What's up buttercup?

I was inspired by a blog post I read today by Kimberly Kalil.  She shared some of her SheART from Christy Thomlinson's workshop.  While her art is gorgeous, it's not what inspired me to finally blog.  It was this paragraph in her post:

Way back in January, it seems like ages ago, I picked healthy as my word for 2011. Without going into too many details, I've become incredibly unhealthy. I'm not sick. I'm not dying. I'm just sort of toxic. I'm cranky. I'm negative. I've been unhappy. I'm overeating. I'm overspending. I'm gaining weight. I realized I was really unhealthy. There are a lot of reason. I know what they are. But rather than share them, I'd like to share what I'm doing to be healthy.

It's amazing the things people say that you are immediately connected to, whether you choose to be or not.  I read this paragraph and immediately knew I was going to have to do some 'releasing' today.    (In more ways than you realize)

I'm holding on to a lot of unhealthy things.  I could have written the paragraph from her blog, if it weren't for me being so tied up in being unhealthy.  But thanks to Kimberly's eloquence, I don't need to think of how to articulate the way my life is going, instead I can skip to the part where I share what I'm doing that's healthy and learn to refocus on the positive things I have am doing in my life.

• I too am taking the SheART workshop and it has been so much fun.  I am afraid I'm going to wind up with a wall of canvases if I don't be careful.  I love that it lets me use all the techniques I've learned from Dina in her art journaling classes, and combine them with the things I've learned from Christy.  Yes, my girls tend to have rather odd dresses and big 80's hair, but I'm having fun and getting inky.
• I am still excited each month for our book club.  There are six of us girls in the book club and it's been such a wonderful experience.  We meet once a month and discuss The Happiness Project.  We also discuss chocolate, marriage, wine, kids, dental work and life in general.  It's a rare thing for me to have that much live social interaction in an evening.  
• I'm doing more of what I love. Debbie's new site Masterful Scrapbook Design is amazing.  I've learned so much and been able to meet some of the most interesting people of my life, Kimberly Kalil included!  Why just today I sat in on an interview with Anna Aspnes and was just blown away by how her mind works.  If you'll allow the photography metaphor, I learned that to find inspiration in the everyday like Anna does, I need to retrain what my eye sees through the viewfinder.  
• Finally, I wrote a class; Get Inspired by Words.  I've been wanting to do it for sometime and I finally did.  I'm a storyteller first and foremost, so when I scrapbook I always have a story in mind before I start my page.  I wanted to share where I find my inspiration for stories and thus, the class was born.   

These are just a few things I'm doing on the road to a healthier me.  I'm not saying I'll be less stressed, lean mean version of myself in a minute, but I know that I can't keep walking the path I'm walking.  I too know the reasons I'm being so unhealthy and the hardest thing is to acknowledge that most of them are out of my control.  On some level it makes me feel like I'm admitting failure or defeat by saying I can't fix them.  Instead, I will instead triumph over them by refocusing my energy towards the healthier aspects of my life.