Serenity Bohon

Author

On Mondays, I’m a Writer

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I may have mentioned, but I am all here for all the new year hype. 

Over the years, I’ve done it all. I’ve made goals (finish the novel in 2018! Nope). I’ve listed new habits I planned to adopt in order to reach the goals (face the page every day). I’ve chosen one word. I’ve chosen three words. This year, I did a worksheet that leads you to your “true north” (i.e., your most important values), which brought me to 5 words. One of those became the word I chose for this year, and it is the cliche-est of all. I’ve been studying happiness so long, I decided to make it my word for this year as a reminder to focus on what doesn’t make me stress, strive, or worry.

What I love about choosing a word or words is that it’s not a checklist. It’s a lens. I wrote an entire narrative for my lens this year with short paragraphs on how I’ll approach my job, my finances, and my writing. I’ve already returned to it, held my day up to it, my hour, my minutes. Like habits, picking a lens is not about reaching the goals but pursuing them.

lifetime achievements

My only goal this year is still about the writing, but I’ll tell you what my writing goal is not about this year. It’s not about my feelings. Last year, I thought everything would work itself out if I could just find the joy again, if I could write for the love of it. I never found the joy, and things didn’t work themselves out either.

At that point, it seemed obvious to quit. No one was asking me to write a novel. No one cared. And, it had taken too long and led to too many rejections for it to be fun anymore or for me to believe, “but the next draft is the ONE.”

None of that mattered. I couldn’t seem to let it go. 

So this year, I’m staying on track, following the book map I’ve created, getting the pages written, however long it takes, and not even trying to love it. If that sounds horrifying, there’s this: I’m also over the failure. I no longer ask myself why it is taking so long. I don’t think about the fact that the dream was to be a professional writer-of-books a long time ago, not to be one someday.

Now, I think: the dream is to write, and I am. Perhaps I should have made the dream “to enjoy writing”, but there’s only so much dream-shaping a person can do without getting down to business.

Last year, I learned I am a 4 on the Enneagram, an ancient personality system from 1-9 with wings and balance and other things I don’t understand, and I read in a book that fours tend to obsess over the one thing they want but do not have. Hello, me. I was doing this with a fantasy about what I wanted my days to look like and what I wanted to be doing in them. I wanted it to be all about books and plays and movies all the time. And, I knew other people had this life I had imagined, and I wanted to know why I couldn’t have it, why I didn’t have it yet, and what exactly I needed to do to get it.

The antidote to the 4 problem is to be grateful, to focus on all you do have instead of on the thing you don’t. You know something cool I have? Floating holidays. This month, I used this magical gift from the day job (plus a real holiday at the beginning of this week) to take off every Monday in January. On Mondays, I write.

the Monday office

And, here we are. I’m letting go of the fantasy but sticking with the work. I wake up on Mondays and pretend they’re my every single day. I go to the writing like it’s my day job, and I type out words like I’m loving it. Words can become books. This, I know. And words are the best I can promise myself for now.

The Mamaversary Post—Take 19

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Today is the nineteenth anniversary of my motherhood. Yay me, except…I have been a mother long enough to finish one human-plus-one-year, and nothing feels finished at all.

I never decided if I should pick him up or let him cry it out.

Scheduled meals and naps or no?

I haven’t learned to relax when the thing at hand is really just a phase.

I still don’t buy dress pants before the night before the event or attend all the parties or calmly oversee homework before their bedtime and mine.

Their comforters lost their comfort some time ago. They always have too many t-shirts and not enough perfectly fitted pants.

It’s time for senior pictures again, and I haven’t.

I don’t know how to teach them to find a job they love.

I never got rich enough to buy them All The Things, which is okay because that’s probably against my parenting philosophy, but the thing is I never got rich at all, and I totally planned to do that by now.

The sheer number of tooth fairy fails.

What I’m saying is, I’m not finished yet. How can he be?

The other day I thought about how I used to spread a blanket in my yard at Highland Avenue and write in my journal while whichever boy was a baby at the time would play, probably rolling the wheels of a car along the edge of the blanket like a highway.

And after I remembered this, I thought: I probably did that once. In that moment, when the memory was far bigger than it deserved, I realized how enough it was—that time I stopped the day like that.

Sometimes we have to realize whatever we had, the way we did it, and how we gave ourselves to it was enough.

And, it’s not the end, anyway. It’s today.

 

How to Save the World from your Unchanging Personality

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My mother tells a story about a woman with a toddler. After any errant behavior, the young mother would take the child’s hand and say to the affected audience: “We’re working on this.”

Welcome to all of us.

Thanks to some podcast binging, recent reads, and the Myers-Briggs membership purchased for my professional development, I have become obsessed with identifying not just my Myers-Briggs personality (ENFP) but my Tendency, my Enneagram type, my functional preference, and why I can never seem to let go of the one thing I want but do not have.

Here’s what I’ve learned: I am a handful, please send my husband presents.

You wouldn’t think I’d enjoy being labeled. My tendency, after all, (and after taking the quiz twice—the second time very thoughtfully) is Rebel. I don’t react well to expectations of any kind, even from myself. However, my Enneagram type is 4, and 4’s believe we are super unique and misunderstood, so it only took about one insight into my soul to realize these labels offer not just whom you are but how with that knowledge you can better handle life.

You see, the truth is this: we are all a handful. So much goes into the making of us and what we bring the world. Identifying our approach to life can help us communicate with our opposites, collaborate better, fight more productively, and—you know—behave.

My latest podcast binge is Happier by Gretchen Rubin. In each episode, she offers some new way to know yourself, whether you prefer mornings or night, abundance or simplicity, overbuying or underbuying, baby steps or the entire goal at once, etc. The idea is that when you know yourself, you take care of yourself. Prefer simplicity? You’ll probably be happier if you clean out that closet. Night person? Maybe don’t seek employment at Good Morning America.

Of course, accurate personality labeling can be difficult when you figure in things like nurture. Case in point: I test “rebel”, but I rarely let myself behave that way. I meet outer and inner expectations all day every day that I don’t want to meet. And, though I crave alone time and definitely recharge with a good book, a chick flick, or my journal, I test extrovert every time partly because of my personal mission statement to “embrace the possibility in every human connection.” These discrepancies have become the point for me. It’s good to know thyself, is what I’m saying, but it’s even better to adjust.

This is what I’m finding: personality tests and similar labels were not created to separate us but to help us understand each other and connect. With that understanding, we can move around less defensively, without expecting everyone to intuitively treat us as we want to be treated. And when our own unique personalities interfere with smooth, connected relationships, there’s an apology for that…

 

We’re working on this.

It works for toddlers learning manners, and it works for the rest of us learning what exactly we’re about and how to be that, but gently, in our interactions with others. Be yourself, take care of each other—that’s the gist. Apologize when needed.

P.S. The picture in this post is my son’s entrance to middle school this year. Let’s all take a moment for that receiving line of awesome and pass it on.