Ask Ingrid: Secret Talents, Slow Design, and What To Do When You Have No Idea What Brings You Joy

It’s been awhile since I did an AMA, so I put a question box up in Stories yesterday. Some of the questions are about me and some are about joy or design, some are serious and some are light, but I’m sharing them all together because I think the joy of the AMA is in the oddball mix.

How do you distinguish between slow decorating vs. pushing the task off over and over again?

This is SUCH a great question because they really blend together sometimes, don’t they?

My simplest answer is to notice how your body feels when you think about the project. Do you feel a sense of desire, excitement, or curiosity (approach emotions)? Or do you feel shame, fear, or anxiety (avoidance emotions)?

When you are avoiding something your body will tell you.

Sometimes we’re also slow decorating because of budget or bandwidth and that is FINE, but it usually doesn’t feel aversive in the body. For example, I kinda know what we want to do with our stairwell but it’s not the right time for a paint/wallpaper project — we have too much else happening now. But we started slowly hanging art, I just ordered new light fixtures. When I think about this project, I feel anticipation, not stress.

How do you get teenagers excited about joy?

I’ll caveat this answer by saying that I don’t have a teenager yet. But I was a teenager, and here’s what I know: The idea of a parent or authority figure “getting teenagers excited” about something is a paradox. That’s because the fundamental job of a teenager is to develop their own identity, and to do this, they must separate that identity from their family of origin.

So the things you find joy or excitement in are likely to be “lame” or “cringe” or whatever the kids are calling it these days (even if they loved it last week). If you are excited, they are nonplussed. If you are joyful, they are bored or annoyed. That is as it should be. But it’s a phase and it will pass.

The only way to excite a teenager, I think, is to embrace what they’re naturally excited about. If that’s video games or fashion or drumming, get into that. It has to be their idea.

Do you have a Secret Talent?

I have a few, all very obscure and random. I’m weirdly talented at the game Jenga. I seem to have both steady hands and an ability to feel out the balance of things. I’m like a human clock — if asked the time I can often guess it within a couple of minutes even if I haven’t looked at a clock in hours. I am also really good at color-matching. I can mix paints to match a color swatch almost exactly.

What if you don’t know what sparks joy? How to find it out when you are lost?

This often happens if you’ve been through a transition, a loss, or a hard time where joy really wasn’t available to you. There are some things I can suggest that can help you rediscover what brings you joy, but there’s one thing I’d recommend doing first.

If you are lost and can’t find joy, the first thing I would look at is your beliefs and comfort with letting yourself feel joy. Do you feel safe feeling joy, or are you secretly worried that if you feel joy the world will crash in on you (again)? Do you feel entitled to joy or is there some part of you that believes you don’t deserve it? Is joy something you feel you have to earn by being productive or good or generous enough? (If the latter, read this blog post.)

If you have one of these blocks, the work starts there because your conscious mind may not allow you to find things that bring you joy until you feel safe or worthy enough to do so.

Once you’re in dialogue with these defensive parts, here are some things to try:

• Reconnect with sensory pleasure. Think, what would feel good to smell, touch, see, or hear right now. Scan Spotify for songs you like and make a playlist. Go buy yourself flowers. Wear your softest outfit. Pay attention to how your body responds.
• Go joyspotting. Take a walk and notice what brings you joy.
• Reflect on what brought you joy as a child. You don’t have to go climb trees or play with play-doh but maybe you’d enjoy forest bathing or ceramics. You’re just looking for clues.
• Imagine you have an entire day free for yourself. What would you do? If you don’t know, journal on it periodically. Having that question in the back of your mind, you may ideas come to you at random times.
• Start paying more attention to your body’s reactions to things you’re doing in daily life. Think approach or avoidance. What are you drawn towards? What do you want to move away from? This is the most basic movement that propels life, from the tiniest single-celled organism to a human being. Paying attention to this – with people, activities, places, things – will bring you into deeper harmony with yourself and your joy.

Lastly, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that we have a program specifically crafted to guide you through a process of reconnecting with joy. It’s called the Joy Jumpstart and it’s a self-guided program made of bite-sized creative exercises, the same ones I use to reenergize myself when I’m in a rut. You can find more info and sign up here.

I am so inspired by the little bits of your home you’ve shared. Could we see a home tour?

Ahhh that means a lot to me. Thank you so much.

