Regularly create novel challenges for myself

I’ve noticed that you can “give up” on goals and revive them again years later. I’m not just talking about your lived life, but on 43Things everything (including the cheers) seem to be saved.

That’s reassuring.

My list is cluttered to the point of stress. Many of the goals I added when I was at the peak of my health, before my relapse and when I could leave the house once or twice a fortnight. (That’s two weeks, for any Americans.) I don’t think I’ll be able to have singing lessons or go to a space observatory for a while, but it is hard to let them go.

I want to hold onto them with both hands. I want to seize the day! When does that just turn into dream hoarding though?

I have a Word file where I hoard all of my dreams. There are pictures of things to do and make; and lists of goals and bullet points of how to achieve them. It is rather stressful.

Sometimes I think we substitute ambition for action or success. What I want to do doesn’t align with what I can do, which creates this grasping feeling. What I want reflects who I am, but not how I am, and I feel this tension between what I want and what actually is. Maybe that gets in the way of what I can actually have; more crucially, the dreams becomes life-denying rather than life affirming because they’re not a true reflection of it. They show a life (or a self) unlived rather than aliveness I have right now.

They’re what I could be doing if I were healthy. But I’m not healthy: the healthy version me doesn’t exist yet. I exist. I need my goals to help me become who I actually am, rather than make me feel like this squelchy, chronically fatigued octopus trying to hold everything down.

That I’ve been feeling pretty good about myself lately might be why I’m thinking about this now. I want to be myself.

2011 really started for me in December 2010, when I started the phone call goal (the impression of which has been deeply embedded like many finger prints into my mind) and when I found this list about low self-esteem.

Lack of social confidence and social avoidance were two of the signs. Not eating well. The inability to see yourself in a good light nor take compliments. A reluctance to take on challenges. Anxiety, conformity. People pleasing and self-neglect.

Yep, yep, yep.

As many of my ambitions, I took this one on with gusto and imagined I’d blaze through the list and it would be totally amazing and insane. I have changed so much in the past few months! One of these changes has been in the form of my (slowly, slowly) shifting focus from end results to processes. The focus on each step as opposed to the imagined destination.

When my affirmation challenge is finished, I want to twist it into a different shape and start playing with it again. It hasn’t given me an “amazing insane” transformation or the fire crackling boost the phone call goal did, but it has given me calm.

First of all: how cute is this fox and how much do you love his ears and his nose and his wee little face?

Second: I’m thinking about my challenge for April. Something more tangible than being social, something based in graspable things but what?