The following post will be about List #3 from this post, if you want to follow along. Otherwise, feel free to skip ahead and read about some people who inspire me.
Reminder
Remember, Reader, I am not a therapist. Feel free to take this exercise to your therapist if there’s more you hope to uncover.
To refresh, if you were following my list format, this one was “the characters or people I kept thinking about. It wasn’t an obsession- I wasn’t necessarily thinking about them every day- but something kept bringing me back. In some cases, it was as simple as one single thing that they said that stuck with me. There was no singular feeling; I was impressed, inspired, curious, thoughtful, and comforted.”
To summarize, this isn’t a list of every person you like. These are people who have something about them that you feel strongly called to in some way.
Utilizing Your List
What can you do with list #3? How can we use it to figure out your dream life?
Well, my list is a list of people who have something about them that I can’t forget about. I quite simply wrote down exactly what it was that was sticking with me. It doesn’t have to be super deep at this point. We’ll make it deep in the next step.
I think it will be easiest to explain if I can use examples, so without further ado and in no particular order:
Women Who Inspire Me
Enya
The dream. I’m serious. I don’t want to live in a castle, per se, but replace that with my dream house in the clouds? Sounds incredible.
After I saw this post for the first time, I looked up Enya. I grew up listening to her music at nap time but beyond that, I hadn’t heard much about her. I really like that she seems to know what works for her regarding her creative process and she sticks to it. I like that her personal life is fairly private.
Tracy Vergugo
This woman exudes wisdom, peacefulness, joy, and playfulness. Her art seems so in tune with her intuition and with nature as a whole. I have found her videos to be healing; hell, I could make a whole post on how abstract art has changed the way I think about life. Beyond that, I like the aspects of her life that she shows online. I love her bright, colorful studio space; I like that she lives near the water; and I like that she travels to make art in various beautiful natural areas.
Nora Roberts
I’ve only read one series by Nora Roberts (which you’ll hear about below), having picked up the first book right after it was released. After looking her up to see when the next books were scheduled to be released, I was floored by how many books she has written, and the speed at which she continues to put them out.
I was so curious about what her days must look like and I found a post from her on Facebook (link is to Reddit, if you scroll down to the comments you can read it without Facebook.)
When I imagine my dream future, career-wise, this always pops up. She has a level of frankness and self-awareness, and I think that allows her to maximize her productivity without burning out. What stuck with me was not so much the specifics of her schedule, but how she has honed in on the perfect creative process for her (I’m a sucker for competence and efficiency).
I realized it was possible to live a life where I changed the way things are to fit my needs, instead of changing my needs to fit the way things are. That may be obvious to others but until then, it hadn’t really occurred to me.
Megan Fox
My formative years were around the time of Transformers and Jennifer’s Body, and to me, Megan Fox represented empowerment. The energy, magnetism, and power I perceived her to have was iconic. Then she kind of disappeared from my radar until I saw a clip from her Call Her Daddy interview and decided to watch the whole episode.
I have never felt so validated by a celebrity before. She talks so candidly about things that I feel, topics I love, and personality traits I have, but they were things I felt kind of bad about? I felt like society as a whole considered them things I needed to hide or change about myself. But there was Megan Fox, icon of my youth, fully embracing who she is with an admirable level of self-awareness. It made me feel like it really is okay to be true to who I am, even if it doesn’t make sense to others.
Hannah Lee Duggan
For me, Hannah’s videos have always represented independence and freedom. There are things I’ve felt would be hard or impossible for me to do as a lone woman, and she proves that it is possible. The quest for freedom is one of the biggest themes of my life, so it’s truly inspirational to see that it could be possible for me to achieve that. Also, I love her homes.
Mira from Keeping the Moon
Mira is the main character’s aunt. She makes greeting cards for a living, lives with her cat in a house by the ocean, and befriends local misfits. She dresses eccentrically, has wild red hair, and rides her bike around town. She gives secondhand items new life and she lets the opinions of others roll off her.
Honestly, that sounds great. No notes.
