Does anyone else collect? And I don’t mean any one thing in particular, I mean anything or everything?
I’ll have to do more research into ADHD to see if there is a tie there as well, beyond collecting hobbies which we all seem to do nowadays; but, within the last year I realized that I am a collector of all things. One of my favorite things to do is wander through thrift stores and find things – some I need now, some I needed in the past and some that call to me for future use. This collecting goes beyond physical items though too, it includes collecting memories, stories, facts, observations and banking them for when I need them again. This is actually a really big part of my personality as I learned through the Gallup CliftonStrengths 34 assessment. This specific strength is called “Input” and by definition literally means that I am a collector of all things – “information, ideas, artifacts or even relationships”.
Prior to my revelation that this is in fact a strength of mine, I used to view this as a bad thing or something that I needed to change, control or stop doing. But since the idea of it being a strength was revealed to me, I have been trying to use my powers for good and actually, I am actively working on reframing my thoughts towards positivity in all aspects (partially due to this one little thing). One way I’m doing that in 2025 (Happy New Year, btw 🙂) is to also be a collector of goals and accomplishments!
Last year, a group of girlfriends and I created 2024 “Babe Bingo” cards as a way to write down our goals or hopes for the year and make them fun; we all included a goal/hope for each of the other girls as well. The objective is to obviously get “bingo” (in our case “babe” because we did 4×4 instead of 5×5 cards) by competing each box; to keep each other accountable for our own but also each others items as well since we each had a square for one another.
We will be doing this again this year (in about a week🤗) so I have been jotting down a few things in my notes that I want to include and I just think it is such a great way to get your mind thinking about who you want to be and what you want for yourself in the year ahead! I will wait to share my finished bingo card with you all until after it is finished but I wanted to bring the idea here in case anyone out there (is there anyone out there?) felt like they needed a fun, interactive way to stay focused through 2025. We are also creating vision boards, which admittedly I am less keen on but plan to keep the two tied together in lots of ways. I will likely use my vision board as the picture version of my bingo card (I was going to say visual representation of my bingo card but duh… that’s why it’s called a vision board 💡).
Anyways, bringing us full circle, I have spent this past week popping into all the thrift stores I can find on the hunt for party supplies and it got me thinking about my niffler like qualities. And now that I reread this post and really think about it, you know what’s funny? I don’t actually have a true “collection” of anything; although, my husband would beg to differ while opening our closet door to show my shoe, clothing and purse collections, lol. When I was younger, I used to collect yellow “rubber” ducky things and then as I got older it morphed into a giraffe collection (of which I still have one or two holdouts that I just can’t get rid of), but now? Just anything or everything but nothing in particular 🤷🏼♀️
Anyone out there want to share what or if they collect anything special?
Xoxo, CK
Leave a Reply