New Year

I stopped blogging last year because I didn't have anything I wanted to share. I left off feeling like I needed to go further and found myself hitting a wall that I didn't know how to climb, or if there would be a door somewhere, and would I even have the key if I found the door? Truthfully, that question was haunting me. What was I supposed to be doing?  

And it's funny because, when I wrote that, I was in the middle of doing the one thing that really calls to my soul, right now.  Everything was telling me that being a mother and a wife and caring for my family was supposed to be the thing calling to my soul.  THE thing God had called me to. I felt guilty for finding passion in making stories come alive.  

In the last 6 months I have come a long way, and not far at all. It didn't take long before I began to bang my head against the bars, until I fell apart. I fell apart and began to become fearful in situations that I shouldn't have been fearful in. Things I could handle with ease, before, I could not any longer. Instead, I both took control and gave it up.  It's taken me six months and I can't explain all of the changes in me. Mostly they manifest in small ways: a growing ease with myself;  an acceptance that I've been telling myself stories that reinforce ideas about myself and the things I believe that just aren't true anymore. Recognizing that wasn't easy and it caused a lot of anxiety, but moving past that recognition and into a life that is based on a new story is freeing. 

In the last 6 months I've lost 10 pounds and stopped biting my nails.  I started learning to play the ukulele and I went a full month without leaving dishes in the sink at night (no, I'm not still doing that, but I am doing better) and I started to feel like myself again. I'm starting to feel like I'm being reintroduced to the person that I used to be.  I was wrong about the conclusion I made here.  Life is full of romance and I can trust blindly.  

And now I'm looking forward to this year.  I don't know for certain what it will hold, but the plan is to lead a workshop for beginning tellers in February, run another half marathon in April, and direct Esther this summer. I have no formal resolutions for the year, except to continue to know myself better,  to tell myself the truth in all things, and to love.