2023 Achievement Unlocked!

Where Does Purpose Come From?

I have shared a bit about this pantry I’ve been making since November.

I finished it late last night.

It was a PROJECT!

I had hoped to finish it by late November, but sickness came for me in November and again in December. Does anyone remember prior to Covid being sick every single month or even every other month and thinking, “it’s just something going around”?

Well, I don’t. In fact, except for a stint in a moldy house in 2016, I rarely get sick. It’s been perplexing to say the least when I have been sick over 9 months of the past 12 as many of these illnesses took more than 5 weeks to clear up, and each started at some point in almost every single month over the past two years.

Where is all this sickness coming from?

I’m not saying Covid has caused this. I have friends with varying theories. Some say the skies being sprayed more for cloud seeding may be causing toxic soup to breathe that’s harder for some to detox. Others think the vaccines may be shedding, creating new variants rapidly in people who had been exposed prior to all other variants. And some, feel that people who received the vaccines are themselves creating variants by being inoculated in the midst of an active “pandemic” or flu cycle if you will. In any case, something seems to be wrong and each illness (for me, at least) has been attacking different parts of my body or getting progressively worse than the last.

By the end of December, this lead to a sense of utter hopelessness, telling my husband, “if this is what I have to look forward to in my life, I do not want to live anymore.”

I wasn’t thinking about dying or ending my life. I just really didn’t want to live with this prospect of painful illness after illness always with some new torture in it on the horizon.

And if you are one of those “no such thing as a virus” people, I really suggest you refrain from commenting as you have no idea how confounding it has been the past two years of “detox” in a vigilantly healthy person with no extra toxins in my diet to sustain the myriad of painful, painful illnesses I have experienced. I do believe terrain is an important part of the puzzle. This is why we moved 30 miles away from the oil refinery we had been living on top of for the coinciding past two years. Our water is no longer fluoridated (not that I ever drank it). But we took showers and baths in (chlorine) filtered out water, and it still gets in our system to a degree. However, I have lived and worked in my life in worse toxic soup and nothing compares to the past two years. Our move in November (at least the first two months) hadn’t brought the relief I was hoping for.

We moved into a house with a mold issue. Luckily, the mold was confined to a specific area. We insisted they do proper remediation at our new house. They did at the end of November (after a stressful period of nearly a month in which the homeowner drug out the project and hired incompetent “handy” men), along with thoroughly cleaning and treating all the air vents and ducts. Now, in a clean environment in December, I got hit with three days of hallucinations combined with a mysterious cough that came out of nowhere, alongside chills and fever.

How does this relate to my pantry?

Well, the thing with having a big move, stress and getting sick all the time is that achievements stop happening, or become untrackable and inconsistent. This year, I had big plans to manifest my dream house, and to start my own online coaching business teaching people how to build better boundaries to sustain healthier, happier and more harmonious relationships. While I did my beta launch and I moved into a house, I can’t say my dreams came true.

It’s kind of a miracle I accomplished anything at all this year.

So when I started thinking about not wanting to live, I took a solid two days considering what made my life worth living and what would be a life I would look forward to living. I have to say, my old standard goals didn’t really seem to ring my bell anymore. Some seemed hopeless in the wake of being sick all the time. Others, just felt disappointing. My epic dream house I designed in 2018 for example seemed like it would be a lot of work to build for an overall let down experience living in it. I’ll get back to why in a minute.

The long story was that for the first time in my life, I really struggled with my “why” for wanting to live. I know you are thinking of my children and my relationships and getting really confused. To be honest, I have to go back to the beginning of my book I wrote in 2019, when I talked about becoming an abusive parent because of two things: bad influences and lack of better resources. As it turns out, being sick creates both those environments as well. A depleted tired mother is an issue. A depleted tired mother who is isolated and alone is not the most wholesome environment for child rearing. But a depleted, tired mother who is isolated and is too sick to get out of bed and is suffering hallucinations due to a mystery illness is an environment I would call the perfect storm for a child in need of any adult supervision. I was not my best self. I was a monster. I never touched them, but I said things in anger, exhaustion and overwhelm no human should ever say to a child. My oldest son was asking my husband to divorce me. For the week I was struggling the most, both kids felt like divorce was their only way out. They don’t really know what divorce is. However it hurt me deeply to hear that they wanted my husband to exile me off family island while I was sick, hallucinating, overwhelmed and couldn’t breathe. In this situation, sticking around on earth for the sake of my children wasn’t a thing that came to my mind as a reason to live. It was a reason to leave.

