Words Worth Shouting
#oneword365
How the One Word Challenge Helped Me
Find My Way Back to Myself
In 2018 my neighbor posted on Instagram about reflecting on the “one word” approach she had for New Year’s resolutions. Like many people, I have a love/hate relationship with resolution making. 2018 found me knee deep in my personal rubble following a year I’ve come to refer to as “ground zero”; a year where I lost my role as primary caregiver to my son, my identity as a teacher and myself. Weekly art therapy was teaching me how to keep my head above water and taking on one word as a signpost on my search for a path back to myself seemed like it might be the flashlight I needed.
Fast forward to today. The first day of a new year; perched on the precipice of high expectations for anything brighter than the darkness that hangs like a shroud over 2020. You might think COURAGE would make the perfect choice for the year ahead and you wouldn’t be wrong, however, since hindsight is twenty/twenty, it turns out that it was the the exact word I needed as a guide to make it through what might possibly come to be known as one of the most challenging times in modern world history. I marvel at how I had no inkling of the pending pandemic a year ago when I woke up knowing that “courage” would be my intention for the new year. After all, I was fresh off a year where my first “word”, BLOOM, was a perfect pairing to the growth spurt I was making on my quest to find my authentic self.
As I sit here in the last couple of hours of the first day of 2021, I am a firm believer that the word I am about to declare will be the best companion for the adventures ahead. Welcome 2021; 364 days ripe with opportunity to live into JOY! My first act of JOY is to launch this new feature of my website!
Join me as I create weekly Blog Posts reflecting on the small and big moments over the last three years that are linked to the words I chose as “resolutions” to help me stay grounded.
Learn how my 27 year career as a teacher came to an abrupt halt.
Find out how ART became my “new career”.
Look through the window of my personal struggles with anxiety and depression and see how I developed more positive mental health routines.
Be present to my reflections on adoption and parenting and the mistakes I am learning to name and how they impacted my relationship with my son.
You will also get an inside look at my writing process as I seek to revise my original Instagram musings (found at #studiospacesunday) and compile them into a cohesive memoir of the midlife storm that shattered me and my journey to pick up the pieces. Each day I learn how to hold them with grace as I patiently and painstakingly practice the art of kintsugi in an effort to find my way back to my whole self.
