National Bucket List Day
I like lists. Lists make my little neurodivergent brain go brrrr. I’m not necessarily the best at checking things off those lists—just ask the extra bottle of ketchup in the pantry… and also the extra, extra bottle of ketchup in the pantry. Whoops! Still, I like lists. And bucket lists are no exception—a list and it’s full of things I want to do? Hell, yeah! Sign me up!
Thanks, in part, to my proximity to death as a kid, I have been compiling, reevaluating, and adjusting my bucket list since childhood. There are still some unchanged items from 1989 on there—like meet the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation and wanting to visit a volcano—as well as the myriad things that I’ve added over the years. There are certainly more than a handful of things that have just been dropped from the list: Michael Jordan is not going to advocate that I be signed to the Chicago Bulls and I am not going to debut my fashion line during New York Fashion Week and I’ve made peace with the fact that those things aren’t going to happen. With three more decades of life experiences under my belt, I’d definitely delineate those from bucket list goals: those were daydreams—but, if you daydream something long enough and hard enough and it starts to looks feasible, especially when you’re a kid.
Okay, I’ve mostly made peace… that Chicago Bulls thing, though. It was a rough day when, my height topped out at 5’3”, I realized I was not going to have any more growth spurts.I think dropping some bucket list goals over the years is understandable—even the ones that aren’t as incredible as my playing basketball with Scotty Pippin. Priorities change and people grow and people grow apart and all of that is a part of life. I’ve had had to modify a lot of items on my bucket list, if not cut them altogether, to accommodate the coming and going of people from my life. That has come with a fair amount of grief, to be sure; it’s one more thing to mourn in a relationship lost or in the death of someone close. It sucks.
Photo by Daniel Byram
But, having spent a substantial part of my childhood in proximity to death, I expected changes like that to the list of things I want to experience before I die. I did not—and I suppose this speaks to my internalized ableism—expect to have to modify and cut things from my list because I am chronically ill and disabled. While, on the one hand, having learned to be flexible about my bucket list means I have a little bit more wiggle room in my brain to manage my own expectations of myself and of my life. On the other hand, it involves grief; it involves mourning the plans I had for myself and my ideas about how I would inhabit my life. On a third, mystifyingly unexpected, disembodied hand, I am realizing that I am not stuck with my old bucket list. As I am moving through those losses and necessary adjustments, I have new opportunities to reevaluate my dreams, really consider what success looks like to me and for me, and to make an entirely new bucket list that reflects who I am, what I am capable of, what I value, and what I want from my life now. I have the opportunity to build a bucket list that doesn’t seem so much like a cobbled together album of ephemera from ideas about myself, relationships, and people lost; one that feels inspiring and motivating rather than one that is so full of guilt and regret that it has its own gravitational field.
Yeah, I’m going to build a rhymes-with-bucket list too, while I’m at it.The rules I’m going to hold myself loosely are as follows: it goes on the list if I want to do it and 1) it is going to bring me joy, without detracting from someone else’s joy; 2) if it is going to bring someone else joy, without detracting from my own joy; 3) it doesn’t require me to change my body; and 4) I can always change my mind and take it off the list if the idea of it no longer brings me joy.
Yep! I’m going to KonMari™ the boots off this bucket list from time to time.So, today, on National Bucket List Day, I am hitting the redo button and building a new list. And I invite you to do the same, if you feel like your current bucket list isn’t serving you anymore. I’ll start us off: sit down and compile a cookbook of family recipes for my sister and me, write and publish a memoir or two, sell one of my paintings, take a cross-country trip (on motorcycle, if possible), grow heirloom tomatoes and corn, catch an afternoon nap in a hammock in the shade of a magnolia tree…Now, if you’ll excuse me, my brain wants to go brrrr over this new list.
