I'm doing a new thing
This is the first post in a new writing series I’m starting. I will post four posts a week for four weeks. Starting today. Hi! The theme: Summer of Gifts.
The name comes from a new idea I’m playing with from the author Jen Sincero, who says that we can shake up the ego (what she calls the Big Snooze) when we get over our petty smallness and begin to share our gifts with the world with heart and integrity and courage. She’s helping me realize that I am not living out my full blissed-out potential because I’m not freely offering my gifts to the world - my way with words, my power of woo, my love of bringing people together, my Lindsayness.
And when my not using my gifts, I tend to wake up in the morning and look around at my life - my sweet husband, the glorious organic farm where we live, the stunning Cascade mountains outside of our window - and still feel a leaden tug at my heart. I’m tired of being of writer who doesn’t write, a person with ideas and things to say who doesn’t say them, and someone with a crazy story about recovering from a catastrophic illness who doesn’t share it. I have worked WAY too hard to be well in all areas of my life to live with this nonsense!
Nine years ago this week I was in a fetal position in my parent’s basement, sure I would die. Nine years ago began the saga of what seven years after that I’d learn was late stage Lyme. Everything about how far I’ve come and the life I am living now is a gift with a capital G - the wonderful man I married, the world renowned health care I’m receiving, the miracle of moving to the Pacific Northwest simply so I can heal. It all feels like an abundance I don’t deserve - AND - I’m choosing a new way of relating to the Gifts: I receive them, I enjoy them, and I give thanks for them! And I want to share them with you.
I have Lyme to thank how its burned away anything trivial, trite and not-real from my life. All chronic diseases have a no-frills way of helping us see the energetic charge of everything we say, buy, do and think. Energy is like gold, and so when something is weighing me down energetically, my radar goes up. As I continue to heal from Lyme, I know now that the discipline of a daily writing practice is the next heaping dose of medicine I need to swallow, even if my Big Snooze suffers a huge vulnerability hangover every time I share. I just don’t have the energy anymore to carry all the creative deadweight that comes when I don’t go for the thing I know I should be going for.
Some guidelines I have for the Summer of Gifts:
a) work no more than an hour on each post as a practice of letting go of perfectionism - the chief form of resistance that keeps me from being a creative person. It’s okay that my writing won’t be polished, perfect or poised. It may be pathetic!! The point is just to show up and write!
b) to let everything about this project be really, really fun!
More tomorrow, and the next day…
xo
