Beware: New Year's Resolutions.
Instead try setting goals that you enjoy.
daisies, because JOY
Photo by Lauren McConachie on Unsplash
I’ve spent the last year coming to terms with my neurodivergent brain. I feel certain I am a member of the adult ADHD late-diagnosis community of women in their 40’s.
Running my small business that includes a psychotherapy practice as well as a coaching and astrology business has been an initiation that has revealed my strengths, limitations, preferences and pain points.
It’s brought up a lot of perfctionism and shame.
I’ve had periods of momentum, creative flow, excitement and vision and, dread.
The whole enchilada.
I’ve got stuck on my own looping thoughts, ruminating and causing myself great psychological and emotional stress.
I’ve practiced my emotion regulation coping skills and tools.
I built out my first beta program and ran it. Then stalled and restarted, recommitting to taking it to the finish line to become a signature offering to be associated with my services and coaching business. Still a work in progress.
I’ve had great satisfaction serving clients that are vulnerable, committed to their growth, radically honest with themselves and willing to receive support.
Sometimes I’ve been so “in it”, attaching and grasping and striving with old patterning around productivity and efforting.
All the while knowing that my way, the feminine way, is one that values the cycles of nature outside and inside my body. My intuition whispering that it is not always summer, that I must relax and receive and trust in the greater timing of the cycles of learning and living and growing.
I’ve neglected my daily spiritual practices that anchor me in the still and fertile void of nothingness from which all creative ideas emerge.
Friends and my dear loved ones have seen me, hugged me, loved me and reminded me that I am basically alright and they are there for me always.
All the while, raising my two children whom I love so totally and dearly it is nearly too much sometimes.
Their preciousness and presence continously reminds me of all that is real and valuable.
Stress is a part of life and my difficulty dealing with it reflects my tender humanity.
Nothing is wrong with me, I am not a problem to solve.
Nothing is wrong with you. You are not a problem to fix or solve.
I have great fascination for the brain. Hence my profession and passion for the privileged work that I do, serving others with care and validation of their experiences and their humanity.
I have watched my brain struggle with things it believes it “should” be better at. That other people are better at than me.
I’ve studied ADHD so that I could understand where my personal difficulties lie, particularly around executive functioning.
It has brought up sadness from not getting the help I needed a long time ago. Simply because it was not recognized that I needed it. My masking abilities deserve an Oscar.
I simply developed ways of coping with the things that were hard for me to do and the underlying intelligence carried me through high school and undergrad, an office job, graduate school and running a household.
My issue has always been about the how, not the what.
I’m tired of the struggle bus and also the narrative that we must suffer to change.
In truth, we change best when we feel good. Self-compassion motivates, shame shuts down. This is studied and true.
My intuition continues to whisper to me to work smarter, not harder. That things don’t have to be so hard. What if it were easy? Do less, as Kate Northrup says in her book of the same name.
The wear and tear of stuggling to perform in a neurotypical way is exhausting and getting harder as I age. Harder after having two children and feeling like multi-tasking is an inevitable reality as a modern day mother. Code-switching from task to task, child to child. All the while maintaining fierce dedication to my other life’s calling: being of service in a healing capacity outside the home.
My entire life is about service, both in my home and life and outside.
I’ve found myself at odds with these two spheres. Feeding a split, a binary.
Not making the connection that my greatest service in fact is the revolution at home that I actively create each day through applying all my healing, through my actions and values-aligned parenting.
Recently a friend asked about this very split.
My response surprised me as I named how tired I was of feeding that illusion of a split between what I think is my calling or purpose (my work outside the home) and my role as a mother.
Care and service are my life’s purpose. Caring for myself and those I love and helping my clients help themselves to better care for their varied needs.
Care.
I care.
It’s good to care.
As the Gregorian calendar comes to an end, it’s normal to take stock and reflect.
As a Cancer sun, reflecting and being sentimental is a familiar impulse.
I have tried very hard not to live in the past as much as I could (and used to).
Everything I’ve learned over the years of my own healing journey I embody and share and support my clients with. It’s my learned and earned fuel. It’s what it means to be the wounded healer.
So as I continue to write these weekly posts, consider them an ongoing contemplation of what heals and serves me and you and us all.
I contemplate things like:
the waves of emotions
making the paradigm shift to self-compassion
learning over striving for perfectionism
interdependence over toxic individualism
nature: our great mother and emotional regulator
practicing holding it all, being with it all, embracing discomfort and change
healing codependent patterns
awakening personal power
living cyclically with nature’s rhythms
living by design instead of by default
As the year ends, the collective feels the coming darkness and it triggers the great shadow of western secular society: fear of death, lack of relationship with death.
