2020: Ready Is a Lie

I don't like the concept of resolutions. They imply that the past version of you wasn't "enough" somehow. Not working hard enough, didn't have enough willpower, wasn't smart enough, not making enough of the right decisions... To resolve to be different in the new year means that Past You wasn't good enough. But really, Past You made the best decisions that she could with the resources and knowledge that she had at the time.

But goals? That's something I can get behind. And since I'm hitting the "restart" button on my life, I have been given the rare gift of time and opportunity to set goals that are truly meaningful to me. For the next two years, I hope to grow into myself in ways that were never allowed until now, for various reasons ranging from the expectations and needs of others, to my own perfectionist inner narrative. This blog will hopefully serve as a form of accountability to these goals, and a way to communicate progress towards them. It will also serve as a journal of sorts, a semi-regular dialogue of one woman's journey towards rediscovering herself and her talents and abilities in an effort to unlearn what does not serve and share that growth with the world.

Without further ado, those goals are:

• Scholarship and Career Change: I've already submitted my application for my second master's degree, this time in Arts Leadership. I hope to move from education into the world of the arts, and use my skillset to help make the arts accessible and inviting to all. (It's a two-year program, hence my two-year plan here.)
• Write: Everyday, write something of substance. (The blog doesn't count, as it's personal reflection.) My intent is to hopefully create some sort of funding out of my writing skills, which have been developed over a decade of secondary humanities studies (and, admittedly, the intermittent internet argument.) Whether this be writing nonfiction articles for Medium or other outlets, or adding pages to my first novel, my intent is to produce 500 words a day, 5 days a week, for the first few months, and then hopefully raise it to 1000 if that is working for me.
• Sew: I've done a fair share of historical costuming since 2009, but almost everything I've created has been completed with restrictions as to time period, needs of a specific event, etc. I hope to begin sewing again with two distinct goals in mind:
1. Learn more techniques: So far, I've acquired information on the fly, learning how to sew specific methods as they became necessary for that particular project. While I expect to continue in this way somewhat, I plan to choose projects that stretch my skills and allow me to learn a range of techniques that raise my overall level of craft.
2. Create art: I hope to create not just copies or interpretations of existing or historical garments, but to meld art and costume and create new designs that express ideas.
• Read: I've always read a ton, so this isn't a change, but rather a commitment to making sure that I am not just picking up the next book that looks interesting, but ensuring that my reading shelf remains broad and deep. 
• Additionally, I intend to follow along with Ian Doescher's 2020 Shakespeare Project, which reads through every work of Shakespeare's throughout the 2020 year. Every work takes from four to eight days to complete, so it's a brisk pace until you've got free time, but I read Renaissance era writings pretty quickly (yay humanities master's degree!) and I want to brush up on some of my Shakespeare. I've read probably two thirds of his plays at some point or another, but never in order, and I've missed too many along the way. If you're interested in joining me, let me know! I'd love to share thoughts about the plays.
• Body Work: I'm covering a few things under this heading, but this mostly includes a deeper commitment to dance, particularly West Coast Swing, as well as a daily commitment to yoga and meditation. This is for two reasons:
1. First, to keep my body healthy, I will need to just plain get off my butt. I don't think I need to elaborate on the host of health benefits to regular exercise.
2. Second, yoga and meditation in particular have clinically shown benefits to PTSD survivors in calming the nervous system. As a survivor of emotional abuse from multiple points in my life, I am working to overcome my body's trained reaction to triggers, and this is one method of doing so. 

This doesn't include work on my personal life, as I'm not quite sure how to set goals for that other than "keep being honest" and "show up for your people." It also doesn't include work around my house, though I have some distinct goals there, and progress on that might show up here, too.

My first struggle will, I am sure, be an intense battle with ADHD and the fact that there are a million fun things to do around my house that don't involve thought or work. I mean, my bed alone is the warmest, comfiest thing on the planet, and that's before I get three kitties piled on top of me. So dealing with being accountable to myself is somewhat of a goal all on its own, but it's one where I just have to to show up and do the work. (Ha! Just show up and do the work, she says!)

Which brings me to my title: "Ready is a lie."

I was never going to be ready for this. 2018 ground me down to dust, I thought, but it made me stronger than I ever thought I could be. I learned to stand up for myself. Learning that, in turn, meant that I had to break some more things in 2019, things that weren't happy for this newer, stronger version of me. Nobody's ever ready for change. Change is hard. But ready is a lie. If you wait until you or someone else is ready, you will moulder in the ground before you ever enact any kind of change. So I'm not ready for this. But I'm going to do it anyway.