Don’t ask me what’s on my vision board.

It’s so . . . cringe.

But, I am but a typical woo-woo lady, and two astrologers I follow said that this was the perfect week [note: about a month ago] to make one, so I did. Its content is a secret revealed only to me and the entire universe.

I believe that the vast, vast majority of people, including me, hold themselves back. And they do it by telling themselves a lot of things that aren’t exactly lies, but are also not the truth. First, when it comes to our biggest, craziest hopes and dreams, there’s the inkling that we’re not worthy of it anyway. That that kind of stuff doesn’t happen to us. I do, to a great extent, believe in miracles, not just because I’m technically Catholic, but also because I honestly don’t think anything happens in this world – nothing moves – without them. I actually think that there are dozens of miracles happening every moment of every day that we take for granted because we don’t realize their larger effects on the greater world, our own teeny worlds included.

The second reason I think we’re embarrassed about our crazy wild dreams is because we’re just so convinced by, well, literally reality that they won’t happen, and then their not happening, after so many moments indulging ourselves just to get through a meeting or a bad date, is just horrifyingly disappointing. We can’t bring ourselves to even remotely have hope that something wonderful will happen to us, and only for it not to. We bought glue and printer ink just to be in the same spot? Why?

But here’s why I did it anyway: I also don’t think that anything happens without intent and articulation. Yes, I am woo-woo. I believe strongly in the universe working consistently for you, even when it doesn’t. “Bend like the whatever tree” and stuff. Sometimes, you’ve gotta give the mysterious forces of the world a heads up as to what you’re really aiming for. When you do certain things – ritual, prayer, etc. – you’re also articulating it to yourself.

I’ll be honest: I had no idea what kinds of stuff was important to me when I made this vision board. I felt stupid the entire time, but then when I would google image search a vague idea of something (a beach – there, there’s one thing that was on mine – you get one thing), I would immediately laser into exactly the image that I meant. And sometimes I would search for an image and realize that none of them fit what I wanted, or that a tiny detail in a sea of otherwise very similar photos is precisely what I really needed.

I thought, for some reason, that the fact that I was searching for stock photos on the internet (as opposed to, like, cutting things out of magazines) would make the process invalid – as if the December 2017 copy of “O” was more magical.

While the process started with total embarrassment, that feeling waned and popped up only at particular stock photos that were terrible but I also sort of loved. Like “travel” ones, which involved women either wearing pants suits or mini skirts and berets, with seemingly no in-between. Also, concern: What if I put a picture of a blond woman with a suitcase on my vision board but the universe just assumes I want to go blond again? I mean, that isn’t a terrible outcome, but it feels like, again, a waste of printer ink.

I tried to think specifically about what energy was around the picture I was choosing too – so, I didn’t want to just go on a trip or “travel more” in the next year, I wanted to start to create a life based around travel. Which of these lovely stock photos best articulated that? (Yes. That’s tricky.)

As I worked, this weird thing came over me as I searched photos. I started to feel really . . . peaceful. For just a little bit (after the initial embarrassment subsided), I was permitted to be wholly myself and just sort of let stuff flow out, kind of like when you’re on a journal writing tear. A lot of instinct took over; I started randomly looking up images I never would’ve thought had anything to do with my wildest fantasies about life. I ended up not using some things, tossing them out. I actually started to avoid more conventional stuff – a picture of the dog I wanted was left off, because I figured this was for wildest dreams, hello, and dogs are, like, everywhere. So.

A phenomenal, delicious feeling of complete self-indulgence took over. Finding images of things I want, think about dream about, that I don’t tell anybody about. And using a shit ton of printer ink on them, expense be damned! And cutting out and gluing, all sticky and having to literally peel it off my nose later. As I moved along making it, I realized that not only was the embarrassment dissipating, I felt. . . happy. I smiled when I looked at all of the pictures. It was a relief to get it all out there, and I felt unburdened. Because, as nice as it is to have fantasies or wish for things, there’s a heaviness to it as well. They come along with the disappointment that you don’t have them, or the feeling that you never will. Fantasizing is never a pure exercise; it’s shaped and colored by your actual reality, which can obviously run counter to it, as well our own feelings about ourselves, so often negative. So getting it out of your head and onto paper, at the very least, allows you to enjoy images that make you happy without the garbage of doubt.

I think most of us are taught, either blatantly or subtly, that the worst person in the room you can be is the blowhard who always has something in the works, the inauthentic braggart who really thinks he’s something but never actually delivers. Be humble, keep your head down, save yourself disappointment. Of course, there’s a middle ground – you can be realistic and hopeful at the same time, but it’s a weird, remote river that nearly nobody in my experience has a map for.

Even if nothing on that board (which will eventually be burned lest someone find it) actually happens, my attention shifted and my perspective changed. It sounds cheesy (also a bit disgusting), but I got out of myself by going into myself. It was . . . reassuring? . . . to actually see things in front of me. And it didn’t feel out of reach! I mean, I don’t know what will happen in life, but when I regarded the finished product, I actually had this weird moment of, “Oh. Well, that’s it? People do that every day. That’s not so weird.” Again, like journaling, getting something out of my head and making it, however, sloppily, made it seem totally fine and the opposite of embarrassing (. . . not embarrassing?).

So, I highly recommend to you, dear reader, to spend a couple of hours totally indulging every seemingly silly, pie-in-the sky daydream you’ve ever had about what your life can be. Find images that reflect that unique brain of yours, be picky about it, accept nothing less than exactly what you have in mind. I personally burned a bunch of sweetgrass and put on an album that always calms me (Carole King’s Tapestry, in case you wondered). The final product is up in my room, and I can see it when I’m laying in bed trying to read and distract myself from what is, because, at the very least, it’s a reminder of what can be. I often can’t help but grin when I look at my lil’ vision board, and hey – that alone makes the time spent on it worth it.