It’s heavy shit.

So, I really had to put my thinking cap on about what would be a life worth living.

Ask and it is given.

And as it happens, I was thrown a lifeline. Similar to my book, where I propose: merely asking the question about a dream or a vision for a future one would love to be living starts the vision in motion. I can say that it did so once again for me. I recovered from my illness. I looked for the circumstances in my new environment which I could somewhat control to make changes. I finally bought my friend, Mike’s book “The War On Sleep” to see if suggestions in his book could help me get better rest for the night and get me in tune with my circadian rhythm. I found several amazing tips that I can incorporate into my bedtime and lifestyle to benefit my sleep going forward.

I jumped on calls with Melanie Moore, my EFT, Tapping Into Your Big Vision guru. She pulled a card from some inspirational deck for me at the end of December to inform me about my New Year. The card was titled “Achievement,” and it got me thinking how much more passionate I am about life when I am achieving my dreams. I realized that while being sick had hindered progress this year, I still managed to do a lot. I could do even more next year, but I would need to keep my focus on the joy of getting small wins. I couldn’t pile all my hopes and dreams only on the windfalls. In her visioning classes she did the last days of the year, I also came to realize why my dream home no longer served as inspiration for me and why moving to two places I didn’t love at all was actually more informative toward my real dream than my dream home plans had been. I realized through moving into these houses that do not work for me, that many aspects of the house I designed also would not work for me. Three stories in my dream home? I don’t like going down one flight of stairs to do laundry. No built in cabinets outside the kitchen or laundry room? Where will I put all my books, my healing tools, my painting supplies? Where is the room for growth as an artist in my designs? I realized I need to revisit my floor plans with all I created that I love, and redesign my dream house to eliminate factors I wouldn’t want to grow old with and add those that would support a fulfilling future for me and my family.

Next, I hopped on my productivity calls with Starr O’Hara. The group Extremists Being Awesome can account for 70% of any productivity I had in 2022 and nearly 100% of the inspiration that kept me on track with my goals when the group wasn’t online. I kept working after the morning calls ended because I had been on the morning calls. If I missed the call, I almost always put off working on anything that entire day. If I was on the call, I busted ass to finish things even after calls had ended, sometimes working all day without any “supervision.”

Last, but not least, my tribe kept me alive. I received calls or texts nearly every day through my move with my dear friend, Kristi Agosto. She was my lifesaver through this year, but she really amped up how invaluable she is to me over the last couple months. We both struggled with terrible losses, difficult moves, and challenges with our families from October through the end of this year. When it came down to it, the very first reason I could come up with for living despite sickness was that I couldn’t let my soul sister down or run off the rails and leave her behind. I owe my life-saving friendships to eliminating spending my time on people who let me down while investing in quality, relatable, supportive, cheerleading, human beings. Kristi is the best of them!

I am so pleased to have all these various structures of success in place, even as I am in the midst of failure.

So, what of my future plans?

It’s 2023, and I am starting with big achievements. However, these achievements are ones I can finish in a short time. It can’t always be about the unexpected windfalls of $100,000 out of the blue. That’s not sustainable rewards. Starting January first, we got hit with a big snowfall. Despite getting little sleep and waking with a really bad migraine, I managed to clear a lot of heavy snow, working all day in shifts to get it cleared and ice melt poured. Having a corner house with a long side walk on the perimeter is a BITCH! But it felt good to be out in the falling snow making a difference to my family and my neighbors. I also enjoyed the crisp air and the constant question to myself about what I would rather be doing with my life for the remainder of 2023. While shoveling snow, I got loads of inspiration.

