Hey friends! Today I’m sharing my 2022 year-in-review recap, and then following it up with my intentions for the near year and the vision board I created that coincides with them.
2022 recap
When I think about 2022, the year seems divided into two halves, and each half felt pretty different from one another. From January through May, I was simultaneously grieving the death of my stepfather, who is the man who raised me, and I was also planning a destination wedding – so two very different things were going on in my life. And you won’t be surprised that those two activities didn’t coincide well together. It really was a constant struggle for me to work on planning one of the biggest days of my life and being reminded that the person who I had envisioned walking me down the aisle couldn’t.
Sometimes I even had some guilt for waiting so long to get engaged and married because my step dad died two months after I got engaged, and we dated for 8 years before getting engaged. It was just a lot to deal with emotionally.
Because my step dad died at the end of October in 2021, I wasn’t in an emotionally stable place going into 2022 – my intention then was just to survive and get through the holidays and figure out how to not only exist but to work on things like wedding planning and doing my actual 9-5 job through what I can only describe as major “head fog” from all the grief that I felt.
So that’s what I did. I existed for a few months, and somehow found ways to do more than exist on some days. Around the end of February going into March, I finally kind of snapped out of the fog and spent the next two months obsessively planning our wedding.
I am a planner, and for our destination wedding in Mexico, I literally planned e v e r y t h i n g – like every detail – and I did have support from a wedding coordinator from the resort. I’ll do a quick plug for our resort – we had an incredible experience at Dreams Vallarta Bay in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.
Anyway, balancing wedding planning with grieving was a lot, and I didn’t have a lot of emotional or phyiscal energy left to give to other things during that time period.
Our wedding was May 7th of 2022, and I’m so thankful for having that experience and also for feeling so much relief and more at peace with my stepfather’s passing after our wedding. I definitely felt his presence there, and that was what I truly hoped when I was planning the wedding.
It was the most incredible experience to have me and my husband, Cesar’s families meet for the very first time in real life during our wedding weekend. It was essentially a vacation for everybody, and it brought me so much joy and this feeling of peace that helped me be able to move forward once we were home from our honeymoon.
I also got this gift really of getting SO MUCH of my mental capacity back after our wedding weekend, andI was able to reprioritize other intentions once we were back from our honey moon.
So the second half of this year felt very different than the first half. I was really able to enjoy life a little bit more than I had been. I planned some events and get togethers with friends, went to concerts throughout the summer, hosted some BBQs, jumped back into mindful eating, I also started counting macros over the summer, and took a couple incredible first-time trips – I went to Seattle for the first timein August, which that city stole my heart. I also did a weekend away with friends in Colorado wine country – it really felt like my soul was actively working on repairing itself. And I won’t lie – those feel good endorphins and feelings were so welcomed after all the consistent heartache that I experienced on a daily basis for so long.
Going into 2023, I feel optimistic and hopeful about continuing to cope better and live with my grief this year.
2023 Intentions
I’m not an advocate of setting hard new year’s resolutions simply because they haven’t worked well for me or most people I know who I’ve talked to about them.
Instead, I like to set an intention for the year. And for this year, my intention is to feel vibrant – it has been literally YEARS now since I felt this way, and I know that I deserve to feel good and I want to be intentional about what I do to help myself feel that way more often.
And that leads me to think that I need to be more consistent and disciplined with my mindfulness. Recently, I heard that the definition of discipline is “to teach” – and there’s a lot that I have learned over the past few years that I want to solidify and put into practice this coming year so I can feel vibrant and energetic in 2023.
I want to be disciplined in my self-care, in continuing to learn Spanish, in my personal finances, dedicating time to my hobbies (especially sewing), also in having new experiences- and that is what my 2023 vision board represents.
And that’s what you see here on my 2023 vision board. What I do is make my vision board my desktop background so I see it every day, and it reminds me of what I’m working towards.
I’d love to hear what your intentions are for 2023, share in the comments below.
