It's a strange concept to me.
The new year.
What it signifies.
New beginnings.
Except whoever designed the calendar placed it in the dead of the winter season, which
is horribly depressing due to the lack of sunshine and where I'm at temperatures discouraging
any leaving of the house unless absolutely necessary.
I've always been more fond of the idea of spring as a new beginning, the new buds forming
on the trees after the snow has gone, sunshine moving back in to allow nature to do its thing,
beginning anew, growing new foliage, and coming out of a long hard season of hibernation.
Same with the bears.
They don't come out January 1st simply because it's a new year.
No.
They've got it figured out where they are unbothered by anything except what nature
intended.
This is why I always remind myself, as well as asking myself the associated dozens of
questions that crop up while I ponder a topic, who designed this thing anyways?
Who decided this?
All of it.
Ah, that's the real question to ask.
I get that it's a rather arbitrary way of cataloging things, even in my own context.
Technically, it's just a date, signaling the restarting of the calendar year as it's
been cycled through yet again.
I mean, Australia is currently in the middle of summer.
That's also a weird time to start a new year.
Then I think of how society has assigned all of these rules to this new beginning, the
whole New Year, New Me bullshit that we're all used to stuffing ourselves with, as if
we hadn't eaten enough junk over the holidays to make us prolong the discomfort of gluttony,
as though a simple date can indicate that suddenly everything has changed, including
you.
Hmm.
That's not quite how it works.
I think I've got the right to speak of this from personal experience, especially with
the last few years and what it's brought to me, complete and utter chaos, change, and
multiple versions of a new me.
But none of that had anything to do with the date on the calendar.
I can assure you, if you're struggling to even have enough energy to do more than just
remember to write a five instead of a four, you're not alone.
And that is totally okay.
In fact, I am too exhausted to even have looked that far ahead or consider the idea past the
recording of this in the here and now.
I didn't look ahead thinking, wow, 2025 is a new chance to get things started and make
those changes.
No.
Life's hard.
I'm tired.
No doubt you're also tired.
Society is tired.
They're just too stuck in their ways to realize that they can actually change that.
It's like that profit that draws a circle around the snake and the snake is convinced it can't
get out.
It's literally just a circle in the sand, guys.
In fact, I didn't even think about what I wanted to work on or do to honor this change
in the calendar year simply because it just wasn't a priority.
I had other things on the mind.
I only decided when making this episode that maybe I'd like to have a talk about my goals
and my hopes for the future.
What's important to note here, these are not new.
What I bring forth is not new information coming out of left field.
It's things I've already been working on and striving for.
I'm just taking a moment in time to say them out loud, to reaffirm them to myself and to
share them with you, to share with those of you who may feel pressured to make certain
types of goals or any goals or resolutions at all because it's the thing to do.
It's okay to not.
It's okay to continue your life like you did two days before the ball dropped.
Change is a personal journey and experience that only you can understand when it is the
right time to start, if you want to start at all.
That's something that belongs to you and you alone.
In order to make this episode, I actually had to go back into my social media to find
where I'd put my 2024 resolutions.
I was too lazy to go back into my journals to determine if I put them there.
Something tells me I didn't.
My mind is such a disorganized mess sometimes.
Then I realized, or I guess I found, that I didn't make any or I didn't document it,
so I guess it didn't happen.
Oh, that's where I'm wrong.
Thankfully, my overflowing notepad has exactly what I intended for myself.
Let's recap here and let me just say no one has had the privilege of reading this before
as I forgot to post it after I typed it up.
That's just my nature, I guess.
Moving forward into 2024, my goals are myself as my first priority, in charge of meeting
my needs first and foremost.
As I start the new year in what may be the first healthy relationship I've ever been
in, with a stable and emotionally intelligent partner, I still need me.
I need to stay true to my values and stay grounded, manage my triggers, my fears.
I want to continue practicing vulnerability, communication, and boundaries in all contexts,
but most importantly, this one.
Consistency within my habits and to create balance.
I have come so far, but there's always room for continued growth.
I also really want to ensure that I make space for the things that bring me joy, painting,
reading, and writing.
So let's review much of the relationships I had before were riddled with poor boundaries,
codependency, and giving up of myself in a way that would result in me losing myself,
where I'd resent the other person for my own inability to regulate, and almost always ended
in an explosion of emotions where I would slam the door shut and just be gone.
That's generalizing of course, but you get the gist.
I took a solid three years of flat out refusing to date so I could get my shit together and
build a solid foundation for me to trust my own commitments to myself.
I met Tanner December 2023 and looking back at this goal, I did it.
It was something we had discussed earlier on when we designed our relationship and throughout
the year we encouraged one another to stick to our goals, reminders that we ourselves come
first as people and then come together as partners.
I think it will be an ongoing goal, but since this was the first real relationship of any
substance after such a long period of singlehood, I would say I managed very well to stick to
it.