What do we do? We do more.
What does nature do? Literal bear mode, powering down, yielding to the dark.
I had the beautiful opportunity this weekend witnessing two rituals symbolizing bringing light to the darkness.
A part of my ancestry is Swedish and my family has held onto many cultural traditions including the celebration of Santa Lucia, adopted by the Swedes as a symbol of bringing light to the darkest day of the year.
When I was 17 I took my place as the Lucia of that year’s celebration, wearing a crown of real candles in my hair, a white gown and red sash, leading a procession of other singing Scandinavians.
I remember the feeling of leading the procession in my body. There were normal nerves mixed with quiet reverance for the mythology and symbolism.
The second ritual involved the little people in my life. Walking a dark spiral, lighting their own candle and placing it along the way, quietly and eventually illuminating the spiral symbol for all who were witnessing.
Each of us is made of stars, our own unique constellation of energies. Our spirit and essence part of a larger whole. Symbols of the all. Lights in the great eternal dark void.
There have been moments this past year where I could not find my inner compass. I felt loss and off track. Sad and confused. I was in the dark.
These moments, like everything in the universe, were impermanent.
How have you navigated yourself through and out of the impermanent dark?
I reflect now, as the year ends, with the sense of growing clarity around a few things. Particularly around the bizarre phenomenon of goal setting and making progress on your dreams and visions.
The fact that I have arrived at this new awareness shows me, like a sign post, where I am on my healing journey.
Worthy goals heed to joy and inner excitement
Take up living the experiment of Human Design for more ease
Take a goal, cut it in half, have fun (Finish by Jon Acuff)
Yield to your incompetences - you’re not good at everything
Perfectionism is a cruel safety-seeking strategy; keep deconditioning
You can’t force your timeline. Be here now.
Notice throughout the day that you are basically alright (Rick Hanson)
The wisdom of the book Finish by Jon Acuff is how I will end this.
He notes that 92% of people fail on meeting their goals.
Perfectionism is the culprit that triggers us to set unrealistically large goals that when we have one slip up with on our journey to meet it, makes us give up entirely.
I have done this so many times.
With ADHD, the consistent support is around breaking tasks down into small and smaller still tasks.
With ADHD, novelty and fun excites the brain and motivates.
As a Generator in Human Design, I’m literally supposed to follow my joy.
I’m tired of trying to work against my wiring and design. I’m desiring yielding to pursuing my visions with joyful abandon, as Elizabeth Gilbert writes in her book on creativity called Big Magic.
I will spontaneously and chaotically (seemingly) answer the call inside my body for what excites me, what drives my creativity.
It’s not been all bad, not in the slightest.
But what is increasingly important to me and to so many is how we work, how we talk to ourselves, how we either root for ourselves or tear ourselves down.
How how how how how.
Process matters.
I will be serious about grounding in the realism around dreaming up a goal, and then cutting it in half, and then breaking it down so that I can maintain movement and promote the possibility of feeling succesful.
I will be kind to my mind by honoring it’s design.
I will play to my strengths and practice unwavering perserverance.
I will keep going, my way, lit by my essence and stardust. Honoring myself and my rhythm and prioritizing enjoying myself as much as I can.
Because why is any of it worth it if you can’t have fun doing it?
I consider myself a visionary, seeing a future I believe is possible. Channeling my energy to create it. Embodying that as much as I can so that others can feel and envision it too.
If you plan to set goals for yourself for the new year, I encourage you to pause.
Make sure every goal you set is something you enjoy.
Ask yourself the question, “Do I actually enjoy doing this or will I enjoy the reward of having done it (thereby find the source of motivation)?
There is no more time for self-induced suffering and shame and shoulds.
Stand tall with your arms and legs out in Starfish pose.
Take up space in your life and fill it as much as you can with life-giving energy.
The moral of this story is to pause as the wheel of time turns and observe any impulse you have to reinvent the wheel, make drastic changes, set lofty goals and charge towards a new year.
Pause and consider your values.
Pause and ask yourself how you feel in your body right now?.
Pause and ask yourself how you’d like to feel if it’s not aligned with your current reality.
Then wonder about the actions necessary to work towards that desired feeling.
If you can do one novel thing it is this: Claim joy and enjoyment as an essential ingredient in your daily life.
Be kind to your mind, to your body, to your heart.
And by all means do less and, do more of what lights you up.