Today is Day 2 of 365 days of my new self-imposed writing challenge of blogging daily. Of getting out of my comfort zone. Even though I’ve been doing a Morning Pages practice for years, writing and journaling something almost every day, I’ve been a little too precious with my words. I’ve decided to blog daily as a way to manifest writing being an important value, an important part of my life. It’s always been important, but I’m hoarding these words of mine like Gollum, so precious. So afraid of losing these words. I need to trust that my words being out there, shared with others, even if no one ever reads them, is safe. It’s a safe act. And it doesn’t really matter what anyone thinks about what I write and how I write. Even if the grammar is off. Even if the prose is gross. I just don’t care. At least, in theory. But that’s the practice. The more I put stuff out there regularly, consistently, the more I’ll be less precious. A less precious practice. Perhaps I’ll even become more patient with myself.
The very act of getting out of my comfort zone, I’ve realized, is how I can grow as a human being. As someone who has battled depression and anxiety much of my life, I’m beginning to realize that staying too comfortable, being afraid to try new things, to fear having to shake my life upside down like a Christmas snow globe, is how I will stagnate as a person, only to grow stale and numb to the beauty of life. Staying too comfortable, in my mind, is a recipe for complacency–and often times, a straight path to the depths of depression.
The more I think about it, a large part of my life IS about getting out of the comfort zone. And a large part of this is seeing it as a series of experiments.
Some examples:
- Selling our 3,500 sq ft house of ten years in the Bay Area to move into a 100 sq ft expedition vehicle/adventure RV for over a year with our son, six months of it in Mexico.
- Leaving my steady-ish job teaching English at a community college to becoming a freelancing virtual assistant (which made it possible to live and work remotely, becoming location-independent; this transition was less scary with the help of this empowering lady.)
- Leaving California and all my friends and family to live full-time in a RV traveling to other states such as Utah, Montana, Wyoming, Texas and then Mexico, where we considered becoming ex-pats in Guadalajara or San Miguel de Allende.
- Leaving the life of always moving to suddenly not. Full-time RV-life to apartment life. Once an homeowner to renting. California to Texas. A shit ton of friends to zero.
- Taking the leap to ramp off all meds since 2011 for depression, anxiety and ADHD to choose food as medicine–first no flour and no sugar, gluten-free, then Paleo/Primal, then keto, followed by carnivore.
- Sharing with others publicly about my diagnosis of bipolar disorder and how eating healthy and ketosis has helped me feel and look better in my late 40s than my 20s and 30s. Also the very act of sharing a photo of myself to others is radically scary.
- Trying keto as an adjunct to conventional chemo and radiation when my husband got cancer in 2014.
- Taking the leap to homeschool/unschool our kid for a few years instead of blind faith to a certain kind of education we once believed in.
- Extended 7-day fasts without food (just water) for autophagy and cancer prevention.
- Trying psychedelics for healing (something I’m planning to write about in more depth).
- Attending MAPS’ first Psychedelic Science Summit in Austin, TX to learn more about how it can help with PTSD, depression, mental health and healing trauma.
Lately, I’ve been feeling a little down, now about three months into living in a semi-permanent place in Austin, TX, where we’ve settled after the excitement of full-time RV life, now living in a rented apartment. Our son is now thriving in his new high school, happy. That’s the most important thing to witness as a parent, is to watch your kid thrive. He’s even working out, spending time in the gym, running around the lake with friends. But for me, I’ve found myself a little stagnated. It’s crazy how easy it is to get into a rut. So I’m shaking up that snow globe again by trying another experiment.
I’m curious to see where a year of writing will take me…
What experiments have you tried in your life?
