I want easiness for us and for the world

Intentions and themes for a new year

John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge at Tinicum, Dec. 2021

Happy new year!

This year, I didn’t make any resolutions.

Instead, I wrote out intentions and themes to guide how I hope to engage with the world in 2022.

They are written in a free-form, affirmation style and I’m sharing some of them here with you even though they haven’t been refined or sculpted into a cohesive piece of “content” like I would normally share—because one of my intentions is to gently release perfectionism, and to embrace allowing things to be raw, and messy, and even bad. And another is to share more fully of myself even if it feels uncomfortable.

Maybe some of these intentions will resonate with you. Or, maybe you have your own you’d like to share in the comments? What are you bringing with you this year? What are you leaving behind?

Affirmations: Why these are not resolutions

I do not want to participate in being resolute. I do not value rigidity.

These are intentions and themes. They are malleable and fluid. They are in flux and will expand with me. They will change shape and adapt to the state of my life and the year as I grow.

As my container expands, so do the intentions that fill that container.

I am always changing, becoming, moving, like water in a stream, rippling over the stones and debris of my life, but still in motion: An unstoppable current—sometimes slow and serene on the clear and calm and sunny days—and sometimes rushing and raging when the weather gets stormy and I overflow, but always bubbling forward in harmony with the waterbank and the trees and the fish and the skies.

I’m part of the world. I’m alive.

These intentions help me understand how I want to be alive right now. But they may look different tomorrow or next month or next year. I don’t want to stand still, so this is good. 

I invite in the lessons the world has to teach me. I invite growth. I welcome blessings and abundance. I welcome love and happiness.

I am part of the world. I’m alive. 

Guiding theme for the year: Hope

Overall, I am feeling optimistic about 2022 despite all the evidence to the contrary and the state of the world. I am trying so hard to believe in myself and to make my dreams for a magical life come true.

Already, I am deeply blessed. And I cherish this fact and don't ever take it for granted. 

I believe I can have the life I imagine; I believe my husband Max and I can embody a way of being that is marked by ease and adventure and homeyness and relaxation (and deep work when it's called for, but I don't want that to be the defining feature).

I want easiness for us and for the world. I want to rest. I want everyone to be able to rest.

And I also want us to be able to rise to the occasion of our life and make the most of it, to do the work that is urgent and necessary—but not in surplus—only in the appropriate amount that leaves space for pleasure and luxurious joy.

This is my vision for our lives.

More specifically, some of the additional themes and intentions I will be working with this year that nest under this guiding theme are:

Belief that a better world is possible

This year, I allow myself to feel optimism. I am going to try to believe, defiantly, that a better world is possible.

Everything is literally so terrible all the time that this one is hard—but we have to believe in a better world or else we are lost.

I acknowledge the voices in my brain that tell me optimism is foolish.

I hear the internal alarm systems that are depleted from surviving through the plague, the whispers that tell me to be on guard, to stay alert, and fear the worst at every moment.

I choose to thank these voices for keeping me alive thus far but I also tell them that I’ve got it from here.

I am allowing myself to expect the best this year. I give myself permission to hope again. I am sick of living a half-life; hope is necessary to thrive. 

This doesn’t mean being irresponsible or throwing caution to the wind. I accept and honor my responsibility for myself and my community.

This simply means adjusting my mindset to welcome in blessings. And giving myself the energy to create and do good works. The art I hope to make is contingent on this belief.

nanowrimo

A post shared by National Novel Writing Month (@nanowrimo)

Being more courageous about being myself

This year, I will be more courageously myself.

I have ADD (or what is now called inattentive type ADHD; I wrote about it for HuffPost here) and as a result, I've often put my foot in my mouth, said weird things, engaged in raucous jokery, and can generally behave awkwardly or over-exuberantly at times.

Throughout my life, I’ve felt deep shame about being “too much” and tried to suppress many of my personality traits (this is commonly called “masking” by people who are neurodivergent like me). But I want to release that shame.

So what if I’m weird or different? That’s who I am. And honestly, I’m a good time.

Part of the issue is wanting to be liked. Humans are social creatures and our survival is dependent on our ability to live in community with one another. So some of the wanting to be liked is hardwired and evolutionary: We need to be part of a group. And this desire can be good at a baseline. It's good to seek belonging. It is wise to be sensitive to other people.

But there are times when seeking approval tips over into the point of self-betrayal and it is robbing something from me: A full life.

I want to be more aware and discerning about when my desire to be liked is coming from a helpful place of bringing me closer to the people I love, and when it is actually camouflaging me, concealing my true self, and making me invisible.

I’ve made great strides in becoming self-possessed but I want to try even harder.

