January to Come

Hi, I’m Nia. Thank you for reading my first post.

It’s about to be January. I have a great feeling about what is yet to come in life, so I intend to kick off the new year of 2023 with good intentions. Though this feeling did not randomly come to me when I woke up this morning.

I have been pushed in different ways over the last couple months to truly reflect on the progress I have made toward my personal and professional goals. While I am so proud of myself for my personal and professional growth and my accomplishments over the past year, I can also appreciate that hindsight is 20/20. Over the past few weeks, I slowly realized that I had spent the year feeling ungrounded and untethered with less clarity than I thought I had in my life. Things changed for me a few weeks ago when I spent a week in Ål, a scenic snow-covered Norwegian town with a group of 30-plus other deaf academics from around the world. This academic retreat with other deaf people was an experience that helped me to gain clarity and sharpen my vision for my future.

It was through the deaf eyes and richly accessible sign languages of my peers and faculty members that everything clicked and I finally understood what it means to actively pursue a PhD. I felt so good and empowered learning from and attending a writing retreat led by and designed for deaf people, and it was my first time attending such an event. However, I simultaneously had mixed feelings that week and felt cheated out of having this type of experience and gaining valuable information a lot sooner.

The opportunity to attend such a retreat that is fully accessible doesn’t come by often for many deaf people in academia. Also, even with hearing academics who sign or through sign language interpreters, it is often difficult for me to relate to the experiences surrounding a PhD from workshops designed for hearing people. It is a matter of fact that they do not share nuanced perspectives and understanding of life with deaf people to offer the type of tips and support necessary for navigating hearing-dominated academia. It is also a matter of fact that my hearing peers can choose from a wide range of accessible workshops, lectures, and mentorships for PhDs offered all year long. This retreat was a refreshing reminder that deaf people need other deaf people for support, guidance, empowerment, and solidarity—especially in spaces where audism is rampant and insidiously hostile to a deaf person’s sense of belonging and self. Spending a week with talented deaf peers and successful faculty members broadened my outlook on my career, gained my confidence, and drove me to be intentional in everything that I do.

The new sense of purpose that I gained in my career had a ripple effect that grew a week later into a nagging urge to structure out my goals for my life. I was ready to lay out my goals a week ago, but I felt anxious and overwhelmed trying to figure out what medium to use—should I write them down on pages closed up in my notebook? List them in a clunky table in an Excel file tucked away in the cloud? Type them in a note hidden in an iPhone app? Every option I could think of was out of sight, which does not work well for me if I want to be regularly reminded of my goals and consistently strive toward them. I’ve had to learn that the hard way, countless times, over the past two years and a half of navigating my PhD research in Germany. My brain annoyingly stands by the saying, “out of sight, out of mind.” So what was I to do?

A friend randomly mentioned on a video call earlier this week that she was going to make a vision board for 2023 to put on her wall this time instead of hidden away in her notebook like the last two years (her brain also says “out of sight, out of mind”). I was initially resistant to taking up that idea for myself, because the first thing I could think of was the collage-heavy mood boards with irregularly formatted texts, if any at all, like the ones I have seen on the internet over the past decade. I am a huge fan of visuals and am a visual-based learner, but for goals and affirmations to stick with me, they need to be in a concrete and specific enough format, which is written text for me.

As it turned out, over the next 24 hours I couldn’t stop wondering if I would be able to create a vision board that suited my needs. An additional 24 hours later, I decided to end my wondering and impulsively cut old cardstock paper into several rectangles of the size between A5 and B5 and taped them together accordion style; that way I can fold them to fit in my notebook when I go out of town and unfold them to review each day on my desk or on the wall behind my computer monitor. It is only day number 3 and the vision board(-card?) has made all the difference in my motivation to be intentional about my outlook and actions. I am so glad that I did just as I intended a week ago: lay out the goals I want to achieve over the year.

intention

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intention ✴︎

“Intention” is a word that has deeply resonated with me over the past week after I saw an affirmation post about it on Instagram. That creator’s words on the 9th slide of their post about being intentional have really stuck with me. Reading that post made me look inwards and understand that my soul desires to be intentional about the choices I make with my energy, boundaries, actions, and life. I intend to be accountable for creating the kind of life I dream of and deserve.

There are a few goals that immediately come to mind—likely because my subconscious recognizes them as some of my most pressing desires. I intend to grow my creative skills and get peace from creating, so I will draw, write, or design something each day. I intend to overcome perfectionism and fear of vulnerability in my creative work, so I will publicly share it at least one to three times a month. I intend to avoid unnecessary stressors and feeling burnt-out in my work, so I will be mindful about setting healthy boundaries with work and have good judgement about my commitments outside of work. I will be intentional.

January feels nice and warm around the corner and looks like a month full of intention and possibilities. I am feeling equally optimistic about the rest of the year, however many ups and downs it may have. I look forward to meeting myself a year in the future and seeing how much of my vision board I have accomplished.

May this year inspire you to be the best version of yourself!

Look at that breathtaking scenery!

My view all week while writing my paper with a candle I brought with me, because I love the calm that candlelight brings me