If you were to ask me, I’d tell you I am a well-intentioned person. I want to do good, and I want to avoid doing bad. My intentions are to always learn and grow, to never stagnate or become complacent. I intend to travel, write, and practice photography. I intend to keep a clean home, one free from needless clutter. I intend to explore various areas of nursing, branching out from my comfort zone. I intend to be a good friend, one who finds a way to bring light to every situation.
I’m finding, however, that intentions aren’t everything.
One can intend a whole lot of things, but that doesn’t mean those things will happen. I can have the best intentions but still do harm onto others. I can have the worst intentions but somehow end up helping.
As a little girl, my dad use to drive me from one small Indiana town to another so that we could visit my grandmother. The towns were maybe 10-15 minutes apart, but one day, I told my dad that I knew of a short cut. In reality, I was craving adventure and mischief. My dad used to be a long-haul trucker, in a time before GPS existed. His sense of direction was unparalleled. I wanted to challenge this: could I get us lost?
On our way home from Grandma’s house, I told my dad to take every turn that my heart desired. Grin on my face, I just knew that my plan was working. Until, my town’s courthouse came into view. I had actually directed us the right way, towards home. And wouldn’t you know it, the drive time was cut by maybe 1-2 minutes. So fully intending to get us lost and experience something new, I created a shortcut to and from Grandma’s house that we used for years after.
On the other hand, I’ve had good intentions fall apart in precisely the same way. In my first few months of being a nurse in the emergency room, I took care of a patient who was in the early stages of pregnancy. It was her first, and therefore, every little change or bump in the road created a sense of anxiety. She had experienced some spotting, but by the time she reached my department, it had stopped on its own. She wasn’t having any pain, and when I took her urine pregnancy test, it came back very positive. Intending to reassure her, I told her that it was reassuring that the spotting stopped and that she had no pain. I told her that spotting in early pregnancy is ridiculously common, and that everything was likely just fine.
So imagine my absolute horror when the ultrasound confirmed that an early miscarriage occurred. I couldn’t even face her. The doctor told her what had happened, and what the next steps would be. When the time came for discharge, I had one of my coworkers do it, because I was filled with such shame and sadness. I should never have given her hope just for it to be ripped away. My good intentions of comfort turned into harm. Not because I intended harm, but because I was trying to give certainty where there was no certainty to give.
Of course, I learned from this experience, and I now am very open with my patients about uncertainty. I know that good intentions aren’t always what they’re cracked up to be, so instead, I rely on openness and honesty. If my patients ask me about something that I’m unsure of, I tell them as much.
I guess I just wish that intentions mattered more.
I have many hopes and wants, many intentions of doing good, of becoming better, of showing up differently. Yet, more often than not, those intentions get lost in the bigger picture. I have to-do lists that never get done, goals that go unachieved, conversations that are never had. I say things to my husband, intending to be vulnerable and connect, just for those words to land somewhere entirely different.
I intended to quit drinking months (or years, even) before I finally did. I’m still not even out of the woods. I’ve been sober for going on a month, but I’ve made it this far before and still ended up drinking again. My intentions feel a little bit meaningless when the intention shows up so far before the actions.
Maybe that’s what bothers me the most. Knowing that intentions are real doesn’t necessarily make a difference. We are judged by what we do, not what we meant to do. We can intend to change for years yet remain exactly where we are. We can love someone deeply and still hurt them. We can desperately want to become a better version of ourselves, and still fail, over and over again, to become them.
Our intentions may reveal something important about where we are heading. They’re evidence of the people we want to be, even when our actions haven’t caught up. Intentions may not be everything, but that doesn’t mean they’re nothing. Maybe the space between intention and action is where most of being human actually happens. The uncomfortable, imperfect space. We know what to do, but haven’t figured out yet how to do it.
So how do I become the person who does what she intends to do? How do I find the follow-through required to achieve the things I wish to achieve? How does anyone do anything at all?
I’m trying to be more intentional. A lot of my life has been conducted on autopilot, with not much thought put into the things that I was doing. When you live on autopilot, years can go by without any real change. It reminds me of a book I read once, called Flowers For Adam. The main character gets stoned on shrooms and thus begins a long journey home. At one point, he becomes a stone and stays still for years upon years. He is told that he is committing a sin by not changing. To be human is to change. Stagnation is the ultimate evil.
So it seems I’ve been trapped in my own version of hell. I’m breaking my way out. I’m trying to remember who I am outside of being a mom, wife, nurse. Who is B?
I’m a writer. Writing is how I’ve always processed my life. I have, at times, been writing something in my mind as I experienced it. It’s as if I am living with the filter of being a writer. I think of how best I could explain what is going on around me. I see colors vibrantly, light and shadows. I am in tune with how I feel, and how the environment influences what I feel.