Breen from The Dragon Heart Legacy series
This would be the aforementioned Nora Roberts series. Breen receives unexpected financial security, moves to an Irish cottage by the bay with her best friend, and follows her dream of being a writer. Plus a bunch of other things, but that’s the part that sticks with me.
Actually, I also love how intertwined magic and nature are in this world.
Kya from Where The Crawdads Sing
I have yet to read the book so this is based off the movie, but something that stuck with me about Kya is her house. The little house in the marsh where she sleeps on the porch. The house is full of her books and her art, which is inspired by the nature around her.
Man Wol from Hotel Del Luna
I don’t remember much about the events of this show, but Man Wol made an impression. Assertive, powerful, funny, sweet, demanding, considerate, all while being so incredibly stylish.
Cassie from Good Witch
Cassie is sweet, smart, and so in tune with nature. She’s magical in a way that seems almost plausible. She makes me feel like I could make my own magic if I learned to listen to my intuition. I want to know all about herbs and natural remedies, to learn about different cultures, and to be as thoughtful to those I love as Cassie is.
Some Things To Note-
I don’t think it matters if you are factually accurate when you do this part. You aren’t writing a biography on these people, you’re writing what is important to you.
Let me give you an example. Let’s say you put someone on this list because you couldn’t stop thinking about how cool their job was. Then, now that you’ve remembered them, you looked them up and it turns out you were wrong about what they did for work.
Who cares? Put that thing you thought they did. That is the part that stuck with you, so that is the important part. That’s the part calling out to your soul.
Another example, using my own list. Someone else might have a completely different take on one of the people on my list. Let’s say Megan Fox; maybe another woman views her as the opposite of empowerment because of the way she has been sexualized in the media.
Who cares? Don’t let the opinions of other people make you doubt your own feelings. We are a combination of all our individual experiences, which means we will all interpret things differently. This is a list for me, to figure out what is important to me.
Next Steps
Patterns
Now that you’ve got the particulars written out, look for patterns. In my case, I can see the following trends:
- Artists and creators
- Being their own boss; being powerful, assertive, dominant
- Independence, particularly in regards to financial security and their home
- Connection to nature
- A little magic, a little witchy
- Embracing the light and dark parts of the self
- Wisdom, living true to the self, intuition
- Softness, sweetness, femininity, playfulness, fun, lightness
- Homes that they’ve made into personal havens
Analysis
Remember, these are people whose impact has stuck with me over time. These are the traits I keep going back to. That is why I think they show me what’s truly important to me.
Let’s put these patterns into something useful, something to use as a guide.
I want to live an independent and financially secure life, where I have the ability to be assertive about what I want and need. I want to do something artistic and make my own schedule. I want to be connected to nature and to my intuition to make life feel a little more magical. I want to be true to who I am, the good and the bad, the powerful and the gentle, masculine and feminine energy. I want balance. Also, for whatever reason, my dream home is extremely important to me.
This is a life that will make me feel fulfilled.
I could take it a little farther and use this to see which personality traits are important to me, what I hope to have, but I have a better exercise for that.
What’s Missing?
Not only can this list guide you to what you want, but you can use it to see what you don’t want. At least, you can see what isn’t speaking to you at this moment in time.
For example, I notice a lack of the traditional life path. I see no mention of marriage or kids. Some of the women on my list have that, and yet that isn’t what called to me about their lives.
I don’t have to take that as the end all, be all, but it is worth thinking about. And boy, has it been something I’ve been thinking a lot about, but I’ll save that for another post.
Reader, you might be completely different. Maybe your analysis lacks anything related to a career and is very family-oriented. That would be worth thinking about if you currently pour all your time and energy into work.
Maybe yours has a focus on traveling around and changing things up. That would be worth thinking about if you’re contemplating putting a down payment on a house or signing up for a long lease.
Maybe your analysis essentially describes the life you are already living. If that’s you, I would ask you how that makes you feel. Do you feel grounded in that choice? Do you feel content and fulfilled?
Or maybe you did this exercise because you felt like something was missing, and you were hoping to gain some insight. Not to plug myself, but might I suggest my next post, where I will be talking about how to use those other lists we made? Come back next week and let’s see!
Till the next.