Grace and Getting Organised

photo by Caitlin Shepherd

It’s Scotland in January. I’m trying to arrange my days around the weather to make sure I get some sun. This morning is meant to be the only pocket of sunshine that we’re getting for the coming 7 days, but I woke up feeling sluggish and a bit cranky. So I made myself some tea, grabbed my notebook and crawled back into bed. Here I still am, two hours later, writing to you.

I know that when there is resistance to doing something that ‘should be joyful’ like a long walk usually is to me, it’s time to get journaling. Something is making itself known and wants to be seen.

And so it was. When I was finished with both my morning pages and a prompt from my friend Katie, I was going to check something related on Instagram and it opened on a video by LaNia. It grabbed my attention and I watched it. If you don’t know LaNia, she makes encouraging videos while painting and she’s really lovely and on point. This video was about her financial insecurity. It was very honest. She’d thought that with a large following, money would start showing up, but it didn’t. She said something that touched me, that she was working on it, but that she never had financial stability before, so this would be a new thing for her. In the way she said it you could see that she gave herself grace for building something new.

That was really beautiful to see. And I think that’s what makes her videos so beautiful and impactful. While she’s struggling with aspects of life, she gives herself grace and thereby allows for the viewer to give themselves grace too.

She also described that she was pouring out in a way that wasn’t sustainable for her, without receiving, to sustain her practice. I think so many artists can relate; I certainly can.

This is one of the things I’m setting boundaries around this year. Unpaid work. Especially as an actor. And not just unpaid work, but also low pay and projects that I don’t believe in.

A lot of my time back in Glasgow this January has revolved around editing and once this is completed (this weekend), I will be very careful about what I’m putting on my plate. I’m going to start valuing my time, so I have the space and energy to show up when something exciting, something I really want comes my way.

I’m one of those people who come up with a word of the year to center my decisions, and I don’t have one for this year yet. What I know is that I want much more joy and ease in my life and less work that feels like work.

I’m learning that work can be easy, and it can be brief too. In the past I’ve been trying to build a life where I can work less and have time for fun things by working a lot, being stressed and often depressed.

It’s not working.

One of my favourite things I wrote in these blog (nu7 to be exact) is:

Tomorrow is eternal
Today is eternal
They are two separate galaxies
That never meet.
You can never get to tomorrow,
It’s only a reflection of today.

I learned to work hard. I learned that I would be required to get up very early and work 5 days a week to make ends meet. That perhaps I would be able to afford one nice vacation a year, unless I was saving for something else.

And while I always rebelled against this structure, wanting to live freely, this definition of what work means is still within me.

I’m redefining what work means. This is still new to me and it will take time to root itself fully in my perception of the world.

Taking the time to go inwards is so rewarding. And I love writing this. In the past months I’ve been back and forth and wondering why I write this blog, and I think you’re probably tired of reading about someone thinking of why they write. Maybe you aren’t, but I surely am.
I’ve been in an extended in-between time, unsure how to move forward, unsure in general and often depressed, not wanting for the darkness to leak onto these pages.

In January when I was in Austria, I had a particularly bad moment. I was with friends and their kids and I had such a bad PMS day that I couldn’t interact, and retreated into my room downstairs to lie in bed. Suddenly I was sobbing. I let it be and after some minutes I wanted to get up & get moving. I had a hot shower and went into the freezing cold on a long walk in the hills. For some reason I wanted to record the truth. I got my voice recorder out (my phone) and started saying what the truth was. I walked for over an hour and recorded about 30 minutes, switching between hands and pockets as the icy air was biting into them. This wasn’t a rant, it wasn’t complaining. It was getting to the core of things, simply. If I started ranting, I’d prompt myself back with ‘the truth is…’ which brought focus back to it.

It was so so good. It reset me. It wasn’t negative nor positive, it was simply the state of myself and things.
Maybe that’s it, that it didn’t have story attached to it.

I decided to do this regularly.

This is how I showed up here too when I started. It was a direct way to check in weekly and share with you. It was a way to keep writing and being read.

And here I am, over a month later, sharing writing from January in a hip café in London de Beauvoir. A nook of the city I had never even heard of. Between one friend’s place and another. My bag with me, stopping, pausing, having something hot & sweet, no more caffeine. My project has been handed over and my word of the year found.
I’ve been holding my weekends ‘free’, trying to resist going into productive mode again, into a new project immediately, trying to take off that pressure of making something of my life NOW, instead thought-through steps, meanwhile still having things go on, like opera singing and auditions that pop up every now and again (yay!), and community sauna sessions, coming to London, working out.

Maybe that’s enough for now.
Maybe the next bigger thing I want to make will need careful consideration and a proper time schedule. Getting organise, taking stock and charge of my life, that’s my approach to the year. Self-leadership.

// Siris