The Year of the Word "Boundless" and Where it Led

This year, I chose the word “Boundless” to describe how I wanted my year to be. In my Substack published on January 1, I wrote:

Sometimes we can only see the infinite when we are standing at the edge of our human limits.

Boundless is anti-boundary. Boundless is something that comes from inside of us and goes outward. Boundless energy, boundless enthusiasm, boundless creativity, possibilities, opportunities. Boundless ideas, boundless compassion, love, grace. Boundless capacity. Joy. Imagination.

Boundless is something with no limit. The form and shape of something is its limit, but something without form or shape has no limit. Something without bounds pushes against things with bounds. Janell Strube, Substack, January 1, 2024.

I started with lots of energy and intention to test the principal of this word.

I enrolled in a course to manifest the year.

My image board of what I wanted to manifest from January, 2024.

I took a six-week course, “How to Become a Creative Force of Nature.” I lit negative phrases on fire, like “Fear of Rejection” that I wanted to stop holding me back. I imagined my muse as a raspberry-colored flying dragon boat named Aida, who took me where I needed to go. She told me I should write a children’s book on surviving adoption.

I went to France to watch the Olympics and to visit places outside of Paris that I had always dreamed of, like Chartres, Monet’s gardens, Van Gogh’s asylum where he painted almost 200 paintings in the last year of his life (talk about boundless!) I walked in the steps of my protagonist, Adelaide Labille Guiard.

In August, in Paris, I sat down at a table in a hotel lobby with one of my blank books and found myself without two words to rub together to form a poem.

This was terrifying. Not one word appealed to me, no word circled in my head crying to escape, nothing. For a person who loves words, loves the sound of words, the feel of them going onto a page, the look of the scribble of them, the satisfying click of a keyboard as they go from brain to fingers to screen, this was not good news.

Perhaps it had to do with a work project that had me working every single day for five months, even every day but three of my vacation. Perhaps it had to do with a long summer of reflection over the damage the church I had grown up in had caused to so many people. Or the stress of the election and wondering whether what I write about even had relevance anymore.

Or perhaps it had to do with the anxiety of sending queries out to agents for my book, agent after agent after agent, to be met with instant rejection, rejection 123 days later (I’m an accountant and I made a formula), or just plain silence. It did not matter that I told myself that Stephen King received 100 rejections on Carrie, or that Query Tracker itself said that the average number of rejections for people who used their platform was 45.

It did not help either that in October, Meta AI presented a poem on my Facebook banner it had written that was a clear plagiarism of my poem, “Old Men and Fava Beans” that it had stolen off my Substack. Here I was, trying to get my work published, and receiving rejections, and yet, Facebook/Meta was scraping my Substack supposedly for large language modeling – and presenting back to me a poem “it” had written. This really stopped me in my tracks.

I had started the year with so much intention. Yet, three quarters of the way through, instead of feeling like an expanding balloon lifting into the sky, I felt deflated and empty.

Today, I remember the wise words of Connie, the woman I met in Istanbul. “Sometimes you have to take your joy back into yourself and protect it to let it shine again.” She had made a motion of taking a lamp and holding it to her heart and rubbing it. In my mind’s eye, I always see her surrounded in a halo of golden light.

She was right. I had to take my joy, my energy, my raison d’etre back into myself to be restored again.

Once I did that, I could look back on this year and see that so much of what I had put into play actually happened.

I did go to the Olympics. I took up flamenco dancing. I am financially so much closer to being able to focus on my writing.

I’m going to have a draft of a chapbook ready to submit before year end. And some things that I could not have imagined have happened – I was invited to write about adoption and suicidality and wrote about the day in a life of a three-year-old who has learned she was adopted. As a result of that essay, I participated in several podcasts this year and I began to understand that my writing could save lives.

And after the election, I realize that it’s more important than ever to write about adoption, racism, and the deliberate erasure of the accomplishments of women and marginalized people. Perhaps more dangerous, more emotionally costly, but more imperative.

This week, I am going to sign a contract with a publisher for my book, Adelaide.

So…today I am grateful to you, dear readers of my Substack, grateful for those who encourage me to keep writing, grateful for the random strangers along the way who impart wisdom and messages from the universe, grateful to the forces inside me that have returned and are calling for me to write again.

Please respond in the chat or comment section and tell me what your word was for this year, and how it’s going for you.

P.S. I apologize for the copyright disclaimer, but I have learned my lesson – I am happy for you, my dear readers, to share any post I write with your friends and family by using the share button, but from now on, all of my posts will have copyright language on them.

Janell Strube, December 1, 2024

©Janell Strube, 2024. All rights reserved. NO AI TRAINING. Without in any way limiting the author’s exclusive rights under copyright, any use of this publication to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.