As far as creating balance, managing my triggers and fears goes, there's still work to do.
Balance as I've discussed in other episodes is not something that I've learned.
Never mind mastered.
It's a huge reason why I had to leave work and even a trend I discovered while on the
road as I mentioned in the travel recap episode.
Did I make room for things that brought me joy?
Sort of.
I painted very occasionally, certainly not enough to count and I suffered in that way.
Writing, I did a lot of journaling, almost daily, and I have about 80,000 words in my
first manuscript waiting to be mashed together into a book, along with a few months of daily
thoughts, so as much as I would chide myself into thinking I didn't do enough, I'm actually
quite proud that I managed what I did.
Reading?
Yeah.
I read.
I had set a goal of 15 books and I hit the 34 mark on December 31st.
As it stands now, I've already read 3 novels into January and I'm on to my 4th.
Moving forward, my theme is staying true to myself.
Yes, in the ways I listed here in my 2024 goals, but also in a deeper, more meaningful
way.
I've been thinking a lot about what is left to tackle in order to heal and feel wholeness
and I know that for so long, too long, I've been so hard on myself for my differences
and my struggles.
How hard life has seemed to me compared to others and I'd shame myself.
I'm going to put an end to that.
My main focus will be two things.
One, I want to be more gentle and compassionate with myself, forgiving, encouraging.
If I could end this year by being able to genuinely tell myself I love you and mean it, that would
be the greatest accomplishment of all.
I will help myself meet this goal by practicing perspective shifts, viewing myself as a friend,
talking to myself as if I was a friend, or even me at 5 years old.
Sitting beside me as I struggle and reminding myself that what would help this little girl
feel better, feel comforted and loved in those moments is exactly the things I need for myself.
Then I'll tell myself those things.
Progress will be tracked in my journal, which is where I do most of my thought work, where
I challenge my beliefs and the negative things I say out of habit, rather than actually meaning
it or feeling it.
Hand in hand with that is learning to let go, to be, to accept what I can't change.
A lot of my anxiety and worries come from a lack of ability to control the situations
around me.
If it's not perfect in its existence or actions as executed, there's a lot of self-deprecation.
I know the reality is that life is what it is.
It's messy.
We can't change it.
We just need to be with it, as it is.
Make the most of it whatever way we can.
Whether it's needing to comfort ourselves, seek out support and company from a loved
one, or finding a way to see the humor in its ridiculousness.
There have been many times in my life where I felt that the world would implode on itself
because it wasn't happening in the ways I thought it was supposed to, as deemed by society,
or whoever dictates these weird rules that everybody seems to desperately try to follow.
That's way too much pressure to put on yourself.
And I think about how our shoulders were only meant to hold up our head, not the weight
of the world and everyone else's problems within it.
I've already started working on this, as I learned to get comfortable with the uncomfortable,
what is, sitting with my feelings and emotions when they're not the happy, pleasant ones.
What this looks like is a lot of reminders, awareness of what I can do within myself to
accept what has come about, rather than thinking about how I can change a person or the situation
itself.
This is an ongoing thing, so I can't really assign an end date.
If I wanted to give into the pressure of ambition and keep in line with what society says I
should want and do, I would list more, but I know that's not reasonable, it's not realistic,
and it certainly doesn't mean that I'm practicing gentleness and compassion with myself.
I can say with full honesty, I'm not interested in that, it wouldn't serve me, except to make
me feel inept and to pressure me to focus on fixing and doing better so that I can remain
distracted and give society what it wants, somebody who puts themselves aside to meet
the demands of the system who neglects themselves and doesn't take the time to ask the important
questions.
For 2025, that is definitely not it.
Even now, I feel cheap having listed these things out and talked about old resolutions.
I'm failing to see the change in dates as a new beginning, it's really just any other
day, any other time, the continuation of our life, natural progression along a timeline.
The timeline doesn't just start over or give you new benefits.
If the idea of a new year allows you to feel inspired and motivated to do better, then by
all means, harness that positive energy and put it to good use.
If it threatens to make you feel worse about yourself and your current situation, it's
okay.
It's okay to also choose to ignore it as what it is.
Another gimmick, another trap to reel you into whatever can be bought and sold.
Remember that your value is within you, and no one can take that from you.
You aren't any less worthy or lovable because you opted out of a trend of new year's resolutions.
There's nothing wrong with you for not being able to muster up the energy to do so either.
In fact, I am giving you a pause if this is the case.
It means you didn't continue to push down what your body and mind needed in order to
do the thing that felt expected of you.
Instead, you let it pass by because it truly doesn't matter.
It's you that matters at the end of the day.
And though you may be sitting in a struggle and finding it hard to accept this as a positive
spin, it doesn't take away the fact that it's still a win.
It's a way of you saying no, putting yourself first and recognizing that this isn't something
that's important.
You are what's important.