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Hello, and welcome to my obligatory “new year, new me” post. I think it’s one of the mandatory requirements for holding your blogger card. Let me just give you a brief overview of what I’m going to talk about in this post, so you can skip ahead if you want. First, I’m going to give you a recap of the “12 holidays” or “12 months of celebrating” thing I am doing and why. After that, I’m going to tell you about all my plans for January! And then finally, I’m going to tell you how I got started today. Buckle up, I think this story is going to be filled with adventure and trauma!
I really do need to come up with a good, official name for this and coin it so it’s much easier to talk about. If you have any suggestions for that, leave them in the comments below. But anyways, in November, I decided that every month I want to focus in on a concept for my life. Here’s the list as it stands now:
I tried to lean into concepts and themes that were already there, so connection with others matches up with valentine’s day, joy matches up with Christmas, gratitude and thanksgiving, you get the point. To learn more about my overall plans for the year, check out this other blog post I wrote!
In case you didn’t read the longer blog, one of the things I’m doing is picking a decoration theme to go with each word, and decorating for the month. For January, I’ve picked citrus. I have decorated my little dining table and my mantle, and then I have 2 cabinets right in my entry way that I use to set up a station for the month. In November it was a gratitude station. This month, it will be a growth station! Here are some of my decorations!
I have links where you can get some of these things! Please note, this page contains affiliate links. If you choose to make a purchase after clicking a link, I may receive a commission at no additional cost to you.
Most everything else I got at Home Sense or one of its sister stores. The only exception is the yellow coke can art. I found it on pinterest and tried very hard to find the original artist, but I could not, so I ended up just printing a copy of it for myself. If you happen to know who the artist is, please send them my way so I can pay them, support them, and promote their work, because I love this piece so much!
TL:DR January Plans:
So, the whole point here is to find ways to make all of this a daily practice that enhances my life, while not adding extra pressure or tasks. So with that in mind, the goals I’ve outlined are ideal, but not some sort of requirement I am imposing on myself. When I started this back in November, I wanted to write a card to someone everyday telling them why I was grateful for them and our relationship. I only ended up getting one card out that month, but instead of being disappointed that I didn’t hit a goal, I am very pleased that I spent the time I did on that one card. The person I gave it to was very grateful and touched, and I’m really happy I could create that moment!
This month I am aiming to write one card. This card will go to a previous boss of mine about all the ways he helped me grow, probably more personally than professionally, and I’ll likely share more with you about that when I get to it.
The black and gold bowl and the yellow sticky notes next to it are for a daily gratitude practice. I did this in November and it was really fantastic. I spent a little time at the end of each day thinking back on the things that I was grateful for that day. In December I tried to do this with things that brought me joy, and it was harder to stick to and feel good about, so this month I am going back to gratitude. I think having a gratitude practice is very much in alignment with growth.
That being said, now might be a good time to tell you, personal, emotional growth is a thing I have been very deeply focused on and invested in for the past roughly three years, perhaps longer. Growth, to me, looks like identifying ways that you want to improve in your life or improve your life, and then focusing on the thing you’ve identified until you feel good about it. One of my bigger ones in the last few years was my relationship with my mother. In December of 2021, I moved to Maryland to get some space from her, and by mid 2022, I was still having a very hard time (emotionally) every time she called me – which was about once per month. She made me feel unloved and unimportant, and rejected, and every month, I’d get a call from her, I’d feel that way for about 2 weeks, and then I’d start to feel better, and then nearly 2 weeks later, we’d start over with another phone call. It was exhausting, and it was in a conversation with an old boss of mine, the one I’ll write my growth card to about this very topic, that I realized that some people just won’t change, and the best you can do is not give them space, and build good solid boundaries for yourself. In August of 2023, I cut contact with my mother, and it has been an uphill growth battle ever since.
So back to the Growth Station! Every day, like I said, I’ll write things I’m grateful for down on sticky notes and throw them in the black and gold bowl. Each thing gets an individual sticky note, and watching the pile grow each month has been very heart warming and encouraging. Today, it’s 1PM, and already I am grateful for my sewing machine, my ability to learn new projects, my writing skills, and the fact that I am in a place in my life where I can think about buying a house (I put an offer in yesterday and am still waiting to hear back!).
Each day the bowl will fill up more, and at the end of the month, I’ll have a little mountain of gratitude!
A few more small goals I have include:
The other major thing I’ve done for January is take a list of journal prompts I found on pinterest, write each one down on an individual sheet of cardstock, and fold them up and put them all in a jar. I’d like to pull one a day and answer it, however this is a very no pressure effort. I’ll only be doing it if it feels like it adds to my life. The other thing about these journal prompts is that I want to use them to try to connect with people in my social circle. I won’t just answer them myself, I’ll also talk to people about them and find out what their answers are. Talking about life, growth, goals, and the future seems like a great way to build deeper connections with people!