I acknowledge that this will continue to be a challenge but I will learn to sit with the discomfort of being judged, or misunderstood, or even disliked.

This extends into my goals for adding my voice to the world as a writer. As a ghostwriter and creator of corporate communications and content for a brand(s), it has been easy to hide. And it has been safe.

This year, I will take more risks—to step out of the shadows—to create and share work that I’m proud of under my own byline.

An affirmation for this is: My voice is worthy of being heard. My contributions are valuable.

Gentle discipline

Discipline has a harsh connotation and I’ve always simultaneously recoiled from it and put it on a pedestal as some unattainable gold-standard ideal. Culturally, we celebrate this thought too, that discipline is the apex of human behavior and accepting its rigidity can unlock the life we desire.

Januarys are the worst for this. Everyone is recommitting to some unattainable version of “discipline” around their behaviors.

I’m opting out this time.

I’m saying no and rejecting the binary: There is not either discipline or ease. We don’t have to choose. These things can co-exist and reinforce one another: Comfort and accountability to the art we want to make, and the life we want to build.

So I am rethinking discipline this year. I am inviting it in as a gentle force, as a soft but buoyant mattress that lifts me up and supports my dreams and provides a safe surface for rest and release.

I am pursuing discipline in a way that allows for ease. I am releasing the all-or-nothing thinking that has held me back from reaching my goals in the past.

I took all of January off to focus on the book I’ve been working on for over a year, and on writing in general. And to celebrate, I’m doing a writing streak this month.

In the past, I would often abandon a streak if I couldn’t show up to the writing in a good mindset each day. I would get discouraged when the words wouldn’t come and everything I wrote was shit. I couldn’t face the prospect of doing things wrong, so I would abandon the effort and admonish myself for lacking discipline. I was holding a definition of discipline that required perfection. Now, I am reimagining discipline as gentle. As celebratory. I have the opportunity to do this every day. I have created space for it. What a joy.

This time: I do not hold myself to doing writing that is perfect or polished or even good. I am permitting myself crappy days. If I write only 5 words one day, it counts the same as if I write 500 or 5000 another day. Everything counts. I am being gentle with myself and allowing it to be playful. What might happen when I don’t push so hard? I am excited to find out.

Protecting my time

This year, I will try to guard my time as sacred. This means being more bold and unapologetic around BOUNDARIES.

For once in my life, I want to be more afraid of letting myself down than of letting other people down.

I've always been externally motivated, not internally motivated. I’m trying to change that.

And I enter into this intention with self-compassion knowing that I will mess it up a thousand times because boundary work is deeply challenging and emotionally draining (but so necessary).

I want to let my hyper-vigilance and people-pleasing recede into the ether but I realize it is easier intended than accomplished. 

An affirmation for this theme is: Other people’s emotions are not my responsibility.

I also honor the other side of this theme, which is respecting other people’s boundaries and acknowledging that my emotions are not the responsibility of other people.

On the topic of responsibility . . .

This year, I am challenging the “personal responsibility” gospel wherever I see it and standing up to it when I notice myself internalizing it.

Two things can be true: We are responsible for how we move through the world AND the much greater responsibility is for systems to change.  (Here’s a good op-ed that talks about this in relation to COVID specifically, but this idea applies to EVERYTHING). Personal responsibility will not solve climate change, or covid, or world hunger, or global health, or anything at all until systems offer more support and create the conditions for a collective commitment to “social solidarity and mutual obligation.”

And finally: More books

This year, I want to read more—for pleasure, for learning, to expand my knowledge of the world.

I already read widely and often but I’d like to read more BOOKS specifically.

There are no quotas for how many books I will read; I’m not putting a number on it.  I do not want everything in my life to become defined by metrics. My interests and hobbies do not need KPIs. I am not a machine.  I simply want to more fully pursue the pleasure of books and am stating the intention. 

RELATED: I will be protecting what I put in my brain.

Some things are poison and even though they are important, everything's important, and I don't always have to engage. Or, I can be more conscientious about how and when I engage with troubling news and upsetting stories.

I've always believed we can't bury our head in the sand, and can't look away from the harshness of the world, but if we're constantly firing our internal alarm systems, those receptors get tired.

It’s OK to protect my attention. It’s OK to keep my headspace safe and nurtured.

I want the art I make to flow from a consciousness that is lush and flowering—a technicolor garden with verdant foliage and brilliant blooms of every hue.

I do not want to create from a position of fight, flight, or freeze, so I will tend to the garden, fencing it off from predators, pulling the weeds, watering the saplings, letting the sunshine in to nourish the burgeoning splendor.

Thanks for reading. Take it easy. (Really.)

-Amy