Vision Statement part 1

This is supposed to provide inspiration and direction in my weight loss efforts. I am working from an article over on Sparkpeople.com by Dean Anderson.

1. What do I want my life to look like in certain time frames, what I want to be doing, the roles I want to take on, how I want to see myself.
     One year- I will be 43. I want to be at least 50 lbs lighter, with my feet no longer cracking and my routine lab values within normal limits. I want to be physically and mentally active each day. If I am able to return to work, I want an interesting and fulfilling job. I want to seek training through vocational rehabilitation for a new field of work. I want to not be suffering from depression, but rather to be living an engaged life. I would like to be an effective homemaker, a good wife, a good friend, a good volunteer. I would like to have a wide circle of friends, full of interesting and vital people.
     Five years- I will be 47. I want to definitely be in weight maintenance and be meeting any health challenges I face with information and action. I want to be physically and mentally active each day. I want there to be no questions about my mobility and flexibility. I want to take part in some organized physical activity such as a race or a weightlifting competition at least once each year. I want to be well established in a routine of home, work or volunteering, church, social life, learning, and physical activity. I want my bipolar and OCD to be well controlled and to be just something to observe for, not something that rules my life. I want to have internalized the coping skills needed to have them least affect me. I want to have a wide social circle full of people that I have established close relationships with.
     Ten years- I will be 52. I want to be in good health by anyone's standards, both physically and mentally. I want to have a sense of mastery in whatever field of endeavor that I entered after re-training. I want to be a good example of what taking care of oneself looks like. I want to be an integral part of some worthwhile endeavor. I would like to have a sense of security about oncoming age. I want to be able to pursue the latest and most effective treatments for bipolar disorder and OCD, taking advantage of research that has been done.

2. What would my ideal days look like? Waking up each morning with Captain Husband, full of energy and hopeful in each new day. The first thing I would do would be to kiss him. Then I would get dressed in something attractive and comfortable, grooming myself and taking pride in my appearance. Then I would set about the business of the day, sorting tasks by priority. I would make physical activity one of those priorities, in order to maintain my health. I would look forward to seeing people I knew and liked each day, working on something worthwhile together. If things were not going well, or if there were tragedy, I would reach out to people that I cared about, who cared about me. I would try to take action to limit the negative effects and find the most positive outcomes. At the end of the day I would be in my home, a comfortable and happy place, sharing time with Captain Husband.

3. What personal values do I want my daily life to express and reflect? In general order of importance: Human connection is probably the most important to me, followed by love and family, security, interest, comfort, variety, then contribution to society. Excitement just isn't that important to me any more; I can't really remember much of what it was like to crave it. Spirituality is probably equal to love and family now, but that is a recent thing and it hasn't necessarily become integral to me yet, which is why I'm just now thinking of it.

So that's the first part of my vision statement. It has taken me a couple of hours to get this far! I have changed the way I've been looking at a couple of things because of it, so I guess this has been an effective exercise. It has shown me that I do have hope for the future, and that I REALLY want to be in recovery from my illness. That's new, because I haven't had the resources to think about it all that much, actually. I've been unhappy with the effects of it and wished that it weren't so, but it's new to be able to coherently express the idea that there might be some mode of life that wasn't dominated by it. It's also interesting to see the idea of re-training put into print, along with the idea of finding some work that I could be good at that would be satisfying.