Last week was pretty crappy. I totally blew a submission deadline I wanted to hit, am still behind at work, and had some personal stuff happen that I didn’t handle in the best way. I choose to believe this was all for the best and better things will come due to these failures.

The story I am still working on and didn’t submit wouldn’t have been ready no matter what I did and I’d have been shoving something half-assed out the door if I’d gotten my dates right. It will be a better story for not sending it.

I’ll catch up at work. I’m not REALLY behind, I’m just behind where I want to be.

I had a great opportunity to work on my interpersonal communication and strengthen a relationship.

I can not change what is already done. I can only control my own actions. I wouldn’t magically be happy if I lost some weight or a magical organizing fairy sorted out my entire house while I slept (though I wouldn’t complain if either happened). I don’t need to be FIXED. I need to be aware of what I actually do and make decisions and actions that reflect my actual needs and wants.

I have a tattoo of a feather and a ribbon of water on my left shoulder to remind me to go where the wind and water take me. I got it, because I succeeded my way into misery. I managed to start my own video production company with my first corporate client… and found out I absolutely HATED it. I scraped and clawed my way to where I was… and never thought about if it was what I wanted or where I SHOULD be.

If you’d asked me a few months ago if I’d learned the lesson I needed to from that, I’d have said yes. I realized I’ve never fully learned that lesson, and maybe never will.

There’s a monthly section in my planner titled “Not To-Do List” and for January I wrote:

• Judge
• Compare
• Worry
• Blame
• Criticize
• Self Doubt
• Shame

And I’ll be honest those are really hard not to-do to myself. Applying them to others is a lot easier. Also, it seems like the universe is trying to test my dedication to sparkle motion.

I don’t need an all new me in 2016. I just need to be more aware of me. To support, love, and forgive myself as much as I do to others. One of the things I’m doing is to use my planner to write how I SPENT my day rather than plan out the next day. I take some time throughout the day and before bed to record how I used my time and color code it. Doing things I enjoy and generally resting are green, writing or working on projects is blue, chores are yellow, work is orange, time with Aaron is purple, and appointments are pink. After doing this for two weeks now, I feel surprisingly better about a lot of things. I can see that stuff generally evens out and that planning to spend all of my waking hours doing things I feel I “SHOULD” do is not just unrealistic, it’s impossible. Also just the act of tracking it causes me to make better or at least more conscious decisions.

My goal for the month is to declutter my life. Clutter = anything taking up space I need for something else. Sure some of that is cleaning and getting rid of physical stuff, but most of it is mental. I have a lot of “shoulds” and “supposed tos” and internal expectations that are just taking up mental space and don’t do me any good.

I feel pretty good about how that’s going so far. I don’t feel particularly great about this last week, but I’m going to let a bad week just a be a bad week and keep going.