Finding the through line
This is not a post about manifestation.
Every year, for the past 10 years, I have made a vision board on New Year’s Day.
The tradition began back on the first day of 2015, sitting on the floor of my friend Sam’s North Austin apartment. We met at 1 p.m. that Thursday afternoon, still bleary-eyed from the night prior. I was 24 then; it hadn’t yet occurred to me that staying up past midnight on New Year’s Eve was optional. And it certainly hadn’t occurred to me that my New Year’s Day hangover might be avoided if I stopped drinking shitty well liquor. Considering otherwise was outside of my college student budget.
But we all sat there, nursing our coffees, pouring through magazines collected throughout the past year, tearing and cutting out pages. We dipped our paintbrushes into Mod Podge, glued our magazine clippings to cardstock. When we finished, we held them up like a trophy, tried to make sense of the pieces we’d collaged together and what it meant for the upcoming months.
It’s funny to look back on that first year, now a full decade later. I had barely been living on my own for six months, having just moved out of my parents’ home the previous summer. I hadn’t yet met my husband; I’d meet him a mere two weeks later. My dog Annie hadn’t even made it earthside. The largest magazine clipping on that first vision board reads: Embrace What’s Next.
I don’t identify as woo-woo, not in the white lady sense. I feel I must tell you that I do own some crystals, but it is mostly because I think they are pretty. And it’s important to know that this is not a Substack post about manifestation.
My spirituality can be described as someone with a general understanding that they do not know everything—or many things, for that matter—and therefore keeps a healthy amount of skepticism about anything presented in finite terms. This world is much bigger than I am and really, what the hell do I know? To me, these vision boards are akin to fortune cookies or horoscopes—vague enough to fit snugly into what I already know about myself, a contained way to look toward the future.
This year, sitting in my kitchen with two friends—a couple dozen magazines spread between us—I ripped pages from the spines of Texas Monthly and National Geographic and O Magazine and told them it was my favorite part. Not necessarily the gathering, but the space between that and creating. Where I cull through the pile, see what resonated, and pull meaning from the pieces of the narrative puzzle laid out before me, threading it all together.
While I never go into these boards with a plan, what emerges is not often a surprise. A more honest name—as opposed to calling it a vision board—could be “a collage of what I have journaled about and discussed in therapy for the past year.” Or, perhaps, “a collage of what I have been ruminating on and am dragging myself toward changing while kicking and screaming.” I’m still workshopping the name.
And yet, as I sit here amongst 10 years’ worth of New Year’s Day crafts, what I am left with are tethers to past versions of myself, time capsules in collage form. These boards have not changed dramatically throughout the years, nor were any of them particularly clairvoyant (save for the one made at the beginning of 2020 about “tolerating ambiguity.”) I can only see them now through the lens of someone who has lived out those years. But, as my friend said to me from across my dining room table this year, it’s comforting to see the through line in them all. Ten years have passed but my core self has remained intact. She has matured, she has both struggled and grown, and there are years where she was more muddled and buried than others, but there is a whisper of her in each and every year.
Happy New Year, friends.