairdressers don’t do a patch test if you’ve had your hair coloured within the last three months as then the risk is much lower. There are guidelines about this I think.

@YogaLite 😄

@TheyDoItOnPurposeLynne
Can you tell me more about the Colour by Numbers app please?

NBH is you don’t make your dcs fancy dress costumed

NBH if you never/rarely wear make up
NBH if you have roots showing
NBH if you don’t remove your body hair —have a 70s ladygarden—
NBH if you don’t cut the grass weekly

Nbh if you edit your phone contacts to those you a) actually use b) are useful to have.
Then switch your phone settings to contacts only. No more unwanted sales/scam calls!!

Something terrible happens if I wash my hair with shower gel.

The rest I agree with though. Especially the ironing. Ironing can fuck off.

Oh dear I opened the thread ready to nod along in agreement at all the fucks I don't give but the examples are stressing me. If I dont mow my garden it would soon grow into a wilderness, look shit, and the grass would be too wet to walk through or chill on most days (very soggy marshlands area). If I didn't cancel a subscription I would be really annoyed at myself for paying for something I dont want! Perhaps I'm not quite there yet....although with ironing I've been there for about a decade already.....hmm....!

@whatwasIgoingtosay

NBH if you don't finish a novel because you're not enjoying it/can't get into it. It's so liberating to jettison books after the first couple of chapters, knowing I just don't have to make the effort to finish them. So glad I'm not in a book club!

I think you need to join our book club. We're all (except one) over 60. If we don't want to finish it, we don't. And we don't hold back about why we didn't finish it.