My Annual Intention
During January, I set my intentions for the year. For years, my intention has been “To Be Content.” I feel like I have reached a place where that is no longer something I have to strive for. At the risk of sounding just like everyone else, 2020 was a strange year. I found that even though I was largely content, I didn’t really feel like a “real adult.” Yeah. I really, really had to sit with that. There was journaling. A LOT of journaling.
What it ultimately boiled down to was this: while I feel very content with who I am, 2020 left me feeling less capable. Let me explain.
In late 2015, I entered an eating recovery program. All the issues that I had spent years keeping under wraps reared their ugly heads when I was most vulnerable after a year of massive loss and change, and I imploded spectacularly. The story is long and messy, but the salient points are this:
For the first time in my life I was forced to really look at the material I carried. I could no longer turn a blind eye to the things I felt.
My way wasn’t working. Setting aside my feelings put me in a place where I was not functioning at all.
I learned a lot of about feelings – how they feel in the body and how they affect what I can and can’t do. Feelings, even when ignored, do not simply go away. They sit in the body and can fester when not addressed. I had years of repressed feelings that needed to be acknowledged, prioritized, and addressed.
My choice to ignore everything resulted in engaging behaviours designed to mask the responses to those feelings. I needed to take steps to recover from the unhealthy behaviours. I do mean this in the most literal sense. The first priority was to re-learn how to eat food in a healthy way. Since my most prominent nemesis was food, I had to accept that it would also evoke feelings. I was left feeling like a completely incompetent human. My brain kept repeating, “You’re a grown woman, and yet you are so incompetent that you can’t even feed yourself well enough to stay alive.” The reality was that I was competent. I still had a job. I still had relationships. I was still doing life things. It didn’t change that I had a lot of grief and pain that I had chosen to ignore, and in order to stop feeling those emotions; I used my relationship with food to numb the feels. I decided that slogging through all the bits and pieces was the only way to keep moving forward.
I worked through the most pressing problem (food) in a very supported environment, and I was released fully to outpatient in 2016. I left with more skills than I started with, and continued to work on things. At this point, everything centered on getting myself to a place where food felt neutral and I could address feels as they came. I stayed in that place for years. What it meant to the mantra in my head was that I was working to re-learn what it meant to be in a place I deemed “okay.” Yes, I know that sounds like a “barely acceptable” place, but really, it meant that I had faced my nemesis head on, and now it wasn’t some awful monster anymore. It meant that feelings were no longer this terrifying nebulous blob of pain and suffering. That was meaningful, and still something I was never sure I would achieve.
Fast forward to 2020. I was starting to feel really stable and more like myself. The pandemic rolled around, and still, I was feeling “okay” and “content.” Sure, things were different, and that was okay. It dawned on me that I was in the place where things could come and I could roll with it. It was the place that I NEVER thought I’d get to. It was an incredibly liberating feeling. All my annual intentions in years prior had been focused on getting to place where I felt okay and content. I wanted to look at something else in 2021.
It would appear, based on what I just said, that 2020 was a beautiful walk in the park that was all lovely romantic pictures and vintage roses. The reality was that it wasn’t. I struggled with motivation, even though I didn’t think I should have. I struggled with finances. 2020 was messy and really awful, but even with all of that I still felt content with who I am. That was the important piece for me in 2020. Even though I felt content, I also found myself revisiting the feeling of not being a capable adult. Yes, there was a lot of data that indicated that I was a fully capable adult, but again, that doesn’t change the feeling. Yay! Time to grapple with the feelings!
I wrote in my journal a LOT (I feel like this is my theme for this year, oh goodness.), and I focused on how I wanted to approach the idea that I didn’t feel like a capable adult. If I wasn’t feeling like a capable adult, what did I want to feel instead? I started by listing out what things made me feel like I wasn’t capable. Here’s where I landed:
2020 was difficult financially, and I felt like I wasn’t able to stay on top of all my bills.
I struggled with staying motivated, and I felt like I was always behind with work.
Since I was struggling with motivation, I felt like I wasn’t able to keep the house clean and organized to a “reasonable” level.
As I continued to sit with these ideas, I kept running into my own personal dysons. There are a lot of things that society tells us we “should” be doing, and I was really falling victim to that sort of cultural story. It was apparent that while I proved to be capable, what I was missing was that feeling of accomplishment. That felt like a real light bulb moment! My intention for 2020 is to feel accomplished!
I like to check in with my intentions monthly, so I started writing down all the things that would help me feel like I was accomplished and chose 2-3 for each of the areas I was feeling less than capable about. So here’s what I’m working on this month:
Build a morning routine that includes: getting dressed, taking vitamins, and general morning ablutions
This is to help me get motivated for the day so that I can accomplish the things on my to-do list.
Build a better workflow to help alleviate the feeling of being overworked and overwhelmed.
This is to give me a birds eye view of what I need to do each month so that I can maintain the feeling of accomplishment throughout the month.
Build a financial plan with due dates and regular amounts due.
This is to allow me check things off so that I don’t feel like I’m scrambling each paycheck.
At the end of the month, I’ll check in and see what worked and what didn’t. What are you working on this month?
XOXO,
Miayah