It’s been 3 weeks so I feel I can share.
I have been waking up early 🙂
If you have been around here for a while you know that a morning person I am not. I have shared about this often in my podcast that while I really would love to be a morning person it has never been a part of my general makeup.
In fact, the opposite is true.
I have always been a night owl.Â
I could be exhausted all day and come 8 pm I am ready to go and could work until 2 am. While I can honestly say this didn’t bother me at my core, living in a world that values the early bird and more basically-requires you to wake up early to go to most jobs and school-mornings have always been, well, rough.
In fact, mornings caused me anxiety. The moment an alarm went off I would feel myself dreading the day. I knew I needed to sleep more but the external circumstances wouldn’t allow for it.
I was lectured of course by every adult I ever encountered when I was young. “You need to go to bed early” they would say with a shake of their fingers. I was surrounded by morning people and at that time I was part of the world that required me to wake early and go do things. The real issue was not what time I went to bed. The real issue was what I was waking up for.
I hated going to school. I pretty much hated all the jobs I had (the ones that had me reporting to some place to work for some person all day anyway). When I got home, I wanted to do all the things I couldn’t do during the day. I wanted to create, imagine, dream, play. In fact, had I not been a night owl many of those parts of who I am may have been buried by the minutia of my days.
That’s the first time I have looked at things in that way. I always used to beat myself up for not being like the disciplined 9-5ers I was surrounded by. The truth was (and is) that I was doing what I needed to do to stay true to who I really was until such a time I could create the external circumstances that would allow me to fully step into myself.
“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Once I started to consciously create my life, doing the things that I wanted to do, that lit me up and excited me the rest started to fall into place.
I didn’t listen to people saying that I couldn’t be a stay-at-home, homeschool mom of small children and have time to myself each day. I knew there was a way because it was important to me. So I kept creating until I was able to create it for myself.
And I share this with you because I want you to know that wherever you are at this moment in time you can create and shift your life to be more and more in alignment with who you really are. Now, I wake up each morning looking forward to my delicious coffee and creative practice. (If I am being honest, it’s really the delicious coffee that gets me out of bed). I look forward to a few moments with my husband before he heads off to work.
I enjoy the early morning routine of feeding my menagerie and snuggling the pups on the porch.
I enjoy water coloring, blogging and creating my podcast.
Sure some mornings aren’t idyllic. I may wake up early and the kids follow behind me. I may burn my breakfast or the dogs might bark at every single leaf that floats by.
And it’s those days when I need my creative practice the most. When I need to refocus, connect and remind myself that I am not my circumstances. I am the creator of those circumstances and at any time I can change paints, add a new layer and begin again.
And so can you.
Join me for The Life Artist Master Class
Until next time…
-Michele, aka The Dreaming Dilettante