Stop Planning and Just Do It Already!

GO Places - DO Things - BE Yourself - ENJOY People - LAUGH Fully

I'm a planner.

I had my college schedule planned by my junior year of high school - as in which class, which semester, for all "four" years. Shockingly, I didn't go to my first choice school or even graduate the first time around. I didn't even finish the degree I'd been pursuing since seventh grade.

I got married and I had this whole "plan" of what life was supposed to look like. Surprisingly (more so to some than others), that ended abruptly (so it seemed on the outside) after a decade.

Somewhere along the way, I made a habit of having very detailed, and somewhat unreasonable, expectations for myself and my life that quite honestly didn't resemble anything I wanted it to be.

A whole new world of "what-ifs"

Freshly divorced, with a brand new job, in a town I'd never lived in before, in an almost empty apartment, I laid down on my bed and asked myself, "what are all the things I've wanted to do over the last ten years and haven't been able to?"

Obviously, this called for a plan, because none of my plans had ever failed me yet...

As I started writing my bucket list, I realized I was describing the person I'd always wanted to be - the person I'd never given myself the chance to become.

But a plan without action....

While writing that plan, aka "The World Record Bucket List", was both exciting and life-giving in a deeply depressing and lonely time in my life, actually *doing* anything on the list felt overwhelming and defeating. It took months, almost exactly eleven months from the beginning of the unraveling of my little world, to get the courage to do one of those items.

I got in Punk'n, my bright orange Jeep that symbolizes a special kind of freedom to me, and I started driving. I drove for over two hours to the last place I remembered being completely free in life - Devils Den State Park in Arkansas. I hadn't been there in over fourteen years.

It didn't just click though

It was a battle to keep driving. It was a battle to get out of the Jeep. It was a battle to convince myself to hike the trail. It was a battle to take selfies for the first time in my life.

I had deleted almost every picture from the previous thirteen years of my life - like a ceremonial cleansing of all of the bad memories. Even the photos I did have I hated - the woman I was looking at didn't resemble who I knew I was inside.

So I made the decision, in the middle of the woods, next to a waterfall, that I would take the pictures. Not only would I take the pictures, but I would post them on Facebook. I would start writing a new history, one for me, of me - the real me.

“Go, Do, Be, Enjoy, Laugh!”

On the way home, I had a feeling as though I had conquered the first item, although unwritten, on my Bucket List. God had some beautifully healing words for me on the two hour drive home and I found a new motto that day: GO PLACES and DO THINGS. It was simple and it felt manageable.

The more I experienced over the coming months, the more the motto came to life for me and by April of this year it came to full value: GO Places - DO Things - BE Yourself - ENJOY People - LAUGH Fully.

And so I go, I do, I be, I enjoy, I laugh... and I take the pictures

Here I am, sixteen months after that battle to go and do for the first time, beginning to write down what it means to fully live into who God created me to be.

I take the pictures when I feel fat, when I don't like my hair, when I feel goofy, when I feel lonely, when I think people are probably sick of seeing my pictures.

Sometimes I make a plan and sometimes I just go. Regardless, I am finding joy in being the person I always knew I was. In the words of Meredith Grey, "Because sometimes you have to step outside of the person you've been and remember the person you were meant to be; the person you wanted to be; the person you are."