When Your Life Doesn't Look Like Your Vision Board

The current year is winding down and the new year is fast approaching. It’s time to take inventory of 2018 as we start to plan for 2019, right?

As I was looking back on my own experiences from 2018, I remembered the vision board I had made at the top of this year. I was SO excited about this vision board, y’all. I just knew it was going to change my entire life.

When it came time to make mine I met up with 2 friends of mine and we laid out all our supplies on the living room floor, sifted through magazines for photos that illustrated our most current desires, and took our time gluing them carefully on to our poster boards. I felt SO optimistic about what was to come throughout the year.

Then 2018 actually happened.

My 2018 can pretty much be summarized in 2 words: A MESS. So much has happened this year that I’m sure I’ll go into detail about here on the blog in due time. Right now though I’m still in the midst of it and while I do value being vulnerable with others, I’m not quite ready to talk in depth about this chapter of my life that I’m wading through AS I’m wading through the muck.

But I will say this… my 2018 looks NOTHING like my vision board. You might think I put on my vision board to be what I DIDN’T want to happen to me, because my year was pretty much the exact opposite of what I laid on out that poster board. Honestly, thinking about the whole situation is laughable since I can manage to have a sense of humor about it.

Before putting mine together I remember asking on Instagram for people to share their experiences with making a vision board. So many people were saying how they made a board and everything on it came to fruition. Some people mentioned how they made their boards, then completely forgot about them, and STILL their visions manifested in their lives. So you can see why I was super excited right?

I just knew that somehow my Elmer’s glue stick held all the magic I needed to make my dreams come true. I was gonna rub that stick on the backs of those photos like my life depended on it, because in my eyes it did.

When your life doesn’t look like your vision board

So what do you do when your life turns out nothing like your vision board plans?

I’d love to have a prettily packaged answer ready to go for this blog post. It’d bring me so much joy to be able to tell you guys in 3-5 bullet points how to handle it when your vision board illustrations look nothing like your real-life situation.

But the reality is I’m still trying to figure this shit out myself. I’m still working through my own hang-ups and trying to work on getting out of my own way.

Usually I aim to inspire here on my little corner of the internet. I want anybody who visits my blog to leave feeling motivated in their own creative journey. But at the same time I also want this to be a place where I can be honest about what’s going on, and this is my current truth.

Life is full of ups and downs, and right now is a down. But that’s okay.

Will I still make a vision board for 2019? Probably, yes. I love the feeling of optimism it provides. You honestly can’t beat that little high you feel as you think of the possibilities that could be for the year. But will I also come up with some sort of plan to achieve the things I put on my board? Yes. I’ve come to realize having aspirations is beautiful and necessary. But aspirations without plans are just dreams. And dreams are great, but dreams are not the same as attainable goals.

I pray your 2018 has been better than mine. And if it hasn’t, I pray you’ve been able to maintain a positive attitude throughout the mess. And if you haven’t been able to do that, I pray you work to change your outlook. Just know, I’m prayin’ lol.

I look forward to writing a post in the future about how great 2019 is going. I look forward to the moment when I can look back on 2018 and laugh at how stressful it was and how it felt never ending… but then it did end and life got better.

So what do you do when your messy life looks nothing like the pretty vision board you’ve created? You keep going.

And that’s all I got.