Every year on the last day of the year I create a vision board. An aesthetically pleasing patchwork of quotes, words, and pictures that represent my intentions for the new year. A vision board is a way to help one live with intention throughout the year. Unfortunately, life doesn’t always look like one’s vision board. Sometimes the universe likes to go rogue and create her own vision board for your life. No offense to the universe, but she could use some work on her vision boarding skills. She’s really not that good at it.

I recently found my vision board for the year 2023 and it made me laugh out loud. The board was filled with intentions of manifesting a year of inner peace, balance, independence, healing, etc. 2023 included very few of those things. It was peppered with moments of each of those things, but it was mostly focused on surviving. Putting one foot in front of the other to get through each day was my singular focus for most of 2023. Survive my illnesses. Survive mold exposure. Survive throwing away everything I owned. Survive having to move in with my parents. Survive getting Iv’s 3 times a week to detox mold from my body. Survive the grief of it all. As you can see, there wasn’t a whole lot of living going on in 2023.

It made me realize that whether you have a vision board for your life or not, life is going to happen the way it happens. You can set every well-meaning intention at the end of the year for what you want the new year to bring, but life is going to bring what life brings. Life doesn’t follow our well thought out and beautifully created plan for what we want each year to look like. It would be really nice if it did, but it doesn’t. There’s going to be things that happen that weren’t on our vision boards. Things we couldn’t imagine would ever happen. Here’s the kicker and the line that as a recovering control freak makes me feel so uncomfortable: “We don’t have control over what life brings us.” Yes, if reading that makes you feel like you and your stomach just plummeted down the first and biggest drop of a rollercoaster, you are not alone. I am riding that same ride. As uncomfortable as it is, it’s so very true.

Just because we don’t have control over what life brings us doesn’t mean we don’t have any control. Our control lies in how we respond to what life brings us. We have a choice. That’s where our power lies. Throughout my health journey I have responded to what life has brought in many different ways. In the beginning of my journey I was focused on maintaining a good attitude/outlook and doing what I could to heal. In the middle part of my journey, I responded with anxiety, fear, anger, and being numb. That was the year of surviving, but not feeling. In the present moment, I am trying to make the choice to respond with “How can I build a life with these illnesses and symptoms.” I don’t want to spend my years surviving. I want to spend them living.

I thought about creating a new vision board for this moment in life to represent what living looks like and feels like now and then I decided I don’t think I need a document to help me decide those things. I think those answers are within me.

If you have things going on in your life right now that weren’t on your vision board, the first step is to blame the Universe and her horrible choices. Seems like an obvious first step to me. After you dump the appropriate blame on the Universe, remind yourself that you have a choice. You get to choose what you do with the stuff life brings that wasn’t on your vision board. That’s where your power lies.