Monday Musings - New Year, New Me

 

The new year is a traditional time to reinvent yourself.  To make the promises that (if you're lucky) change you for the better.  In reality, these promises end up broken within a few weeks, if they even last that long.  I used to make resolutions every year, and failing at them within a few days.  Then I tried doing a 101 in 1,001.  Those lasted a bit longer, but the list was so unwieldy that the 1,001 days would be over and I'd have checked off maybe 10 things from the list.  Mostly because I'd forgotten about it before the end.  I've tried just setting goals (exercise 3x a week, clear my email nightly, etc), but I ended up giving up on those soon too.  My habit tracker only helped so much - there was shame seeing "exercise" not shaded in for months on end, but that didn't seem to push me into what I needed to do instead.

I think the biggest problems I've had is setting long term, repeating goals.  I'll say that I want to exercise 3 times a week, or call my mom once a month, or take my meds every day.  And the daily ones, I manage at about 75% accuracy.  The weekly ones... maybe 50%.  The monthly... about 5%.  It seems like if it's something that I don't have on a daily calendar, or something that I can't keep up as a habit, I forget to do it.  Or say, "I'll do it tomorrow."  I have a bad habit of procrastinating.  (Which is part of why the blog hasn't been updated in 3 months.)  It pushes things off until tomorrow becomes next week, becomes next month, becomes next year, becomes never.  And then I feel bad because I didn't do it.  

The worst for these are my open ended goals.  Get the house completely clean - well, that can never happen with the family living here.  Lose 100 pounds - eventually, that may happen, but not in a time frame I can see.  Go through my closets for Goodwill - well, great, but then I have to find time to actually BRING them to Goodwill.  I end up cascading one thing into another into another and then feel overwhelmed and get nothing done.

This year, I'm putting one big thing at the top of my list - Self Care.  That can take the form of taking a bubble bath, spending a day reading, congratulating myself for getting one thing off of my To Do list when depression is weighing heavily on me.  It also means forgiving myself when I stumble.  Whenever I berate myself for not being (in my mind) good enough because I didn't do XYZ, it feeds into the depression and just keeps looping.  I am trying to change that.

I have a few things that I think will help me be more successful this year.  The first is that I've lost 40 pounds in the last 3 months.  I knew what the numbers said, but I didn't recognize how I'd changed until I did a 10 year challenge on Facebook.  I put up a picture from 2011 and 2021, expecting to see more wrinkles, a fuller face, those kinds of changes.  Instead, I saw that my face had slimmed down a LOT.  I looked older but I also looked better.  It was a good shock.  I haven't really noticed the change in clothing because I wear leggings and baggy shirts more often than not.  But I did put on a pair of jeans the other day and had to hold them up.  So mentally, I'm feeling like I'm headed in the right direction with my weight loss.  And that makes me feel as though I'm successful in at least one thing.  

The second is that, for the most part, I was able to keep up with my Bullet Journal as well as my Today I... Yes, I have some months with missing moods tracked, or holes in the habit tracker.  But there are more days filled in than not.  Just the act of putting everything down makes me feel better.  It was one of my goals from last year and it's one that I've managed to be pretty successful with.  I also set up a large part of my 2022 Bullet Journal before the end of 2021 so I'm able to hit the ground running.  Last year, I had a separate planner and Bullet Journal and it was hard to keep up with both.  So I'm adding the planner into the BuJo.  I'll be posting more about that on Wednesday.

So I'm hoping for a new me this year.  A better me.  A happier me.  It may be early in the year, but so far, I am feeling positive that it will happen.

Me, a few days ago.  I'm liking who I am.