Resolutions.
I mentioned in my New Year’s Even post that I don’t make them. I don’t believe in creating a concrete idea for what I am *going to do* in the next year. It is too hard, in my opinion, to ensure that you will do something you set out to do. Not because it’s not worth the effort, but because life often gets in the way and things change.
I am my own best example here. When I was younger, I loved writing and photography, enough to spend all of high school on the newspaper and taking photography courses. I was certain that I would end up in journalism, travelling the world reporting on various things, writing and taking my own photos. I craved it. But life happened. Circumstances happened that led to one thing, which led to another, and so on. Eventually, it led to my husband and my first born child. That changed the entire trajectory of what I’d envisioned for my life. Please don’t misunderstand me though, I wouldn’t change a single thing about my life (except maybe a nicer car), and I am a firm believer in things happening as they were meant to.
Fast forward now to 2017, the year that I finally went back to school after taking 11 years off, and completed my degree in creative writing. I did so many things in those between years: learned various crafts and art forms, expanded on my photography, had two more children, and became a fairly well-rounded person. I had come to realize that while I love writing and knew I wanted to do that, I was the type of person who was good at many little things, rather than being great at one thing. I excelled at making and decorating cakes, became a fairly good artist (at least in DIY terms with painting and my Cricut), planning parties and coordinating events for the Girl Scouts, coaching Girls on the Run, etc. For the longest time though, I craved more than being good at many things, looking for the one thing that I was excelled at, because I thought I had to settle on one thing for the rest of my life.
And then anxiety hit. Suddenly, I wasn’t good at anything and I was questioning every aspect of my life as I knew it.
If you know me personally, you know that I thrive on asking the question “why?” and as much as that helped anxiety bring me down, it pulled me up too. Going through the treatments and therapies, working through journaling and exercising and everything meant to ease my anxiety, it brought me to a place where I no longer felt like I had to do one thing forever. I no longer had to be one specific thing, either. I was learning to be content in the idea that I could do many things very well. The idea that my personality might shift to fit my mood, as would my clothes, and other such things. Since I’ve talked about all of this in various posts I won’t go into too much depth here (feel free to head back and read some of the other posts if you’re looking for inspiration into anxiety and motherhood, though). Ultimately though, that shift in my thinking is what helped me grow as a person and expand on the belief that I truly could be anything I wanted, even if it was more than one thing.
Coming back to the present. I started something this month called “Yoganuary”, which is a month long flow/yoga journey with Soul Sanctuary and Cat Meffan. The intention behind it, the very phrase that highlights it’s depth, is “this is me”. This is me at the very root of who I am and who I am meant to be. It is my flaws, my mistakes, my ugliness, my sadness; and also, my happiness, my beauty, my creativity, and my inspirations. It is everything that I am on the inside, brought forth to the outside for the world to see. I know for me personally, getting to the root of who I was inside, and sharing it with everyone else, wasn’t an easy process. Hell, it was downright frightening for me. Yet, I have spent the better part of the last year truly getting to know myself and bringing who and what has always been on the inside to the outside. It’s been an enlightened journey, and it’s ever changing and growing with us.
How many of you can say that you know who you are and are comfortable with that? If you answered no to that, what’s stopping you? Is it fear of whether you’ll like that person or whether other people will like that person? That is what stopped me from searching for so long – the fear that other people wouldn’t like me if I was my true self. And guess what? Lots of people don’t like me! The difference is, coming out on the other side, I’m more than okay with people not liking me for who I am. (That took quite a while for me to be comfortable with, also).
And so this year, as with the past six years, I have set forth with the intention to continue on the journey that I have been building, and see where I might go from here. I cannot promise myself anything, nor can I firmly plant any one idea in my head of what I will do. What I can do, and what I choose to do, is play into my strengths and build on what I’ve already got going.
What will you do this year to make a change in your life? Will you continue to expand on the person you already are? Will you finally figure out who that person is? Are you completely content with who and where you are in life?
Drop a comment and let me know!
Allison Christine 