Happy New Year! I hope your New Year’s Eve was fantastic!

Aside from the unfortunate news of the death of America’s Sweetheart, Betty White, ours went pretty well. It felt like 2021 needed to get in one last gut-punch before it ended. On the other hand, Betty was about to turn 100 years old. Maybe it’s a positive thing that we didn’t have the death of a National Treasure as part of 2022’s opening act to set the precedent for the whole year, but it was still a sad way to end 2021.

But this isn’t about Betty White, wonderful as she is, and as much as she will be dearly missed.

I want to talk about growth.

A lot of people take some time between the end of the previous year and the beginning of the next to write down some New Year’s Resolutions. A new year can seem like a clean slate in which you get another chance to turn the person you are into the person you want to be. Having that chronological marker can make it easier to keep track of how you are progressing because you have a clear jumping-off point to look back on.

I don’t disapprove of setting resolutions because I believe that goal setting in any form can be very beneficial, but I do have a few issues with New Year’s Resolutions that prevent me from setting them.

1. People place so much significance on following through with new years resolutions that when they inevitably fall short (as we do with many of our goals) the feeling of failure can seem so much more grandiose than that of a goal set at any other time of the year. This is a feeling I strive to avoid, as I already have low self-esteem, I don’t want to look for ways to contribute to it.
   
2. If I come up with a goal or resolution in the middle of the year, I don’t want to waste time waiting for a new year to start before I get to work on it. I prefer to begin working toward a goal when I think of it. That way I don’t give myself any time to forget or talk myself out of it.
   
3. Resolutions tend to be overarching, multi-step goals (as they need to encompass an entire year) and I have a difficult time breaking that sort of thing down, so I prefer to begin with smaller goals that I can accomplish in a shorter amount of time and build off of them instead of setting a single, multi-step goal for the whole year.

That being said, I may not set resolutions, but I do like to really take a look at what is going on in my life and figuring out what I really value, and where I would like to place my focus for the following year. I really try to scale it back, look at the bare bones and develop goals from there. The idea is to cut away the things that are not serving me so that I can grow intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually.

I have chosen the following things to focus on in the upcoming year:

1. Marketing. I am an excellent writer, but my writing cannot sell itself without anyone knowing it exists. My marketing skills, however, are terrible, as I have a lot of anxiety and fear surrounding putting myself and my work out there. In a lot of ways, I feel like telling people I have done something special and asking them to consider purchasing it feels like the MLM people that seem like your friends but in actuality are just trying to sell you their product. I never want anyone to feel like that. My goal for marketing will be to first work on establishing relationships with people who may be interested in what I have to say, and second, to conquer my fear of saying it.
   
2. Speaking of relationships, my second focus will be on my family. My desire is to make my children central to my life. I love my children very dearly, but unfortunately, I am not always very expressive about it. The goal will be to spend more time with my children doing the things that they enjoy doing, learning about their interests, and helping to build up their self-esteem and resilience. I will also be working on cultivating relationships with a select few individuals that are not members of my family by blood or marriage, but they are members of my family by heart. These individuals are also extremely important to me as I would not be who I am today without them, and I want to spend time with them, appreciating the individulals that they are.
   
3. My final focus this year will be on spiritual growth and healing. Living as a neurodivergent person can (and often does) come with a lot of trauma. My goal will be to look deep into who I am, and reframe a belief system that is not working for me. I have a lot of things I can contribute to this world in my own way, but not if I am only focused on how broken I am instead of working on healing that brokenness. Though others may have contributed to that brokennes, it is my responsibility alone to fix it. My goal will be to learn to trust my instincts and grow in emotional maturity so that I can be the blessing I was intended to be to my family and the other people that are brought into my life.

I hope that you will continue on this journey with me and I look forward to what the new year has in store for us all.