The end of the year is one of my favourite times. A few years ago I started a practice of doing a long, thorough reflection on the gifts, lessons, blessings from the year and emotionally and spiritually prepare myself for the year ahead. (If you’d like to try it, here’s a blog with a walkthrough of my process.)

As I reflected on the biggest things that happened this past year, three things have risen to the top of the list:

I have chosen to follow God’s way. For the first time in my life, I am choosing to tether my soul to God’s and follow wherever God leads.
To do (1), I have laid down all of my creative ambitions. That’s why there were no vlogs this year (after the Jamaica trip in December 2019). There were no Instagram posts after April 2020. With the exception of writing, which I’ll explain below, I have stopped creating.
I have given my Masters of Divinity program space to become a part of me.

Instead of filling the spaces of my life with creative projects and output, I’ve let myself live in the space and let God fill that space.

The Crossroad

In the Spring of 2020, I hit a monumental crossroads. I just couldn’t shove all of the coursework for my Masters courses into a tiny corner of my life anymore. All of the readings and papers and projects needed space. I ended up speaking to several people about this, including my parents, a pastor, the program director and trusted friends. Since I started the program in September 2019, I had managed to make it through the my first few courses while still creating personal videos and blogs on Saturdays, but this was no longer possible. The courses I’ve started taking involve concepts and assignments that require more of my time and mental space. So the thing I had to surrender was all of my creative projects.

This was no longer about time management. I’ve written several blogs about productivity and I knew that trying to be MORE productive was not the answer. Despite our culture’s obsession with “more, faster, now,” it’s not just sane to squeeze out every creatively productive minute out of my life.

So I’ve stopped making personal creative work. There are some gorgeous photos I got on a family camping trip in the summer that I have yet to edit. There is drone footage still on the SD card that I may never get to. I have to be okay with that for now. I know it’s not forever. I have to trust that if God created me to be a creative, then he can create space for it to come through in other seasons of my life. Until then, I put all the dreams — dreams of making beautiful youtube videos, dreams of creating photography that awakens the soul, dreams of traveling to breathtaking places — on hold.

Letting Go Of A Love

Truthfully, I am sad about it. Making photography and videos brought so much joy into my life since I started creating in 2014. They helped me to find joy, goodness and beauty in this life. Although I still walk through life with a eye for all things beautiful, I am no longer able to capture it and share it on social media.

That 30-45 minutes it takes it sift through photos, edit one and write a meaningful caption is now being used for rest. My mind needs white space in order to process things and do the work that is infront of me.

On another level, I may also have social media burn out. (I have created over 1700+ social media posts in the last few years?!) I crave the mental space to create deeper works that can’t be finished in 30 minutes.

To add to the burnout, the kind of social media that I still create for my jobs just doesn’t fuel me the way of creating content for my personal accounts used to. This feeling of social media meaninglessness has made it easy to quit social media.

(I wrote more about my waning relationship with Instagram here.)

As I explained this to a friend, she asked me, “But don’t you miss creating?! That’s who you are! That’s what you’re good at!”

Yes. I miss creating. But I have reached the crucial conclusion that it is not who I am. And being good at something can make me prideful and arrogant. It is better for my soul to lay it all down for now. Who I am is a child of God, a beloved daughter of God, first and foremost. What I do is not who I am. What I do should flow from who I am. In the words of my friend Maxine, it is better to create out of your specialness, instead of creating to be special. This season is giving me an opportunity to learn who I am without all the incessant creating and online approval.

Writing

I have stopped taking photos, making videos, dreaming up videos. I have stopped writing posts, thinking about posts, publishing posts. But the one craft that has made it through the pruning this year is writing. In September of this year, I started writing again. I started practicing the memoir writing techniques that I learned in Guatemala and to my surprise, I could do it! The stories started coming out!

I started putting some of my travel stories from the last 9 years of my life in words. There are stories from my time in Africa, Europe, Asia and Central America that few people have heard, but they are the pearls of my existence. Countless times, I have drawn courage, hope and purpose from my memories of the people I met on my travels and the things that happened.

Just out of curiosity, and a personal need to excavate these stories, I experimented with putting them into the form of memoir essays. Almost immediately, I could sense that something was happening to me. Most of these stories are memories that I haven’t even spoken about in years. With my life in the city, it feels like no one cares. But these stories are important. I have to tell them, if for no one else but me. My writing sessions started to feel like an intense therapy session, in the wee hours of the morning, first thing in the morning, for a month and a half.

In the beginning, there were some stories that were easier to write than others, and the longer I wrote, the more courage and confidence I felt to probe deeper.

You haven’t seen any of those essays here on the blog because none of them are ready for publication. They need polishing, pruning, fermenting, aging. Some of them sit in piecemeal chunks, just scenes that need to be thread into part of a larger narrative.

Still, something happened.

I discovered that I can write. Memoir. From a standpoint of technical ability, I still have much to improve, but I felt something awaken in my bones. I can write these stories. And they can be meaningful and coherent, not just for me for others.

So sometime next year, I hope to start sharing these essays on this blog. Until then, now you know why it may be quiet here.

Side Note: this is the video I made for author Joyce Maynard for her writing workshops in Guatemala, which I attended in March 2020. This was my last side creative project of 2020 (outside of my day jobs). :)

Finding Steadiness and Rhythm

A few times this year I wrote about the desire to have a sense of steadiness and rhythm in my life. Looking back, and looking ahead, I see that I do have more of both in my life.

Instead of just becoming more on the outside—someone with more followers, more posts, more videos, more subscribers—I feel that I have become more on the inside. It’s as though I have more internal, spiritual, emotional resources to draw from as I go through life.

This chapter of living in a town on the outskirts of Toronto, working two jobs while doing a Masters, living with housemates, was never in my plan.

It still carries a slight tinge of disappointment, but for the most part, I now embrace it as it is. As much as possible, I try to find growth, hope and goodness in this life. I try to integrate all the good lessons I learned from my years of travel to live here with wisdom, generosity and kindness.

God will not always give us what we ask for, but he will give us what we need, in order to become the kind of person that can be used by God. I trust that this must be what I need, for now.

I am wishing you have a blessed start to 2021! I will see you on the other side! :)

Infinite Love,

Anita

Explore More