An Assessment of the Process So Far

It’s been 258 days since September 1, 2014. It’s 107 days until September 1, 2015 and it’s 151 days until October 15, 2015 and none of this has much significance except that I have kept my commitment to daily blogging since last September 1 so I have gotten to the page and at least written something for 258 days when for so long I just walked around telling people I was a writer and not writing. that’s something in itself and if the blog ends up serving no other purpose than to have got me to write again, that would be a blessing.

I figured out the day after I made the “this is the last year of my life” proclamation that I would never be that recovered around codependency to end my life and that other people’s getting all fucked up about it was a shitty reason to stay alive so I decided to do everything I could to fix the shit that was fucked up about my life. According to the original plan, it would now be 107 days until I made the final decision and if it was “thumbs down,” 151 until I left. But that’s not happening. Still I decided to remain mindful of the original plan as a way of keeping the stakes high and reminding myself where doing things as I always had took me. The year to live has been transformed into a year to live.

The first thing I did was set out to find out specifically what in my life was so dissatisfactory to me and move towards the way wanted it to be. To do this, I made up a little goal-setting workshop for myself. I divided my life into several categories: career and finance; health and fitness; sex and romance; and spiritual, emotional, and psychological. I set the timer for five minutes for each category and used “free-flow” writing to describe how I would like my life to look in each of these areas and from this writing I delineated about 20 specific measurable and specific goals. Under each goal I put at least one action item that I figured would take me toward the manifestation of that goal. My idea was to simply take those actions on a daily basis and I’d achieve my goals. If the action items seemed not to be working, I’d modify or change the action item. At the end of the year, having achieved most of my goals, I’d be happy, not sad like I was when all this started. Then I promptly got busy not doing the action items.

Instead I decided to go to each category and give sort of a personal history with respect to that category. In essence I’d tell you my life story over and over and over with regard to each category. Gratefully, I abandoned that process.

I like to write scripts. So then there came the period where I invited some celebrities in to poke around in the weirdness that is the inside of my head. I enjoyed that and missed it when, without notice, it ended.

There were several days when I just let you in on what was going on with me and even a couple of blog entries where I shared some of stream-of-consciousness poetry, some of which are basically just word salad.

I went after a couple of haters in a couple of the blogs and then there’s been a little handful where they sounded something like a self-help book, two or three that were sociopolitical commentary a go-to favorite of mine in writing or conversation.

I’ve taken a lot of steps including joining a support group around underearning and getting back in therapy for PTSD. I’ve shared some of that writing with you as well.

I think that’s it. I’ve purposefully resisted forcing the blog into a more structured framework but rather let it be what it wanted to be at the time I wrote each entry. I could probably do that for the rest of my life. Additionally I do think I could take most any of these formats and force myself to blog in that way consistently. I could probably actually market the blog then and maybe even allow it to generate some income. That, after all, has been one of my chief complaints: money. At the end of this “year to live,” I’ll at least have a lot of seeds for further writing. Who knows, there may be scripts that could grow out of the scenes I wrote in that format, self-help books or an autobiography. I actually wrote what could be considered an autobiography a few years back and, as with many of the things I’ve written, it sits hidden in my computer, avoiding the possibility of rejection.

I do think that I’d like to go back and look at the goals again now since I’ve been doing some work to address the fear around taking the individual actions. I really do think I can achieve those goals but frankly I’ve just not been taking those actions since I abandoned that format for the blog. If September 1 arrives this year and I find that I have achieved at least some of those goals, I can’t imagine that I wouldn’t be feeling a lot better than I was when this whole process started.

Okay, that’s it. I just wanted to take one entry to sort of take an inventory of the process so far and see where I am and where I want to go from here. As I have been when I have written so many of the previous blogs, I’m wicked tired right now and think I’ll rub one off and go to sleep.

I appreciate y’all hanging in there with me.

See y’all tomorrow.