Part of the reason I haven’t done a home tour is because it really is a work in progress and as anyone who has done this sort of room by room decorating knows, it’s like you have some spaces that are full of personality and others are still builder’s white. I’ll be honest that this is a bigger home than I’ve ever lived in – my past homes were one bedroom apartments and tiny cottages. It just takes time and I’ve been enjoying not rushing it.

But the other reason is my evolving understanding of how social media has kind of turned our homes inside out and made them performative spaces. On the one hand, I teach a home design course and it’s totally fair that I should share how I apply these ideas in my own home. And at the same time, the way home images are shared on social media can create a pressure to perform an idealized, stylized version of your space that is more about paint colors and furnishings than joy. I’m not immune to that pressure, and I’m trying to be more aware of what it makes me show vs. hide.

My goal is to prioritize sharing decor as a springboard for stories and moments. And maybe if at some point I figure out a good way to do that via a home tour, and we finish more of the spaces, I’ll share a more holistic view!

How do you remember to find / focus on joy on the hard days?

On our last vacation, one of us was sick for the entire trip. We were away for more than 2 weeks and every time one of us would heal up, another would go down. We’d saved and planned for a long time. It wasn’t the worst thing in the world, but it was so disappointing.

At some point, I said, you know, we’ll probably only remember a total of about 5 minutes a day of this trip. So let’s aim for 5 minutes of joy.

It takes the pressure off. One day we found a stroller hike so we could take Graham up to a waterfall even though he was sick. We couldn’t go to the pool but we could make a quick sand castle at the beach. We couldn’t go down for cocktail hour, but we ordered maitais through room service and heard the music from the balcony.

In the end we probably found more than just 5 mins a day but if you set the bar low, it motivates you to try. Even on a hard day, you can do something that gives you 5 minutes of joy.

Thoughts on Self-sabotage? As an antithesis of joy?

I wrote about self-sabotage on Instagram a few months ago. I’ve been having some aha moments about the way that I go about unconsciously sabotaging opportunities because I’m afraid of failure. You can read that here.

I’ve also written in the Joyletter about the upper limit problem, an idea that says that we all have a certain level of happiness we feel comfortable with, and if we exceed it, we tend to self-sabotage to bring our happiness back down to a tolerable level. I’ve made that edition public. You can read it here.

As I’m coming to understand it, self-sabotage is usually a sign that we have an issue with our self-worth. Deep down we don’t believe we deserve joy, success, or love. So even if we want it and seek it, the idea that we might actually get it is terrifying. Fixing this is a matter of getting curious about why we might believe we’re not worthy of what we want. And then replacing those old scripts with new ones.

How do you feel about your name? (Asking because I love the name Ingrid!)

I didn’t love it when I was younger. It felt “weird” when all I wanted was to fit in. That I could never find my name among the personalized items in gift shops (remember those mini license plates?!) made me feel very left out – confirmation I didn’t really belong. I also hated correcting people who always thought my name was “Adrian.”

But I grew into it! And now I feel like it suits me, and that it suited me all along. I think at some point it helped me lean into my differences and embrace what was unique about me. I can’t imagine being called anything else.

Read any good fiction lately?

I’ll be honest I’m reading a lot of books about physics and consciousness at the moment and it’s kind of all I’m interested in right now so I’m kind of on a break from fiction.

But I did read Kiley Reid’s latest, Come and Get it, and it was excellent.

Are you surprised in any way to be living the life you live now?

When I was younger I thought I would do a lot of things earlier. Get married young, have kids in my late 20s or early 30s, write a book early.

My path was a lot more winding than I expected. I didn’t discover design until I was 5 years out of school, and was 8 years out before I had my design degree. I didn’t get together with Albert until I was 33. It took me 10 years to write a book I thought would take 1-2 at most. It took 4 years of IVF to have a child.

But in every case the result was beyond worth the wait. So I guess I got surprised twice. Surprised (and frustrated) when things didn’t happen on the timeline I thought they should. Then surprised (and amazed) by how much better things ended up happening than I’d hoped or planned.

I feel lucky and grateful every day for the family I have and the work I do. I don’t take any of it for granted.

Favorite lip color?

Lately I’ve been wearing Jones Road’s Cool Gloss in Great Red. It’s a warm, buildable tomato-y red that’s getting me through the winter!