Your reminder that you can find or create joy while also feeling fear, rage, despair, and other prickly crap.
(We use em dashes, but never AI)
My local Goodwill organization opened up a boutique. Not an overwhelming warehouse-sized megastore that smells like all of the donors’ attics and basements combined, but a curation of cool clothes, shoes, accessories, and housewares. What’s astonishing isn’t that their style team found such fancy goodies, but they managed to comb through the heaps and piles and mounds of donations. Have you ever peeked inside of a dropoff site? It’s terrifying. Imagine a space anywhere from the size of a basketball court to a big grocery store crammed full of bursting boxes and overflowing black garbage bags.
The racks of my local thrift stores are increasingly filled with more and more fast fashion, like Shein. I see a lot of brands in which the company name is a random string of capitalized English letters, a sure sign of Amazon merch. I live in an art-school town, so consignment and second-hand stores can be a bit too…precious.
So of course I’m excited for a thrift store that promises the best of the best. Of course I went on opening day. I expected it to be busy (it was). I expected it to be a little like a land grab with people rudely hoarding shit (it wasn’t). I didn’t expect the Elvis merch. I didn’t expect so many cheerful Goodwill employees wishing me a good day and asking if I was ok. I expected a line, I didn't expect it to be 45 minutes long. I didn’t expect them to be operating in hard mode.
They had two tills available. They’d been advertising this venture and the opening everywhere for months. Local media was bursting with it—a nice change from stories about record rainfall and flooding.
One of my superpowers is logistics and systems. It could be congenital nerdiness or 5 years working at McDonalds in high school and college. I’m hyper aware of the flow of processes and tasks, especially in retail and food service. Got a complicated list of errands or finicky travel situations: I can distill them into a smooth operation. It hurt my whole being to watch the inefficient check-out process, even thinking about it makes my arms tingle.
They probably didn't even know they were doing it in hard mode. Aren’t we all guilty of that?
In the world of gaming, playing in hard mode earns you a higher score or extended lives when operating in more difficult or challenging conditions.
But in real life, not so much.
Some of our hard modes are fixed: disability, poverty, chronic pain or illness, depression, being a member of a marginalized group, past trauma, being surrounded by dumb-asses, etc. Parenting or any kind of caregiving is hard mode. Maintaining an awareness of current events and the state of the world triggers hard mode. Remember Covid Lockdown, that was hard mode.
We can’t toggle those challenges off, we’re stuck with them. It’s up to us to figure out how to play the game of life with those inflexible constraints.
But what about the other hard modes, the ones we maybe don’t know we set ourselves up for? You don’t have to jump into an ice-cold shower, but can run the water for a minute to allow it to warm up. You don’t have to wait for the dishwasher to be full before you run it. In fact, you don’t need to rinse the dishes before they go in. Malcolm Gladwell says so.(36 minute mark). Dishes aren’t clean enough? Run it again. In the case of Goodwill, you can encourage customers to remove hangers from clothes while they’re waiting in line.
Hard mode is not having a dedicated hook or bowl right inside the door for your keys so you’re always looking for them. Hard mode is not understanding the mystery of scissor migration patterns, and thus not keeping at least one pair of scissors in every room. Hard mode is forgetting that “No” is a complete sentence. Hard mode is not thinking about having extra scanners and credit card readers.
Hard mode is big things like hanging on to toxic people, and not setting boundaries. Not limiting the number of items in the fitting rooms, literally and metaphorically.
Listen, I’m all for a challenge. How do we know what we are capable of if we don’t test ourselves? I’m a self-employed writer/artist with ADHD. We need goals to strive for, but not in every fucking aspect of our lives. Maybe in just one or two. Also, we should probably get out of our own way and recognize how we’re making things harder on ourselves.
There are other modes of operation, after all.
Slow Mode
Slow mode is pretty subjective. It’s doing something difficult because you want to, because the time and effort involved bring you joy or create a sense of peace and fulfillment. What’s slow mode for me could be hard mode for you. It’s doing the thing the hard way, because you want to, because the act of doing it brings you joy.
Cooking from ingredients is slow mode for me, but hard mode for my friend Angela, a small business owner and single mom. Dragging out the hose and vacuum to clean the car is hard mode for me, but slow mode for my hubby. He doesn’t understand my fascination with driving through car-washes (and taking videos of the process from the driver's seat).
This is not to say that there isn’t overlap sometimes between hard mode and slow mode, or slow and soft.
Soft Mode
Soft mode is kind of a big fuck-you to hard and slow mode. It’s aknowledging that life is fucking hard and you need to dim the lights and wrap your soul in a snuggie.
Once again, this is subjective. Whatever makes you feel gooey on the inside (but not, like, in your guts), and like life is maybe not so shitty after all, this is soft mode. There’s not one answer. You probably have heaps of ways of finding your way there.
My soft mode is sitting around my kitchen table (or a park bench, picnic blanket, campfire) sharing a meal with friends. My soft mode involves covering a surface with art supplies and making stuff. One of my soft modes is playing sudoku on extreme mode. My friend Libby’s soft mode is hanging out with her dog. Handsome hubby’s soft mode is gardening, playing with tools, or exploring the history of English civil war.
Our time is too valuable for me to keep giving examples, I have a bunch of used clothes to wash, and you know what I mean. I don’t want to talk about life hacks to get you out of hard mode. I’m hoping to bring awareness to each of us about how we operate. If we can see how much we’re doing in hard mode, maybe we can either shift some of that load, or give ourselves some grace for more time in soft mode.
You won’t know if you don’t explore.
see you in a few days
I’m always open to ideas, suggestions, shenanigans, tomfoolery, collaborations, cheese, snacks, and field trips.
You can find my art here and here. I offer custom workshops and design. I am the proud guardian/custodian of a 17 year old cheeseburger named Patty.
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words and images © Rubi McGrory 2021-2025
So much wisdom here.
"scissor migration patterns" really felt this one