Welcome to another holiday creative prompt…
… and in this one I’m going to invite you to get a little bit nasty.
At this time of year we are, if we’re lucky enough, enjoying a respite from business as usual. Depending on how you are able (or expected) to spend your January you may be resting, reflecting, entertaining, hosting, planning, or preparing for the year ahead.
Hopefully this is a fun or restful time for you. But regardless, in reflecting on our lives we inevitably find ourselves thinking about what or who doesn’t work for us.
Alongside thinking positive thoughts and building resilient habits, I’m a great believer in also getting stuff off your chest.
I found a glorious list of insults from around the world on Twitter. They included:
Go comb a monkey (Brazil)
Go ski into a spruce (Finland)
Go fry some asparagus (Colombia)
Go get [CENSORED] by a blind bear (Albania)
Go take it in your [CENSORED] by a runaway donkey (Italy)
Go back home, your mother made you waffles (France).
Other insults I have come across during my digital travels include:
May your wife give birth to a centipede so you have to work for shoes all your life (Serbia)
May the cat eat you and then may the devil eat the cat (Gaelic)
Go hit your head on a corner of tofu and die (Japan).
There’s nothing wrong with screaming a little bit of spite into a pillow (although there’s a lot wrong with trolling people on social media or bullying them out loud and in real life).
For today’s creative exercise,
I want you to make up your own flamboyant insult.
Then to really bring it to life, find the right way to deliver it:
Go and scream it into that pillow
Hiss it venomously at an invisible imaginary enemy
Mime and gesture it
Write it on a piece of paper and burn it.
Enjoy! The rest of the creative prompts this week will be much more edifying.