I need clean starts.
Contrary to every piece of advice on making changes, I need things to occur at the start of a week, month or year. I need to have the clean break and it can’t just happen on any day, it has to be the day that feels like a new start.
In this way, today, Monday, July 1, 2024, is the perfect day to press the reset button on my life.
Many things over the last year have led up to today, many moments that foreshadowed today and the need for a reset. On my way to building a life that I chose and wanted to live, this moment was inevitable.
Over the last year, I have been downsizing my life, physically and mentally. I sold my house and moved into an apartment about a third of the size. This required downsizing my belongings, a task made easier by necessity. (Story of my life – as long as there is still space to hide the items from my view, there is no need to deal with them.)
Getting rid of things created some physical space but what I really needed was the space in my mind. Just like physical things, I needed to clear the mental clutter that was taking up so much space and keeping me from choosing the life I was living. I needed to simplify, increase my mindfulness, let go of the shoulds and start to create the life I wanted. In short, my life needed to be easier to live.
While removing the things reduced the weight and work of maintaining my life, I also needed to increase the enjoyment. I needed to add in things that I wasn’t doing in my old life. After years of working so hard just to maintain a life I wasn’t even sure what these things would be. I started to explore things – things I used to like to do and for whatever reason weren’t doing anymore, things I’d always wanted to do and just never found the time, and things I just knew would make me feel better physically and mentally.
One of these things was creative writing. For once, the algorithms of social media worked in my favour, I came across this post for a site called Deadlines for Writers. The basic premise of the site is that writers need deadlines to help move them past writers block and push away perfection and all of the other things that keep us from writing.
I’m not sure what I had been searching or reading about that had let Facebook know they should show me this post, but somehow it dropped this wonderful site into my feed. I’d like to say I signed up the minute I saw it, but that’s not how these things happen for me. I scrolled past it a few times, clicking now and again, until I made the decision to LIKE the page so that if I did decide to do it, it would be easy to find. (Yes, some things have many stages before they come to fruition.)
Finally, I clicked on it, registered and started writing my first short story. For the prompt “Living”, I was challenged to write a 1200-word short story. Yes, that’s part of the process, to write exactly that many words, you can post stories that are slightly under or over but part of the learning process with this page is to hit the exact word count. On June 19, 2024, I posted my first story, A Life Worth Living, was hooked and started brainstorming ideas for July’s prompt.
But all of this was a soft reboot of my life. The gentle nudging and starting to add the small incremental steps James Clear speaks about in his book Atomic Habits. It was working to some extent but there was still a barrier blocking my way.
The elephant in the room, the thing I knew needed to change but felt like other changes needed to be made first. The thing that was eating up my energy, creativity and feelings of accomplishment. That thing was about to leave my life, opening up the opportunity for new beginnings.
Today, Monday, July 1, 2024, I woke up unemployed.
And it is the best thing that could have happened to me.
As of today, I choose what happens next.
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