The word of the year, 2018 edition

Moodlings followers who have been reading here for a while know that my best friend and I have a ritual of picking a theme word to focus on each year. Past words have included Freedom, Joy, Balance, Tenderness, and many more -- I think we started the practice of a Word of the Year in about 2003. I wish I had kept a list of our words over the years -- that would be 15 now! Actually, I suspect many of them are included in the handwritten letters we still write now and then and have saved over the years. Our friendship was founded on snail mail from the time we were ten, and we tend to discuss the really important things in our relationship via pen and ink.

Our word of the year for 2017 was Tenderness, and with hindsight, Cathy and I see that it was an essential word for both of us. We are both TWOs on the Enneagram, the kind of people who constantly put our own needs last, doing everything that we think other people need us to do before tending to ourselves, sometimes out of a "need to be needed." The word Tenderness came up in our conversations and letters over the past year when we were stressed or tired and not looking after ourselves. "Be tender with yourself," one or the other of us would say, and the comfort in that suggestion carried the day.

2017 was a very challenging year for me. Part of my tenderness toward myself recently was seeking out a counselor, a lovely woman who helped me to realize that my inner critic was dominating my thinking and making my life miserable. You know (or maybe you don't) -- that little voice in your head that is always saying, "You should do more!" "You should have said this instead," "you should have done it that way," or "you really don't know what you're doing!"

Constantly second-guessing myself in the many roles I play -- Mom, Wife, Sister, Daughter, Employee, and Friend -- took a huge emotional toll on me, to the point that I felt as though I was about to fall apart. And if anyone made a critical comment, my private tears were endless. But my counselor invited me to talk back to my critic, to stand up for myself and announce loudly, "I'm doing my best! And if that's not good enough for you, too effing bad!" Turns out, it's a much better tactic than allowing the inner critic to run me down and completely destroy my self-worth.

Cathy had her own struggles this year, a lot of them with the scheduling of her days and a lack of time for herself. She has a tendency to fill her daily life with more than it can actually hold, leaving her tired and out of sorts because she's left with no time to do the things that really make her happy.

So (drum roll please)...

Cathy and I have decided that it's time to look after our own needs, before all the other demands placed upon us completely wear us down... in effect, to "put on your personal oxygen mask before trying to assist others" so that we don't find ourselves incapacitated by our own inability to breathe!

In discussing it, we've both commented that having "Me" as word of the year rankles and feels too self-centred in many ways, but that fact alone tells us that we're on to something -- that perhaps it's time to celebrate Me a little more, to do something for Me every week. We don't want to end up like my favourite saint, Francis of Assisi, who reached the end of his life lamenting that he hadn't been kinder to "Brother Ass" -- as he referred to his own physical self.

How about you? Do you need some Me time? A year to celebrate yourself a little? If you've been giving yourself the short end of the stick for too long, join us. We're not going overboard; we're just making certain that in looking out for others, we also look out for the Me that goes hard for the sake of everyone else. And every so often in the next 362 days, I'll report on some of our Me year projects and activities. Stay tuned.

Becoming someone

I used to be one of those people who loved personality quizzes, was into the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the Enneagram (I have three books on it) and was pretty much magnetized to the psychology/self help section in any bookstore. I was determined to self-improve, to become MORE than I was, to show the world... that I was something special.

But somewhere along the way, I acquired a friend who made fun of my reading, calling it "psychobabble" and "navel-gazing." Then Oprah came along, and the sort of self-helpy things she offered on TV, her professional "experts" who often seemed to turn out to be frauds, and her wacky guests with all the weird problems turned me off even further. Self-help was taking a strange road, and I decided to avoid it.

I guess you could say I developed an aversion to the self-help business, because that's all it suddenly seemed to be. A business, selling stuff. Did all those people, flogging all those books, really care about anything other than the fame and fortune their theories would bring them? The more I read or watched, the less I believed in their visions of who I could become if I followed their suggestions. Soon I began to laugh at the titles of the books on the shelves in the psychology section. Puh-lease!

But recently, I picked up an Enneagram book and looked at it again. It really wasn't so bad; in fact, it reminded me of a few good things that I need to do for myself -- and the people who have to put up with me. I came across my Myers-Briggs test in an old journal, along with the suggestions that came from it -- and they still hold true. So I keep working on my tendencies to procrastinate and not finish what I sta--. And I saw Oprah in The Color Purple, (a wonderful film) and remembered that I liked her acting (and some of her book club recommendations).

Then yesterday, I came upon this video, and laughed delightedly as I recognized the melody, played by "the fabulous Stephane Wrembel." "All of me, why not take alllllll of me?" It showed me how those mostly abandoned self-help books have had their place in the making of me, in my journey of self-discovery. As have many events, courses, places, and people (a few of them, FOOLS). The thing that I've recognized is that, even before I read those books or had those experiences, I was already ENOUGH, and that I am even moreso now through the things I have learned about myself -- and others -- from books, events, courses, places and people who have played their parts in the shaping of all of me. I may not be a rich or famous someone, but honestly, I wouldn't trade my life with any of the rich and famous lives out there! And I know that navel gazing isn't nearly as important as being involved in life.

Who and what has shaped you into the SOMEONE you are? Today, breathe a little thankyou to them and celebrate your journey. And if you like, enjoy this little video as part of that celebration. Cheers!