A Life by Design
Finding the note I wrote three years ago, to my future self
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
Something very exciting happened to me the other day, when I was reviewing my calendar for what we had coming up over the school holidays.
I had a mystery entry which said - read p.87 of journaling book from Lucy.
What the heck was this?
My lovely friend, Lucy, had bought me a journaling book years ago and it turns out that three years ago I did a ‘future me’ type exercise. The prompts were around how I wanted certain areas of my life to look and feel.
The journal prompts asked me to write my age in three years in a circle on the page (39 - which is now my current age). And then complete sections for various parts of my life. I sprawled notes on areas such as family, home, creativity, health, work, finances, marriage and Rosa (my daughter).
What did life look back then?
In August 2022 we were living with my parents having sold our flat in Birmingham (UK) where we’d lived for far longer than planned due to various factors, mainly Covid, but were yet to find our family home. My parents had recently relocated to Warwickshire which was a huge deal with such established lives in Essex where I’d grown up.
We actually ended up living with them for two years which was not the plan but we had a house sale fall through, then a renovation project, so we were incredibly fortunate to have this option.
It was just what I needed following the isolation of lockdown life with a baby, being away from family and a patch of poor mental health. During those two years, having my parents there for company and support when my husband was working a lot was amazing for me, as well as for my daughter who was a toddler at the time.
That period of time felt very ‘in-betweeny’ and by then, I was used to this limbo feeling. Being in limbo had become very much a theme for me - with our fertility struggles and then challenges with trying to move, I had started to feel like I was constantly ‘just waiting’.
But I didn’t want this period of time living with my parents to be yet another trigger for making me feel this familiar sense of frustration and impatience, so I made a purposeful effort to reframe it and embrace the pause.
I remember saying to a friend that I was sick of waiting for our lives to start and had come to realise that this is our life.
It was the perfect time to take stock and dream up what our future life could look like whilst also being present and grateful for our circumstances during this little chapter.
Knowing we finally had our daughter and that my parents (and sister) had relocated to be near us made my heart so full that anything else was a bonus. It was far easier to welcome this type of limbo, than it had been previously whilst yearning for a future which felt so uncertain and quite frankly, so far fetched, when we saw negative pregnancy test after negative pregnancy test.
The big reveal
Reading back over my scribbles of how I hoped life would look in three years felt like a real moment. We’d done it. A family home in the suburbs/countryside, a wonderful school for our daughter, being creative (hello Sustack!), working with good people, a home that felt like our happy place - calm and homely and close to family. Tick, tick, tick.
And the best thing, which, when I wrote it felt a little bit ambitious to write was ‘a little brother or sister for Rosa.’ Having known it was a long road to conceive our daughter we knew we may be embarking on IVF again. As it turned out, we did have IVF again and, this time, we were lucky enough to conceive on our first round.
Taking stock
I’m so glad my past self forced me into pausing and taking stock of our current life.
Life is busy and it feels like there is barely time to keep up let alone take time to reflect on how far we’ve come and how drastically our lives have changed over the last three years.
It’s made me realise how important it is to do this. Since discovering this page of future dreams I keep coming back to the fact that whilst so much of life is outside of our control, a lot of it is by design.
Interestingly I didn’t have a section for career. I think I knew that the three years ahead of me needed to be more focused on home and family life. I knew from past experience that it could be an all consuming process to have another child - and I was right - so I didn’t put unnecessary pressure on myself on the career front.
Instead, I love how I put some focus on creativity. Carving out time for my writing over recent months has made the world of difference to me and I intend to keep building on this.
What’s next?
I plan to do a similar exercise again and now feels a good time to do this as we approach the end of summer.
At the time of writing, I’m about to go away on a childfree spa break with my husband and will definitely be having some reflection and journaling time and also the very rare opportunity to take stock as a couple and set some future intentions for us and our family.
Three years is quite a good length of time for this kind of thing and even before I looked back on this journaling exercise I’d found myself really noticing that I’m entering a new phase of life.
My son will be turning two soon and I’m out of the baby years and am purposefully carving out windows of time for me again. Time to dream, create and get to designing the life I want to live.
I’ll be ready for the curveballs, of which I’m sure there will be many, whilst staying true to myself, continuing to ‘check-in’ and make sure I’m living my life on purpose and not just being dragged along for the ride.
Once again, I’ll be embarking on my next chapter with intention, purposeful action and a little bit of hope to carry me through, and it feels exciting.