Reflection on 2016 (toward what I'm growing)

After a year's work, I find it helpful to look back and note achievements, losses, important contacts made and steps taken. Because so many of us view 2016 as a year of losses, I'm keeping my missed opportunities in my back pocket and instead sharing some favorite moments and memories in my creative life.

Highlights:

• Taught a workshop at California Institute of Integral Studies
• Got my MFA Play Project read at Boise Contemporary Theater's 5X5 Series
• Made contacts with Erik Ehn, Naomi Shihab Nye and other greats as a co-editor for Mission at Tenth
• Developed and taught the first Theater Lab Playwrights Workshop at BCT
• Funded a trip from Boise to San Francisco for my MFA Play Project team
• Graduated from CIIS with an MFA in Creative Inquiry, Interdisciplinary Arts
• Wrote an article for The Dramatist Magazine
• Was a featured artist in Boise Weekly's Annual Manual
• Started learning to play the ukulele
• Moved into a house with my favorite person (and our kitten)
• Participated in SITI Company's Suzuki, Viewpoints, Composition Workshop
• Taught my first 6-Week Adult Playwriting Class for The Cabin
• Had three short plays performed through HomeGrown Theatre
• Got a play commissioned for BCT'S Children's Reading Series in 2017
• Gave a speech for The Cabin at their annual gala before Gloria Steinum spoke
• Was invited to the National Winter Playwrights Retreat 2017
• Drafted my first children's play, inspired by a short story my dad wrote

I highly recommend taking a moment to recount successes, losses, connections and steps made at the end of a year. There were a lot of 2016 wins I'd forgotten. Remembering bits of failures motivated me, too, while listing goals for the next two years. 

I've gotten in the habit of numbering a big batch of potential goals for my personal, creative and professional life every year. Then I pick three from any category to focus on over the next two years. Smaller lists inspire more results from me than exhaustive ones.

3 Big Goals for the Next Two Years:

• Plan/embark on overseas travel with my favorite person and a project(s)
• Teach a university class
• Get an agent​

What are you growing this year? Photo Neslihan Gunaydin

​As for the New Year's resolution route, I've decided to set the intenion to invite joy into my creative, professional and personal worlds. This used to be an easy quality to inspire in me, when I felt writing and theater saving my life in palpable ways. That energized me with enormous vitality in the creative process.

However, as projects and jobs and responsibilities piled up, overworking habits, panic and grief made it easier to get overwhelmed by whatever I was making than exuberant. And I don't want that kind of life. I'm no longer interested in the tense and heavy approach, clutching at my forehead with falcon claws and grit teeth.

I realize I'm priveleged and lucky to be an artist. I want to spend the next year kneading joy back into my dailyness. By adjusting my schedule, stripping stress away, treating artmaking as a gift, attending to my life with love, kindness and gratitude, I can give more through what I make without wearing out my well. I'm calling on an attitude shift: to ignite joy.

What are you calling on this year? 
What are you growing this year?
What are you inviting? Igniting?

Happy 2017.