Don’t worry, I am drinking enough coffee for all of us.
At the tail end of 2021, I decided to get back into therapy, and after spending the majority of the pandemic without it, I truly wish I had started back sooner. I do consider myself lucky . . . I LOVE my therapist on BetterHelp. She walked with me through so much anxiety-riddled loss:
- Losing the feeling that comes with being as close to my friends/family as I want whenever I want to. (The pandemic has been emotionally tough on this extrovert.)
- The loss of friends and community connections after my church became LGBTQ+ affirming
- The loss of our church building
- The loss of one of our Lead Pastors
- The loss of my mother
- The loss of the freedoms that come with being a single person sans children
My therapist has guided me through an onslaught of highly emotional situations. I came out better in the end because of our mutual trust, vulnerability (I know, yuck!), and willingness to lean into her wisdom. Still, as I look back on my therapy journey, I sometimes go back to the goals she has posted to my account, and one of them was set very early on and remains incomplete. It’s simple. All I have to do is write a journal entry: What does “My Day” look like if I did nothing for anyone else but me? And if you know me, you understand why this is such a seemingly impossible task for me. But I want to improve, grow, and start making headway on finding a good balance of family/work/life/self-care. As I close the door on 2022 and walk into 2023, I want to take all the tools my therapist has given me this past year and put them into practice as I embrace personal transformation. I’ve already begun putting some of them into practice—setting better boundaries, making time for myself, becoming more aware of my internal feelings and how they affect me, learning to speak my peace and let go, etc. Still, with how this past year ended, I know there is much more to unpack, discover, and evolve.
Each year I sit and think about a word, to sum up, what I’m hoping for in the new year, and this year, it’s EVOLUTION. I know, I know . . . some folks are terrified of that word, but I’m not. I’m embracing it. This year I want to, as Merriam Webster states, engage in the process of continuous change from a lower, simpler, or worse to a higher, more complex, or better state. I want to peel back even more layers of my cultural, religious, relative, and psychological upbringing and ask more important questions. I want to lay it all on the table and ask myself—what is worth bringing with me on this journey to a healthier, more whole and authentic me? Where do I get hung up on the trail? What do I want to notice about myself/others along the way? Who will I allow to join me through valleys and mountaintops? What will I do with the things they say along the way? What do I hope to gain mentally/emotionally/socially/physically on the other side?
There is a song by a band called, The Fray, titled RUN FOR YOUR LIFE (hint: all of my blog posts are named after songs.) As I’ve been thinking on what I want for my personal growth in 2023, this song keeps coming back to me. Here is the story behind the song:
Singer Isaac Slade and guitarist Joe King penned this song in a remote studio in Leipers Fork, just outside of Nashville. Slade told the story of the song to Denver Westword: “This one came from thin air, you know? We started with this idea of twins, two sisters, one makes it one doesn’t. We really wrote it about the one that is left, the survivor, who’s sort of wracked with guilt, like ‘Why me?’ We kind of put it in contrast to this African concept of Sankofa. It’s basically this concept of: If your village burns down, go back to it and pick through the ashes and find anything good and then take it with you and leave and never look back. It’s like an acknowledgment of tragedy and hardship, alongside celebration, almost, and thankfulness for what you have. Kind of run as fast as you can from that black hole of guilt.”
https://www.songfacts.com/facts/the-fray/run-for-your-life
Joe King added: I had been brewing on this word “sankofa” for a while. The word is an African word, and it’s where a villager would go back to their village that had been destroyed by whatever, fire or famine or whatever, and they would go back through the destruction, and they would dig through the mess and the dirt and the rubbish, and they would pull anything from that destruction and take it with them to their new dwelling place. For me, that whole confident truth is in me. There are legitimate things that have been destroyed in my life, but how I respond to it is everything. Going back to it is kind of difficult because you have to face it and try to pull the good from those things, because there are still diamonds in there and there are still some good things in there that aren’t destroyed that you can take with you. It brewed from that, and then we combined it with the story of two sisters. So, yeah, that song has a pretty close place in my heart.
I closed out the year without a church home/community, with complex relationships being navigated, ending one job and starting a new one. As I walk into 2023, I’m ready to acknowledge the tragedy, hardships, celebrations and be thankful for all I have as I keep moving forward and running toward personal evolution. Though this blog will continue to be my favorite spot to share some fun memories throughout the year and creative thoughts, I’ll also be adding content that peels back more layers into things I am learning more about myself, things I’m seeing unfold in the world around me and what I need to say about it, plus some fun new work content. I hope you’ll keep checking back for updates through this year of EVOLUTION. Let’s grow together!
What is your word/resolution for the year?
What are you hoping to learn more about this year?
amo.says 