Here are the prompts I am using:
I also have a vision board night planned with one of my friends some time in the next 2 weeks. We have done vision boards together a few times now, and we generally focus on several categories, follow a bunch of prompts, and outline our goals! I’m really looking forward to that, and I’ll likely tell you about it when we do it!
Here’s where the aforementioned trauma comes into play! So some time in 2023, I realized that I have a tendency to generate shame to protect from rejection. Let me explain: when I start to feel too sad, rejected and lonely, like no one wants me around, and no one ever will, my subconscious, some part of me, whatever you want to call it, pushes me to get drunk, uber to the bar, and have a one night stand. As much as I’d like to be a sex positive girly, I never felt particularly proud of this behavior. In fact, I often woke up the next morning severely hungover, and so ashamed I could hardly live with myself.
What I realized in 2023, while doing some internal family systems parts work (if you haven’t read this book, you should!) I realized that I was doing this because I was feeling rejected, and rejection was – as someone with neglect based childhood trauma – so abhorrent, that my brain did anything it could to get me to feel something else. Shame is an easy feeling for my brain to drum up.
Now, as lots of people will tell you, awareness is half the battle. Once you have the information, you can do something with it. And I am happy to say, I have not slept with a stranger since I had that realization! Some nights it has been really hard, but I have found other avenues, things like reaching out to friends for a conversation, or even to ask for reassurance that they don’t hate me and they do in fact enjoy spending time with me. Because I have not put myself in those situations, I have not had to experience the shame that comes with it, and I have been forced to face the feelings of rejection head on, which has been really good for me. But this story is actually about the shame.
Last night, since it was NYE, and I have been working on socializing, I found a meetup group hosting a NYE party event at a local barcade near where I live, and I decided that it would be a really good idea for me to go and meet more people, so go I did. I wore this really cute outfit with a shirt that had one job: make men be nice to me. And it definitely succeeded! However, while I was there, I didn’t drink at all. I hung out, I chatted with a few people, I had a few red bulls, I stayed until midnight, and then I went home and walked my dog. When I woke up this morning, I had all those same feelings of shame.
Until today, I really thought that it was tied to drinking and the sex (hello, catholic guilt!). But when I woke up this morning, I sent my friend a few texts about it:
“I woke up feeling shame, so it is either tied to going to the bar, staying out late, or talking to strangers. I’m not sure which yet, but I didn’t drink or bring anyone home.”
“I think I feel like I deceived people. This is tied to [ex’s name].”
“By existing around other humans after dark, I am confusing them and tricking them into wanting to have sex with me, and the next morning they will realize I am definitely not what they thought I was and they will not want me.”
“That’s the root feeling here! Holy shit”
So this kind of conversation, where one of us sends several messages for a while and the other comes to answer later is pretty typical for my friend and I. We use our chat as our outside brains. And if you don’t get that, I’m sad for you.
Anyways, there is a longer story here for another time, but a few highlights – I was kinda in this really unhealthy relationship with this person that I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone about, and it was when I started learning about narcissism that I realized (3 years later) how unhealthy it was, and I very quickly broke it off after that. But that relationship really did a number on me, and the texts you see above are really the result of that.
I’ve seen a lot of things on the internet, in books, in mindfulness and medication content, etc. lately that talk about quieting or retraining your inner critic, but – and maybe this is trauma related – my inner critic doesn’t say these things out loud. I don’t have a voice in my head constantly chirping “you tricked that guy,” my inner critic lives deep in my subconscious, tormenting me with emotional electric shocks rather than words. So, much like I said about awareness earlier, figuring this out means that I can use it to grow and heal! How? I don’t know yet, but I’m sure my therapist will tell me on Thursday. As hard as it is to hear that I believe that about myself, it’s also really exciting to know, because now I can do something about it!
Wish me luck!
When was the last time I achieved something I thought was difficult?
Last week, I survived Christmas. Since I cut contact with my mother, the holidays especially have been very difficult. I have to grieve both the mother daughter relationship I never got to have and the one that I did have. I have lost all my typical traditions, and I spend a lot of time wondering whether the family mentions me, or misses me, or what they are doing without me. But I went to a family Christmas party that one of my friends invited me to, and they were all so welcoming and nice. I had dinner with another friend later that night. All in all, it was a good day in an otherwise tough time of year.
When was the last time you achieved something you thought was difficult? Tell me in the comments!
~Tata for now
Meagan
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