2023 Intentions - A day late

 

2023.

In a couple of holiday conversations with family and friends, the idea of new year resolutions came up. I’m not a big one for resolutions (mostly because they feel more like pre-meditated failures) but I do enjoy the new year as a fresh start and like to begin with intentions. My intention for 2023 is to lean back into my writing. I committed to writing every day and am posting in an effort to hold myself accountable.

Yep, I committed to writing every day in 2023. To process my thoughts, my emotions, my concerns.

But it is the 2^nd of January and I’ve already f*cked it up.

So be it. I’m starting on the 2^nd.

Writing has always been the best medium for me to think my things. When I talk to people like a normal person, I get distracted and sometimes stuck. When I talk about hard things, I worry about how other people will interpret my tone of voice and whether or not I will start crying and woefully misrepresent my point. When I am angry, I worry that I will be too sharp with my words and inflict permanent damage on those that I care about.

But when I type, it all flows. Wandering as heck sometimes but definitely flowy.

And when my emotions are stuck someplace uncomfortable, writing about them helps to unstick me. Writing can help me take anxiety out of my body in a choncky little blob so I can look at it, poke at it, unblobify it and then move on.

I stopped blogging regularly when my kids entered high school and a friend of my daughter’s announced she followed me on Twitter and read my blog. Sharing publicly was always part of the process of being seen, heard, and held but, I wasn’t ready for that level of sharing where my kids’ could potentially find out things about me, my health, my feelings, before I’d had a face-to-face conversation with them.

So I pretty much refrained from using the blog for working through deep thoughts, made a few general update posts after major events, and then kind of stopped blogging. And then I stopped writing. And then COVID… and empty nesting… and grad school… and a household move.

And no, I didn’t just transfer to a more private venue like one of the 97 gazbillion journals that clutter my home. I stopped all together. Essentially at a period in my life where I desperately needed my writing, I gave it up.  

Now I’m reclaiming what was always mine – my thoughts, my emotions, my reality.

Trigger warning for those who may have stumbled across this blog for cancer support or parenting camaraderie – beyond messing up frequently while navigating a 20+ year marriage and serious trial and error efforts to meet the evolving needs of newly adult children, my life intersects regularly with things that society doesn’t talk often about including serious illness, dying, and death.

I don’t know what I will write about but, at this point, I’m choosing not to censor myself so please consider this a heads up. 

And now… here’s to the best of 2023 intentions complete with a photo from my morning walk.

Sending love, light, and good energy into the universe. More tomorrow.