Take for example, my living room. It’s cluttered with baby toys, scattered across the floor. The floor is completely open, with a single thick mat. Our coffee table got demoted to the storage unit to give our daughter space to explore and learn to move her body. My big green couch and white bookshelves are the center-piece of the room. The book shelves are filled with all sorts of works, from Barbara Tuchman’s history books to Sylvia Plath’s poetry. Fantasy, crime fiction, poetry, witchcraft, religions of all kinds. I am proud of our little library. And don’t even get me started on the green couch. It makes me happier than I can even say. It’s L shaped, with a dark brown table behind it. Our windows are adorned with cream-colored curtains that match the lighter wood of the TV stand and vinyl table. Like our book collection, our music is varied. Aurora, Between the Buried and Me, Mumford and Sons, Ocean. These are just a few of the many artists that play in our home on a regular basis.
I feel overwhelmed when my home isn’t put together, but I also don’t know how to keep it together. It seems it doesn’t matter how much effort I put into keeping things tidy, by the end of the day it seems a tornado has gone through. It’s hard, too, because we have too many things. Not all of our things have homes, and then they just get shuffled around from place to place. So I’ve intended to do some decluttering, to get rid of the things we no longer use. Marie Kondo would have a hay-day with all of the material things that do not spark joy in this home.
The funny thing is, without intending to, in some ways, I have improved and become a more tidy, efficient version of myself. The nature of becoming a parent has changed me profoundly. It used to be a monumental achievement for me to get out of bed by 9 a.m. These days, I am lucky to sleep in until 7 a.m. My days are filled with more now than they ever were before. It’s 10 a.m., now, and I’ve already gone on a walk, cleaned the kitchen, fed the baby breakfast, worked out, and I am now sitting down to write this post. If you’d told me a few years ago the direction my life would soon take, I would have had a hard time believing it. Accomplishing these things in one day felt like an impossible feat, yet this is now a normal day in my life.
So now the question is, if change occurs without conscious intention, then what role do my intentions even play in who I become? It seems a whole lot of my life has been completely out of my control, and who I am as a result of it all isn’t something I asked for or even consciously decided. Clearly, I have the capacity for more than I know, for change occurs when necessity demands it. So how can I make room for the things that make me feel like myself? I named this blog Becoming B because I felt the need to discover who I was. I wanted to get away from anxiety and relinquish control. I wanted to just be, effortlessly.
Much of this change has been a response to circumstance. I have a daughter who depends on me, a husband who shares a life with me, patients who need me to show up and do my job. The days have a structure now, whether I create one or not. There are things that must be done, and so I do them. Somewhere along the way, I became a person who can get out of bed in the morning and accomplish a dozen things before lunch.
But what about the things that aren’t required of me? What about the things that exist only because I want them to?
No one needs me to write. No one is going to suffer if I never pick up my camera again. The dishes will eventually get done, one way or another, but no one is going to make me sit down with a book and really think about what I’ve read. There is no external deadline for becoming the person I want to be.
Those things require something different from me. They require that I choose them.
And choosing them, I’ve come to realize, is harder than it sounds.
It’s easy to imagine the life you want to live. It’s easy to picture yourself as the woman who writes regularly, who takes beautiful photographs, who has friends over for dinner in a clean home, who goes on adventures and tries new things. It’s easy to imagine yourself having difficult conversations with grace, responding to frustration with patience, and doing the things you said you would do.
The imagined version of yourself never has to contend with a bad night’s sleep, a sink full of dishes, an argument that didn’t go the way you hoped, or the sudden and inexplicable desire to lie on the couch and scroll through your phone for an hour.
She exists in a world where wanting to do something is enough to make it happen.
I don’t live in that world.
I live in the space between who I am and who I want to be. And perhaps the mistake I’ve been making is treating that space as evidence of my failure, rather than as the whole point.
Because I don’t think becoming a better person is a matter of waking up one morning and finally deciding to be one. I suspect it happens much more quietly than that. In the conversation you choose to have instead of the one you rehearse in your head. In the ten minutes you spend writing when you’d rather do nothing. In the things you put back where they belong, and the things you finally admit you don’t need. In the moment you recognize that you don’t know the answer, and choose honesty over the temporary comfort of pretending that you do.
Small things. Unremarkable things. Things that probably won’t feel like transformation while they’re happening.
Maybe this is what intentionality actually asks of me. Not that I become a person who always does what she intends to do, but that I become a person who notices when she doesn’t. A person who is willing to examine the distance between what she says matters and what she makes room for. A person who can acknowledge that distance without using it as an excuse to give up.
I don’t know how to do this yet. I’m still figuring it out.
But I do know that I don’t want to wake up ten years from now and discover that I’ve spent a decade waiting to become myself. I don’t want to keep telling myself that I’ll write when things settle down, that I’ll travel when we have more money, that I’ll pick up my camera when I have more time. There will always be something. There will always be a reason to wait for a more convenient version of my life.
And I suspect that the woman I want to become isn’t waiting for that version of my life, either.
She’s here, somewhere in the middle of all this. In the messy living room, the half-finished books, the long lists of things I want to do. She’s in the person who keeps trying, even when trying doesn’t seem to amount to much.
Maybe I don’t need to invent her from scratch. Maybe I need to start making choices that give her a little more room to exist.
I have spent a lot of time thinking about who I intend to be.
It’s time to find out who I can become.
