DIY For Boredom

There are three types of boredom: the boredom of your closet, the boredom of your surroundings, and the boredom you have when you have nothing to do. All three can lead to a malaise of your mind, and a feeling of being trapped, both physically and mentally. The act of creation can reawaken yourself and your senses, building a world around you that will allow you to be as bored as little as possible. Filling your senses can help you to grow as a human being, especially when you’re creating the reality around you with art, and objects you love. When you look at what you’ve made, whether it’s right after the project or months after you created it, pride can collect in your heart. It’s that pride you feel, and happiness you feel when you look at your work, that can keep your surroundings from creating boredom.

Whether you’re finding a project online, or looking at a something that’s broken that you know you can fix, or you’re in a consignment shop, your next project helps build your reality. Sometimes, we have no choice over what our realities are, but we do have control over what we create. This means, that making our wears or doing projects ourselves, can give us power over what we have no power over. We’re taking back control over whatever part of our realities we can.

Whether it’s over our space, our closet, or any other parts of our lives that we can build onto, or DIY, we gain parts of ourselves back when we play piano, paint, do photography, decorate our bedroom, dye a white shirt purple, or upcycle a piece of furniture everyone else only sees as ‘junk’. The act of creation is not always DIY, but if all of this can be accomplished while doing art, then how much can DIY do?

It’s as easy as taking a crew neck t-shirt and stretching the neck out, cutting it into a v-neck, or cutting it into a boat neck. It’s as easy as taking an old t-shirt, and painting the word ‘freak’ on it. It’s as easy as turning an old racerback tank top, and turning it into a halter top.

Yes, these are all suggestions for shirts in your closet, but imagine how good you’ll feel when you turn that annoying, choking, top into something you can breathe in? Imagine, just for a second, buying tops from consignment shops and turning them into whatever your imagination sees.

Whenever I desperately need a pillow to decorate somewhere before I have an actual pillow, the easiest thing is to stuff a cute tote bag how you like it, and then tie it shut. How you stuff it will turn it into a different type of pillow.

You can also easily create your mind with furniture.

For instance, I bought this desk, a desk I love and sit at almost every single day, off of a website I love. It came in pieces, and I had to put it together. No matter how much fun these puzzles are for me, it did not prepare me for piecing it together wrong. When it came time to slide the drawers in, their sliders were offset. It was impossible to get them in. Also, the instructions magically disappeared. I had no choice but to keep the desk like that.

Rather than complaining on the website, I kept the drawers, and I kept the desk as they were. My brain saw solutions instead of problems. Knowing me, the drawers wouldn’t have suited how I would use the desk. I prefer cubbies. Those look neater, and they can hold more objects and heavier items.

Now, I’m using the drawers as storage bins underneath my seating area in the main room of where I’m living. You can see them, and they look like drawers… because they are drawers.

This might seems like an excuse for me to not have to go back and feel bad about me putting a desk together wrong, but it’s actually my way of saying that problems can also be solutions.

That, to me, is what DIY is all about.

You find a problem, and you solve it with creativity. Those drawers are prettier versions of storage bins. Imagine finding drawers that are together in a piece of furniture that’s falling apart. You can use those drawers in other parts of your house. That’s solving a problem with a fun solution.

DIY, to me, is all about curing the boredom of time, the boredom of your surroundings, and the boredom of your closet. It’s also about finding solutions for problems that other people might not have come up with, yet. Creating your surroundings by solving problems will help you feel more in control of your world. DIY is all about fixing issues in imaginative ways. Sometimes, those issues are about more than boredom…

… but, all it takes is one rainy day and a good craft to start building the world around you.