the beginning is always magical

I have never really liked new years as a holiday in the wintertime. I have never understood why you would want to start fresh a year whilst dealing with the cold, and snow, and ice. How on earth does it make sense to begin anew when the earth is still in hibernation mode? We should be allowed to take the last few weeks of december off for various religious holidays for certain, but beginning a year when the winter solstice just happened has never sat right with me. I can understand the fascination with focusing on the self while stuck indoors with not much else to do. There is something inherently sad about wintertime, and I think that we should not hold our resolutions about bettering ourselves or changing things around until a time of year that makes more sense. 

Such as – the spring equinox. The equinox is on friday and I decided at the end of the calendar year that trying to instill new efforts into my life simply didn’t make sense until the sun started to come out more. I want to live more in tune with the seasons of the earth, and we are at the end of the winter season and an astrological year. It may sound a little hippy but I forgot what casual, mundane happiness felt like until I was able to stand out in the sun with my face tilted to the sky and feel its warmth seep back into my skin. 

The beginnings of all the things I intend to change and get serious about have been as plotted out as I can do and come friday I will celebrate my fathers birthday and the beginning of a new cycle around the sun with the welcoming of spring. I can and will wax poetic about how I love spring in the same way I love autumn – it is part of the cycle of life/death that we participate in every year as people. I love the rebirth of the world around me as much as I love the way it slowly fades. Much in the same way that for me, the beginning and ending of road trips are the best part. The anticipation created by both for different reasons is something I wish I could bottle up and drink every time I need a little boost. 

All of this is to say that I completed the first week of the artists way and I feel more vindicated in my decision to start all of my “new year, new me” resolutions closer to the beginning of spring. 

This first week is about finding a sense of safety for your inner artist, and the uncovering of what that looks like. I feel as though I’ve been in this phase for months, creating a safety net for myself so I can feel comfortable enough to actually write and share what I’m working on. The most frustrating thing about myself for myself has always been how long it seems to take me to actually feel like myself again when I have been knocked down, pushed off the path, or in some way felt as though I do not belong in my own skin. While the realistic part of my brain understands that everyone lives differently and handles things differently, there is a part of me that wants to start projects and just go until they are complete, no stops. Truly not a sustainable way to live and move through the world but it is where I find a significant amount of inner conflict. 

During this week, one of the many prompts that are given at the end of the chapter is to find three of your biggest monsters and write about them in a few different ways. You can write letters to them, you have to write everything that they ever did and said to you and just in general get out a fair bit of the aggression that you are holding onto about some idiot that said you weren’t good enough when you were young. There are two very visceral monsters I was able to think of, but I sat staring at the little 3 on my page for a solid twenty minutes trying to think of who else was the most horrific piece of shit that has kept my self esteem so low. 

That bitch is me. Granted, I have had many people feed into the low self esteem for years, but all in truly nonchalant, almost casual ways on a regular basis. I would talk about wanting to write with friends who would agree being a writer in new york would be so glamorous, but where would you get the funding to do that? You surely cannot be good enough right now to be able to achieve a lofty ambition like that. These quick interactions that veered quickly back into whatever other petty gossip we were talking about, or where we were going for the night and truly only snippets stuck in my mind. I have been very loved by people who do not fundamentally understand what it is like to have worlds and characters and dreams stuck inside of your body almost constantly trying to claw their way out and to the surface. But I allowed small things that fester into the wall that I fully created for myself, by myself and almost lovingly maintained for years. I was my own worst monster, constantly berating myself for things said years ago to a version of me who was bullied by her friends for liking fantasy over contemporary fiction. Those people have not existed to me for (and I cannot stress this enough) an incredibly long time. There were certainly two other monsters who I wrote some scathing things about and felt better about afterwards. But grappling with the reality that I am truly my own worst nightmare so viscerally took me out this week. 

Another exercise was coming up with three champions of your creativity, and reader I came up with a page full of names. I have been lucky enough to have amassed people in my life who want nothing more than for me to write and encouraged me for years to follow my heart in this manner. I truly have gotten so in my head about where I am in life, and the versions of me that I have had to leave behind and the people that did not follow me to where I am, and how truly sad growing up has been. But I have also found people to populate my life that think that I am good at what I do, and that I should be chasing the elusive dreams of being a well published author. 
The joy I experienced thinking that this would be some sort of garden I would have to start digging, only to find that I have a garden and I simply need to tend to it was a joy that I needed to experience. I am looking forward to the rest of what this book has to offer, and how it will help me truly knock myself into the next stage of my creative life.