Intentions

I've been poking around on the interwebs, looking to see how other people might cope with creating while transient. In my travels, I found the Creative Everyday Challenge, and spent some time looking at the blogs of people who are participating. It's wonderful to see so many people creating, to see all the beauty being added to the world. I'm debating joining the challenge. It would be nice to have a committment to something outside myself; that might keep me going at points where it would be easy enough to curl up around myself and shut down.

As with so many other things, though, looking at all the drawings and artistic things makes me feel a bit inadequate. This is one of the challenges I've faced over and over and over in my life - to be visible, to participate fully in my life, in life in general. Being visible is not just being seen, it's having the potential for being judged. And still, in some corner of my mind, being judged is not a positive thing. It's to be judged and condemned, judged and found lacking.

When I'm tired, when my energy is low, my brain resets to the default, which is to believe the negative voices from my childhood, the voices that still whisper, "fat, stupid, ugly." The positive voices are harder to hear. I have to keep myself healthy and strong and energized to keep the voices balanced. And it's hard to keep myself re-energized when I'm living in someone else's house.

On the Creative Everyday blog, I found an idea that's very interesting. Instead of New Year's resolutions (which I hate anyway), someone came up with the idea of setting an intention for the new year, and choosing a word to represent it. I thought about visible, but I've decided that open is a better choice for my situation for this point in my life. I need to keep myself open to possibility, keep my heart and brain and soul open. By being open to everything around me, I can find the path, the job, the place that I need to be.

To me, being open means being able to take risks, take chances, experiment with things that may not work out as planned. It's being open to playfulness and pain, to ups and downs, to the full specrum of life. It's being able to quiet the judging voices, not silence them. It's staying open to all the feelings and thoughts I have, both positive and negative, and accepting them as part of me. When I can do that, just be who I am at the moment, then life is good. So, OPEN is my word, my intention for this year of changes and challenges.