The Visualization Practice I Love and Other Weird Stuff

like fun weird

Before I get into this next oh-so-fun manifesting part, I need you to know a few things.

1. I spent a lot of my teenage years with a shitty ass teenage attitude thinking, “if I expect the worst then I won’t be disappointed when it happens.” Mind you, “the worst” was probably all related to sports and school dances (like me never getting a date) because I had a very nice and privileged upbringing, yet still found a way to feel VERY bad for myself about everything.

   Let’s just say I wrote a lot of dark poetry and loved nothing more than to burn the edges of said poetry with a lighter to give it that dark and moody / Wanted in the Wild Wild West kinda vibe. Because I was a tortured teenage artist, OK? Ugh.

2. When I came across a copy of The Secret at age twenty, it blew my mind. That is so cliche and corny to admit. (Again, insert laughy emoji face) but it was the first time it registered with me that constantly thinking about what I didn’t want, or what others had that I did not (like boyfriends!) might not actually be putting out a good vibe for me…

3. I’ve read a lot of self help and power of positive thinking books (like a lot.) And I’ll be there first to tell you, there is nothing magic about those books. They don’t contain spells, or chants (ok, a lot actually do have chants but they call them “mantras”) or one simple thing you can do to change your life instantly. Bummer, I know. I read so many looking for that one quick fix. That said, I love the shit out of those books and will keep reading them, even knowing it’s a lot of the same info just presented differently, because it works for me. :)

The real “magic” for me is in the energy. As in the energy shift those books help provide for me, or help guide me to achieve. Does that make sense? Am I crazy? Are we all crazy? Does it matter??! Not really.

So let’s time travel back to my early Chicago days and part two of this post and maybe I’ll clear it up for you.

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For the next part of our Lululemon training, we could choose any drink we wanted from the fancy Starbucks across the street (it was two stories!) and then we were going to be led through a visualization writing exercise. A FREE latte and writing time? This was the best first day of work ever! And I had survived through several first days in the past few years.

We all found seats in the upstairs Starbucks balcony ( balconies are always extra dreamy to me even when at a coffee chain and I’m not sure why) and were told to write out our “ideal day.”

“But this is a visualization practice, remember?” Lululemon Lady instructed us, “So I want you to get extremely detailed with this. Don’t just tell me what you do in your day, I want to know what you feel and smell before you even open your eyes. What does your bedding feel like against your skin? What does your home smell like? What does the floor feel like under your feet? And remember, this should be fun! So have at it.”

As someone who was just starting to dabble in the self help/Law of Attraction stuff, I understood where she was going with all this. I often wrote down my goals and dreams, but never in such a detailed way. But as someone who could easily get lost in the joy of make believe and fantasy, this assignment was right up my alley.

I saw myself waking up in… “fancy white sheets.” Not the weird fuzzy dark brown ones we had at the moment because they were the cheapest I could find at Tj Maxx and I thought the color wouldn’t show dog hair… And I woke up in a “ nice big bed.” A bed with two nightstands, one on each side! And I can casually get into my side without jumping from the end of the bed like I do now because our bed is so tightly squished into the corner of our tiny apartment. And the floor is beautiful wood. Not gross old stained carpet like we have now. Shit, don’t think about what I don’t want. Focus on the ideal day. Ok yes, we have a big mid century style wood bed from… Crate and Barrel! And we have Crate and Barrel furniture in our room! It’s beautiful and it matches and I have space to put my folded my t-shirts, and my underwear even has its own drawer.

I was really fired up now. My pen could barely keep up with my dreams as they poured out of me. At this time for Chris and I, most of our furniture was hand-me-downs from our parents that we also had in our college homes, cheap stuff from Tj Maxx, or Chicago dumpster alley finds. But every day on our walks, Harlow and I passed what I thought was the fanciest, most luxurious furniture store in all the land; Crate & Barrel! It took up an entire corner block at North and Clybourn, with expansive floor to ceiling windows, allowing peasants like Harlow and I to peer inside and dream what it must be like to live in a home that was decorated like their show windows. Owning (brand new) items from such an elite place surely meant that one had made it.

After I finished describing my dream bedroom and I how I felt in it, I floated out to our … “big open kitchen and living room.” I knew the kitchen had “good views and a fancy coffee maker,” but most importantly, I knew that in this ideal day I got to enjoy “slow mornings.” This is was what I truly cared about.

