Reinvention Free Writing Exercise

Think about some of the things that you want to reinvent in your life. Big or small, it doesn’t matter because it is about you and your needs. Below is a list of categories that you can start to explore. You don’t have to have the answers all at once. What you decide today isn’t permanent. It is your life and you get to reinvent it as many times as you want to.

One of the things that I felt was really helpful was to choose a category and just journal about it. Free write anything that comes to mind as you ponder that category. You may be surprised at what comes up. You many find that you aren’t even writing about the category you though you were going to write about.

I wanted to share a page out of my journal where I was thinking about the new home that I was looking for and how much maintenance I wanted or could handle. The entire entry turned out to be about pools and water. Whatever came up I just wrote about it. As a result, I quit looking for homes with pools, something I was sure I wanted.

Another thing you may notice about this entry is that it is in complete sentences. Even though I seemed to jumble the past, present and future the thoughts are fairly linear otherwise. I have other journal entries that have doodles, little drawings and single words sprinkled into the free writing. There is no wrong way to do this.

Below is a list of categories. These are just suggestions and you may find that there are others you wish to explore. What are there areas of your life that you can reinvent to become the person you want to be after loss? You have other areas to explore? That’s fantastic, go with it and keep discovering yourself.

Write as quickly as you can and put everything that comes to mind on the page. Nobody else will ever see this, it is just an exercise in discovery. You may even want to do the exercise a few times with the same category. You can see in my journal entry that I wasn’t even addressing the category I thought I needed to explore. Time may change the areas that you want to reinvent in your life.

Doing this exercise doesn’t commit you to reinventing anything right now. As I said before, you might want to revisit one of these categories, or a category that you came up with, more than once. When you are ready, choose something that you are confident you can handle and make a commitment to make that one change. If it doesn’t work for you, that’s OK. You tried. Yea, you!!