Better Than Before....

I confess... oh yes it's public confession time. I confess that I've been avoiding you. It's not you, it's me. So please don't take it personally. I won't bore you with all the sad sorry details. It's one of the reasons that I hadn't been writing. I was feeling all sorts of negative emotions and I did not want to put that out into the world. I hadn't been ready to come back until today I guess.

First things first - there has been a whole lot going on. At the top of that list has been my heart. It's been ten weeks or so since I've started treatment for an infection in the lining of my lil ticker, this is the first week that I feel almost normal! So that's great news. I have another month to go and then hopefully I'll feel tip top. 

As some of you know, when something big happens in your life, if you're used to checking in with yourself, you tend to re-evaluate. It can be any big thing like in my case a health scare,  or the death of a loved one, or end of a marriage, birth of a child... whatever... you look at your life and ask: "Am I living the life I want to be living?" In my case, the answer was kind of no. I can't complain. We live in one of the most magical places in the world. If you don't believe me, just check out my Instagram page and you can see Spring blooming in all of her magnificent glory. I have an amazing partner whom many of you know as He Who Shall Not Be Named, and we have a great dog. Still my heart and soul are not entirely fed because of work. 

Being a writer, I want to write. You might be asking: "Well then why the heck haven't you been here blogging, for crying out loud?!" I'll get to that in a second, you know how I love to run on.

A few events came together and my beloved and I had a long talk and we have decided to leave Vancouver. We are going to drive across the country next week and make the move to Toronto. I don't as yet have a job out there. There are no guarantees. We don't even have a place. I flew to Toronto over Easter to find a place and it was an epic fail. Suppose that didn't help my sour mood, but I certainly didn't want to come here and moan about it. Hence part of the avoidance.

Doesn't matter. Life has a way of teaching you that there are no guarantees with anything so you may as well live the life you want or at least try for it. Nothing worse than holding a dream that you never really intend to fulfill. That's not me, noble readers. I want to be a working writer. So much of my time has been spent working on a new TV series - a 1900's gangster drama that stars a woman as the lead of all things. It's been all consuming. Still that isn't the reason I haven't been here.

I've been avoiding coming here because just when I felt I'd cleared a space for me, for us, to talk about whatever we wanted, to explore next stages in life, or to even share a short story or two with you (that was my hugest desire and then I became afraid), our girl Tracy Anderson came out with Streaming. 

It was all I could do to limit my love of it to one or two posts. Each new class I wanted to run over and ask: "Did you see that?" or "What did you think of this week's class" or "Wasn't that so hard?" or "It was a love week or a hate week." I'd finally gotten myself away from raving about how great The Tracy Anderson Method was and how much I love the woman who created it. In January she totally had me taking over my instagram with pics and posts of her workouts. It's fabulous. I love it, I love the community that's grown up around the practice, but I wanted more from my space and I became terrified that this was just going to become another Method blog all over again. Nothing wrong with that. I'm just trying to keep out of the "obsession" territory that I'd once lived in.

Does any of that make sense? Or does it just sound whack? I know, Whitney is dead, the expression Whack should have died with her. 

The thing is, in letting go of the obsession, I have also let go of my diet a bit and I put on some weight, then getting sick I've had to ease off the six days a week - doing live stream every day in January nearly killed me. So I've been feeling poorly all around.

But as luck (or life) would have it, I stumbled onto a great new book. I love a good book, who's with me? You know I have such a soft spot in my heart for Gretchen Rubin, right? She wrote "The Happiness Project." Well she has a new book out called "Better Than Before." 
  

And just picking it up reminded me of her ten commandments and that led me to my own Shamandments, the first of which is: Be Shannon. How had I forgotten? Have any of you forgotten the golden rule of being yourself? We sometimes just need a good old fashioned reminder. And isn't it rather fitting that "Mastering" is in the title? I felt it was a personal wink just for me. I had to take it home.

The book is about habits. Why the bad ones are so hard to break. Why the good ones are so hard to make. Why is it tough to create habits even around things we love? Essentially her first book asked: "Can I be happier?" and in Gretchen's own words this book asks: "But seriously, can I be happier?" I'm only halfway through, but already it's setting my world back to right. I feel more confident in me. Who cares if I can't do all the planks in streaming? Who cares if I'm ten pounds overweight? Who cares if people in Vancouver think I'm insane for leaving? I'm okay with all of it. Okay not the ten pounds but I am working on habits that are going to improve all that.

I'm sorry this post is all over the place. It's been such a long time since I've had to table my thoughts into a consistent line of thinking.

Bottom line is this. I was judging myself. Not necessarily being a hateful meanie to myself, but judgie none-the-less. I felt that you'd judge me too. I became afraid to post anything other than stuff about the Method because that's what we're all so used to. I've been super tired and now I am in the process of uprooting my entire life and driving into a future that is entirely uncertain --- like you do when you're sick and tired right? Lol.

Who knows what the future holds, but I think on the other side of this move, I'll be better than before. Or at least that's the hope. My dad says if you aim for nothing, you'll hit it every time. I'm sorry that I abandoned you. The next month or so will be insane, but I'll be thinking of you and snapping pictures all the way across the country to share with you. And because I could use the reminder, here are some helpful Shamandments:

Be (Insert your name here) Shannon
Don't be a hateful meanie to myself (or others)
Just do the bleeding cardio already (Tracy took care of that by sneaking it into the live stream - Tracy we will always have a love-hate-love relationship over that)
Know why I'm doing this -- I think this can be amended to know why we're doing anything that we do.
And Make it your own - on my last blog it was about diet and workout, but I think this rule applies to the lives we live, don't you?

So lets make our lives our own and be really sure that we're living the one we want. Check in with yourself and once again, thanks for checking in with me. I've missed you!


Big hugs.
Shan


PS

Maybe it's time for some new Shamandments. Perhaps that will be the next post.

Oh and I have really got to come up with a new color scheme - I was trying to switch things up for spring, but didn't have a whole lot of time, now it's a hot grey mess! Like me - he he he.