Honoring Yourself

As we come to the end of another year, whether or not you like creating resolutions, an end is near. For some, we are being pulled to think about everything that we have and have not accomplished this year, and what we want to take into another. Now is a good time to start considering how you want to envision this next year. What are your short term goals? Long term goals? How can you show up for yourself? That is what is in front of us.

There is something that came up throughout the year that may or may not be a direct result of experiencing the pandemic with a lot of idle time. While some people got to experience working through the pandemic, there was also a surge of people who had a wakeup and decided to question whether or not the standard work environment and practices work for them at all. We could call our pandemic selves the work for yourself generation to better understand what I mean by this. Between loss of work, and spending most of our time in the house, so many people decided to start small businesses by being creative. There was a lot of room to spend working on your hobbies and trying to find ways to turn those hobbies into financial gain. After all, who doesn't want to have multiple streams of income?

It gets easy to get lost in trying to find ways to make money, but we also have to not get lost in that so much that we forget who we are, what we want, what is important and that getting lost in the hustle culture of it all can change the outcome of it all. We are not brands, we are people. It is not normal for us to market ourselves with popularity so that people want to buy our creations. It takes away from our experiences when we record our process so that people can see what we are doing at every moment. For so many of us, our hobbies are creative outlets that allow us moments to escape from the world. A creative outlet is a necessary release that feeds our soul.

They say that if you do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life. That is not exactly true. If you do too much of anything you can get tired of doing it, you can lose steam, it can become a chore, and so much more. I spent the entirety of the pandemic pouring into something that was meant to be a personal experience of self-love and self-care. I lost myself in the experience of trying to make money from it and stopped caring for myself in the process. After overproducing and taking pride in how much I overworked myself without enough business to keep it going, I gave up. Since then, I have started pouring into myself again and I love it.

The message behind this story is to honor yourself and what you need. Do not get caught up in trying to keep up with other's, do not base your success on social media and how many likes you have. True success is succeeding in making yourself feel good and being able to get through the day. Support your intentions by honoring what you need and choose things that feel good.

My new favorite thing to do is to ask myself what I want and need from anything. Check in constantly to ask yourself what my gut response is to what is in front of me. If it doesn't feel good, if my spirit doesn't respond with joy, if I feel uncertain about it, I honor that truth and choose not to do it. I am trying to stay true to this new path. I no longer want to do things that do not feed my creativity, that do not make me feel good, that make me wish I hadn't signed up for it. In the process, this does mean making space for things to exit while giving myself the grace to allow it to go. Sometimes what feels like a missed opportunity is simply an opportunity of growth and change, or an opportunity to make space for something better. We have to keep attracting the very best for ourselves and we do that by welcoming into our lives the things that we want and acting on that.

I hope that you have a great end to your new beginning. You deserve it.

Happy New Year.

Lola