Goals from Last Week – How Did it Go?

Writing

• work on Moonchild all seven days – DONE.
• work on blog at least five days – DONE.
• journal about blog at least once – DONE.
• five digitizing sessions – DONE.

Music

• seven guitar practice sessions – DONE.
• get up through song 94 of book one of my Hal Leonard Guitar Method Complete Edition book – the new songs focus on incorporating the C# note into songs – DONE.
• seven keyboard practice sessions – DONE.
• Get up to page 57 (first half of the page) in my Keyboard Musician for the Adult Beginner book – DONE.

Lifestyle

• sleep without the phone (a struggle you can read about here) – this will put me at 168 nights (24 weeks) in a row – DONE.
• write Morning Pages every day – DONE.
• don’t pick up the phone until after Morning Pages – I held off on picking up the phone until after MPs on four days, and definitely felt the MPs went smoother and faster on days I didn’t look at my phone first.
• do an Artist Date – DONE. I took time out and watched a movie.

Reflections on the Week

General

It’s been a week. It was definitely mostly absorbed by my post about leaving medical school, which I’d been working on for some time. I put a lot of time and energy into writing on the days leading up to posting it, and the day of.

After, it was a mix of so many things. I kept thinking I’d feel a sense of relief from writing the email to the Dean, turning in the Leave of Absence paperwork, telling people. And some of those had some relief after, but the real relief came after posting about it, which was surprising to me. I’ve felt lighter, and the slightest bit hopeful for the first time in months and months.

The response was overwhelming, in a good way. Sometimes, the tough times in life show you who your friends really are, and I was touched to find such overwhelming support. That doesn’t even feel like an adequate way to say it. I was pretty anxious about the reactions to the bombshell news, and everyone really came through in a positive and supportive way. I still have so many people to respond to, and will get to that. I just had to take a break for a bit.

Because along with the relief of release came complete exhaustion. For several days after posting the post, I felt like I might be fighting something off, which is not a thing anyone wants to feel these days especially. On the other side now (I sure hope), I think it was probably emotional exhaustion. I was deep in my bones tired. I ate soup and drank tea and took naps. My body felt wrecked and my energy was shot. But luckily, most of these goals I could still do while tired, or catch up on when I started to feel normal again.

I made some progress on my tarot podcast, including a great session with my friend Tracy and her husband Dan. They gave me some equipment to borrow, talked through ideas, and Dan showed me lots of stuff on his super cool keyboard that could come into play for creating the theme song. I also got some great resources for learning how to start a podcast, and probably the most intriguing tarot request of my life as a tarot reader.

Music

I’m adjusting my keyboard learning trajectory a bit. I realized a couple weeks ago that I’d skipped the “technic” sections in previous units, thinking that like the “rote” section, it needed a teacher’s accompaniment, but it doesn’t. I thought about going back and starting from the beginning but then was like ah fuck it, I’ll just move on ahead and not skip it in future chapters.

I had also been skipping the composing exercises, which are tiny, one-sentence instructions below each chapter’s rhythm practice. I’d thought that maybe once I went through the whole book and knew more about playing, I’d go back and maaaaaaybe dip a toe in the composing waters.

After doing some of the Artist’s Way exercises this week, I realized what a strong block I have against composing, what a strong belief I have that I can’t. So, I’m going to go back and tackle it, be a beginner, start with the real simple ones, even if it makes me uncomfortable.

This is something I want to be able to do, so badly, and working with the keyboard book, it should be low stakes (no one will ever hear it but me) and fun.

So I’m going to go back and do the ones I skipped, and if I’m going to do that, I might as well go back and do the accidentally-skipped “technic” exercises too. I’d like to get caught up on both before moving on to week 8, and that may take some time, and that’s okay.

Goals for this Coming Week

Writing

• work on Moonchild all seven days
• work on blog at least five days
• five digitizing sessions

Music

• seven guitar practice sessions
• get up through song 97 of Book One of my Hal Leonard Guitar Method Complete Edition book – the new songs focus on the A7 chord
• seven keyboard practice sessions
• Finish Unit 7 in my Keyboard Musician for the Adult Beginner book, and then go back and do the Technic and Composition part of Unit 1, and the Technic of Unit 2

Lifestyle

• sleep without the phone (a struggle you can read about here) – this will put me at 175 nights (25 weeks) in a row
• write Morning Pages every day
• don’t pick up the phone until after Morning Pages
• get up through at least page 210 in The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd (and I wouldn’t be surprised if I get further)
• do an Artist Date

All right, I’m off to read Week Two of The Artist’s Way and then crash.

Have a great week everyone! If you have any goals you want to share in the comments, please do!

-April

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.
• Artist Dates, the practice of doing a solo activity to take time out and connect to your creativity, also comes from The Artist’s Way.
• 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.