The next thing was getting on those calls each morning and finishing my pantry. I can honestly say that I haven’t felt as proud of myself and high about something since I published my book in 2019. I guess that’s part of why it meant so much to me to create something new and different in the midst of sickness and the awful move we went through. Sometimes we find the shiniest gold in the darkest swamps.

Here’s some photos and videos of that entire pantry building process.

It all started when we moved in to this new house and realized that along with this kitchen having little cabinet space, it also had no pantry. I looked on Amazon for something I could purchase, but only found pieces that were poorly made of particle board and others that cost around $300 for anything that wouldn’t fall apart or was large enough for our family’s needs. This one here is particle board and listed on Amazon for $319.

I shifted to hunting for second-hand pantries, trying to keep my costs around $100 or less for a solid wood cupboard. At that price point, even second-hand, all I could find were partly smashed particle board pantries. The pickens were slim. The solid wood pantries, even used, were extremely expensive. People wanted anywhere from $400 and up for solid wood, second-hand pantries. I bought an armoire for the space for $30, thinking it would suffice, but it was so huge in depth that it took up half our dining room. We ended up moving that clunker downstairs into the basement, homeschool, bonus room to hold the kids’ board games and science kits.

No closer to finding a pantry, I started searching for second-hand “cabinets” hoping my search criteria might turn up something someone removed from a house for a remodel which we could repurpose. What I found was a slew (I’m talking droves) of curios and hutches. I guess the age of the hutch is long past. People were practically begging for someone to cart their giant, glass encased hutches away. The problem with using a hutch or curio cabinet as a pantry is that you can see inside it. Sort of unsightly prospect for most food items. I started researching whether I could paint over the glass. You can, but it doesn’t look great. It can be done with really modern designs, but those often don’t match the age of the woodwork on the hutch. I started contemplating removing the glass and replacing it with wood panels. That’s when I came across this piece of inspiration. It’s an Italian made, hand painted custom pantry that goes for maybe $10k or more.

So, I realized, I wouldn’t need to stain wood panels perfectly to match the rest of the wood. I could paint the panels with a folk art design if I antiqued the base coat first. I had started painting at my friend, Danielle’s house on New Years, 2020. I have discovered that I really enjoy painting. So, I quickly found an ideal hutch for the project for around $70. One of the glass pieces had broken which is why they gave me $30 off the $100 asking price. Clearly though, the glass was inconsequential to my needs. The wood which is more than 40 years old is in pristine condition.

You can see the little makeshift, wire rack “pantry” we used in the meanwhile to the right. Not very attractive.

I measured the glass pieces and went to Lowes to have 4 wooden panels cut to fit the spaces. I got an off-white paint that matched the knobs on the doors for the base coat, and I purchased a gold spray paint to use around the edges of the panels to make them appear antiqued. After sanding and painting the base coat and adding the sunburst/antiqued looking gold spray, they came out looking like this.

The next part of the process was drawing a design that had a folk art feel to it on parchment paper, cut to the size of the panels and layering it with dark pencil markings. It took a few days of drawing to get a design I was happy with.

The third part of the process was to carefully place the template pencil side down on top of the panels and weight it down so it would not slide around and spread pencil markings everywhere on the panel. As you can see, the side panel is more narrow than the door panel so the parchment was shorter and wider laying across my side panels than the door panel it was cut to match.

The fourth or fifth part of the process (I lost count) was the transfer. I used the side of a scotch tape roller and rubbed the back of the parchment design onto the panel.

Once the outline was transferred, I started painting. And I made them all slightly different. I think the end result looks far more rich and unique than had I stenciled the designs onto the boards. I had to use layers and layers of paint to get them looking really sharp.

Painting took WEEKS! Thankfully for my participation in Extremists Being Awesome, I was able to get up each morning, turn on Zoom accountability and work bit by bit on them, or I would have never finished. Being sick made the whole process take far longer than I wanted. I expected to finish in November. Still, I am so happy I finished. Far better late than never.

This was my end result!

So, I now feel for the first time in years, like I put my time and attention into something worth doing and saw it through to completion. I am satisfied. No, more than that, I am actually very proud of myself.

All in all, 2023 is starting to seem like a better year already. Except the kids are sick now… We hope and pray this will be the only sickness in our family this year!