Project Paper Birds

Introducing the ‘Life Binder’

Chat, I have more reflections, but this will be two posts so sorry in advance: So as I established, I realize now I’m solidly in phase three of Judith Herman’s “Trauma & Recovery” model. The clearing. The integration. The reconnection. Well, I’ve been trying to step into that in a few ways, one of them being this binder I started. It’s essentially a guide—for me—to navigating life. I have four tabs so far, most of which remain empty at the moment: “Internal World”, “Connection”, “Regulation” and “Future Looking”.

I’ve always been an intentional person, but it wasn’t till recently I started giving credence to deciding my own belief system (I think deep down, a younger part of me was half-hoping an older adult would come take my hand.) Grounded idealism is probably where I fall now, which has proved to be a helpful. An allegory I relayed to a friend the other day was this: When we lose power during storms, if I happen to have a flashlight in hand, at one point or another I’ll hone in on a random object out of boredom and spend the next 10 minutes loosely spinning the beam around, watching the shadow morph. The object here is the things we experience, the shadow is its impact of the experience, and the light—specifically how it’s positioned—is the belief system reality is filtered through. 

It’s an imperfect metaphor, and the message here isn’t that our feelings are our fault, or that we can simply choose to be happier—it’s much more complex than that. But being in a place where I feel a decent degree of control over how I experience the world, I can see now how existing positive frameworks have, like the flashlight, channeled experiences into ones that produced growth and kept an undercurrent of hope. (Now that I’m typing this all out, I’m wondering if a better parallel would be the moats my brother and I built in our sandbox growing up, and the water following the pre-dug paths when we let it go). 

Anyway, this was a very long-winded and possibly anticlimactic way of setting the stage for sharing future entries of my ‘life binder’, but hopefully there’s something of value here.