The rushed mornings I’d been experiencing at this point in my life— the running out the door to get Har to the park before I had to leave for work, hustling to the Fullerton Train stop to get to the West Loop by 7:45 a.m., then sprinting to a cubicle inside a depressing building, all of this sent my nervous system into a chaotic tailspin before 8:00 a.m. I knew a lot of people lived this way, but I also know that didn’t mean that I had to. Every single alarm bell inside of me was shouting ‘life is too short to be this miserable!’ It wasn’t as if I was dreaming of some crazy grandiose morning, just a calm, slow one.

From there I saw myself “working from home,” but wasn’t entirely sure what this meant in 2013 ish. I knew that I loved to write, create, do comedy, be with my dog all day… but how would this pay the bills? I wasn’t sure, so instead I focused on the feeling of doing all the things I loved. I felt energized, fulfilled, excited, optimistic. Certainly there was a way I could figure it out. So many other people had, why not me?

I was already starting to jot down a separate list, aside from my ideal day writing assignment, of possible ways to make money on my own terms, using the skills and passions that were more aligned with what I knew I should be doing with my time— with my life. My one precious and wild life!! Shit, I had to get going. Time was wasting!

Lululemon Lady announced that we should wrap up our writing exercise, so I promptly stood up and handed the pen back that she had borrowed me. I gushed to her that I loved the visualization exercise she taught us and that she did a wonderful job explaining it.

“That seriously just got me so excited and motivated!” My ADHD was in the driver seat now and there was nothing I could do about it. I had shifted into hyperfocus mode and there was no going back. “But I think I’m going to take off now.”

There was at least four more hours left in my first Lululemon shift, but I had just felt a glimpse of my ideal day, and selling athleisure wear wasn’t a part of it. Like not even a tiny part, so I had to leave, otherwise what was the point of that exercise!?

I don’t leave jobs at lunch anymore, but only because I stopped applying/taking jobs I knew from the start were not meant for me. From this day forward, I started writing down, “I am my own boss and always will be.” I wrote this five times a day, sometimes ten times, on bad days I filled pages with it just over and over, like a complete psycho. I wrote it until I believed it and until it actually came true. Then I started to dream a little bigger.

I have a literary agent! I chuckled the first time I wrote this, having no idea what a literary agent really did, or why I needed one. I just knew I wanted one. It took five years of writing in present tense that I had a literary agent (and a lot of rejection emails) until in 2021 I signed with one. She was the very first agent I reached out to several years previous, I even got a polite “not interested” email response from her. But in 2021, she reached out to me.

A few years after the “Lululemon ideal day,” I got an email from a “freelance photographer and producer,” we’ll call him Jack. I almost didn’t open the email because it seemed kind of fishy. Jack explained that his client was looking to “completely remodel and furnish” any room in a local Chicago resident’s home. He knew I had a blog and had just moved into a new condo with my husband and would I be interested in this project? And did he mention the client was Crate & Barrel?

Why yes, Jack, I was very interested. Could we even get two nightstands?!

I’m going to end it here because my girls will be home any second. The material items come and go, (except for the blue velvet C&B arm chairs, one will have to pry those beauties from my cold dead hands.) But what really sticks with me about the vision board stuff and thinking positive, are the big energy shifts. Like the slow mornings I get to have now. (Slow ish, because kids.) But you know what I mean.

I cherish and I mean CHERISH the fact that I get to have the relaxing slow mornings I used to dream about. I get to drink my coffee in my favorite spot on the couch, cuddle with my girls and our animals, hell I can ever just stare at a wall for twenty minutes if I want to. The point is, I get to really live in this part of the day I love so much rather than rushing through it in a crazed hurry to get to somewhere I never wanted to be in the first place. I don’t take it for granted how lucky I am and never plan to. Which brings me to my next post… want to read about the weird gratitude stuff I do? :)

As I’ve already said (and will continue to say) there’s no magic in the self help books I love to read. From what I understand, it has everything to do with an energy shift and the way we feel about ourselves and talk to ourselves. I still run very anxious WHY WHAT HAVE YOU HEARD?! So yes, I have to continue to do all these weird little exercises and rituals on nearly a daily basis, but I don’t mind, because I love the mood they put me in. And sometimes I write down some very specific shit in my dream journals just to see if the Universe is listening… oddly enough, most of the time it is.

*sorry for any typos, I’m trying harder to slow down and correct myself! But I still mess up.