New Year’s Resolutions

Since I talked earlier this week about how New Year’s resolutions can be triggering at the start of a new year when you realize how far you are from the goal you set for yourself 365 days prior, I thought I’d talk a little bit more about resolutions in general.

I don’t typically do them.

It’s not that I have anything against them, in fact, I think it’s a wonderful tradition to start the year off thinking about how this is going to be the year you finally do X and how you are going to make those changes or whatever you do when you make resolutions. It’s pretty great.

It’s also…well, if feels a little empty.

I remember as a young kid in school, we would talk about resolutions and go around the room asking everyone what their resolution would be. And, as someone who never had one, I would always just say something similar to what everyone around me was saying. You know, “Play outside more”, “Do better in school”, or some other nonsense that didn’t actually mean that much to me because I was already doing well in school and as someone who lived in the South in the 80’s, playing outside was already over half of what I would do.

So, maybe I don’t do resolutions because I’m just not good at them.

And…I also do have some versions of resolutions, I just don’t like talking about them out loud.

Things like, “I want to sell more books”, or “I will write more books”, or anything else similar to getting away from my normal day job and just sitting around putting words to a page.

And the truth is, I entirely plan on doing that this year. I’ve got approximately six months left of school, and when I finally get done with that, I’m going to have this huge gaping hole in my requirements of any given day that I’m incredibly eager to fill with words.

But one of the cool things about New Year’s resolutions is that you have this crazy energy at the start of the new year to just go ahead and do it.

And I don’t think I have the time for the copious amounts of writing I hope to be doing at this point. A new term at school already starts on January 4th, and coming out of the term I just finished, which was incredibly rough considering it involved completing my capstone and an entirely unnecessarily hard Psychology course. That means for the next few days, I’m really not planning on getting much of anything of worth done. And then I get right back to all of it. Work, school, and pretending I have time to write.

So, I guess what my real New Year’s resolution is for this year, although I have so much more I want to do with any given day, is to allow myself to chill more.

Because, if I’m being completely honest here, it has been a long time since I’ve been chill.

And I miss that.

Happy New Years everyone. I hope you ring in the change of the number of the year with some awesome chill.