Goals from Last Week – How Did I Do?

Writing

• journal about Moonchild (memoir) project at least once – DONE.
• collect all relevant old notebooks from storage and bring them up into my apartment – nope, didn’t do it, still want to.
• start constructing Nick timeline (the timeline for a relationship that figures prominently in my memoir project, explained in the reflections section of last week’s check-in) – find all existing references in Moonchild – I did technically start this but barely worked on it, and think I need a more concrete goal for this going forward.
• work on blog at least 5 days – DONE.
• journal about blog at least once – DONE.

Music

• seven guitar practice sessions – yeah no, I did four – I’ve been practicing every day, with very few exceptions, since early mid-April, so this drop-off is out of character for recent months
• get up through song 83 of book one of my Hal Leonard Guitar Method Complete Edition book – DONE – even though I didn’t do the amount of practice sessions I thought I would, I still did go forward since the previous lesson was the Em chord, which I was very familiar with already.
• seven keyboard practice sessions – yeah even more of a no here, I only did three (and two of those were today) – like with guitar I’ve been doing keyboard pretty much every day for months, so this does have a falling off the wagon type feeling.
• get up through page 52 in my Keyboard Musician for the Adult Beginner book – also no, I’m up to page 50 and have some catching up to do.

Lifestyle

• sleep without the phone (a struggle you can read about here) – this will put me at 140 nights, aka 20 weeks, in a row – DONE – 20 weeks, baby!
• read through page 226 in All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr – DONE – this book is sooooo good; not easy but good.
• write Morning Pages every day – I wrote them 6 of the 7 days – I couldn’t exactly write a big post about them, and then not write them.

Reflections on the Week

It was kind of a weird freaking week. One of those weeks that feels more like a month and is hard to remember in detail. One of those weeks where you feel like you lost time–not mismanaged it so much as it just evaporated.

In a lot of ways, I fell off of a lot of habits that I’ve been working on building, habits that support me creatively, emotionally and physically. I fell off with practicing guitar and keyboard. I only worked on writing stuff three mornings (I aim to do all seven whenever possible, and it definitely was possible). I haven’t been putting exercise goals on here (maybe I will) but I fell off several of those, too.

I think it started with staying up too late Monday night, and then on Tuesday, I had a (phone) session with my therapist through my med school’s student health center, and you know, you don’t always walk away from a therapy session feeling good and this time I definitely didn’t. It just stirred up so many anguished feelings, including a lot of what I went into towards the end of what I’m thinking of as my anguished post, and it was hard to put all those pesky feelings back in the box afterward. I felt derailed and really struggled to get railed again. Re-railed? Whatever it was.

Oh yeah, I was also taking a class whose big assignment and final were both this week. So there was that.

Later in the week, I worked on an email that was epic and a long time coming. Maybe the derailing of the session, or the anguish in the post, pushed me to write it. I stayed up late Thursday night working on it, and listened to folklore while composing. Then in the morning, I looked it over a couple times and tweaked it some, and then sent it, and then wrote this post about sending it.

So, that took up a lot of time and an enormous amount of emotional energy, that probably had been stagnating for quite some time. I’m hoping that writing that and releasing it into the world will help me move forward in tangible, real-world ways, and also break that stagnation that’s been plaguing me and help things move forward on the more inner landscape, emotional fronts as well.

Now I’m slowly trying to get back on track. I don’t want to look at this past week as a wash or a waste, though it’s tempting to, because I did something that needed doing for a long time, and so I’m hoping there’s a setting-free that comes with that and that I can focus back on some of these goals and what feeds my soul. I’m also starting to sizzle some wild juicy plans, maybe.

Goals for this Coming Week

Writing

• journal about Moonchild (memoir) project at least once
• collect all relevant old notebooks from storage and bring them up into my apartment
• work on Moonchild all seven days – currently working on Nick timeline (the timeline for a relationship that figures prominently in my memoir project, explained in the reflections section of last week’s check-in)
• work on blog at least five days
• journal about blog at least once

Music

• seven guitar practice sessions
• get up through song 86 of book one of my Hal Leonard Guitar Method Complete Edition book and introduction of the D chord
• seven keyboard practice sessions
• get up through page 55 in my Keyboard Musician for the Adult Beginner book

Lifestyle

• sleep without the phone (a struggle you can read about here) – this will put me at 147 nights in a row
• read through page 356 in All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
• write Morning Pages every day

Now I’m off to do some detailed planning for the week, and maybe read Mists of Avalon, a book that is a trip to re-read fifteen years later, for a bit before bed.

-April

I’m going to start putting notes at the bottom of these posts in case anything on here is confusing.

Notes:

• Morning Pages, referred to in the lifestyle section of these goals, is the practice of writing three long-hand pages right after waking up in the morning.
• You can read about them in this post where I introduce what they are and my history with them, and you can find all posts that mention Morning Pages here.
• The practice comes from The Artist’s Way, the seminal creativity book by Julia Cameron. I’m doing a weekly column called The Artist’s Way Reflections, which was introduced here in my blog re-entry post.
• Moonchild is the name of my memoir project, which you can read about in more detail on my Memoir page or on this old post with a rough sketch. You can also find LOTS of other posts about it here.
• You can check out other posts about goals (goalposts?) here.