If fears of what your future holds are crowding out positive dreams, I have a suggestion. Like me, you have tons of magazines laying around. Consider making a collage. Snag some kind of poster board, large piece of paper or cardboard from that recent Amazon purchase.
Glance through these magazines and spontaneously find photos and titles that appeal to you. Maybe that cover of “O” from six months ago has some headlines that resonate. Get scissors and start clipping. Cut out as many or as few photos, captions, ads for products that catch your mood and start to glue or tape or staple them to the board.
Themes will appear on their own. Don’t analyze what you are doing. Have you heard of “Automatic Writing?” That’s when you sit and write whatever comes into your consciousness whether it makes “sense” or not. This is the collage version of that because women are more visual. Also, some people get intimated by the very act of writing. Things that we are drawn to for reasons we don’t judge are easily and quickly chosen, like when we’re shopping. We are tactile creatures. We like to feel things in our hands.
Have fun filling up this board. Don’t decide not to glue the photo of the woman kayaking down the rapids if that appeals to you at the moment.
No one is judging or grading you and no other living soul should need to ever see this. But if you prefer company by all means invite some gal pals over to do it with you.
Work quickly and spontaneously. Cut and paste and cut and paste. And this needn’t be a one-time deal. Do it whenever. you want to. I have found it almost shocking how doing this clarifies things for me. Sometimes it’s an issue I didn’t even know I had! Themes come to light when you are having stream-of-conciousness fun.
When you are done, you can chuck all those mags. They’ve served a purpose after all.
I think of my piles of unread magazines as “Conscious Clutter,” with credit given to Gwyneth Paltrow and her “Conscious Uncoupling” of course.
During my own life transitions, I try to remember to do this. After the breakup, I was on my own for the first time in decades and I felt directionless. I did a collage about it. That collage included some things I drew with markers. On the first board, there was a lot of empty white space. Years later, I did another collage and I found myself clipping like a Madwoman and even layering pics over pics because I had so many to use up! Zero white space. I don’t have to explain the symbolism of that!
I kept that first collage and every now and then I unroll it and give it a glance. All those years ago, I clipped out just three headlines. Here’s what they said. “Calm Yourself Naturally,” “Cool Renewal,” and “You Are the Answer Lady.” All things that came to fruition over time. Time to get clipping Ladies!
We all go through major life transitions when relationships end… Through this website, I will share my thoughts as I walk the path of “New-Self” discovery. It doesn’t matter which side of 50 you are on. The real question is, Are you ready to live life? To forge a Path of Your Own Making (For a change!)? Then stop dwelling over the What-Might-Have-Beens and join me. Share your thoughts here, comment on mine, and let’s do this together!