Every year despite the amount of blog posts I have been able to make, I create my goals for the new year. This will be no different. Hopefully I will find the time and energy to write the post I really want to about all the changes and transitions happening in my life right now and what the start of the new year means for me.
As always, these goals are changeable. This time of year is rife with “new year, new you” and “new year’s resolutions” rhetoric, but these goals are different. Instead of a resolution that I must achieve or else I am a failure, these goals represent what I hope to accomplish in the new year with the knowledge that life happens and things change and with that, so do my goals.
- Write – My writing is personal in nature and requires a lot of emotional and mental energy. I have found it very difficult to write if I do not have the energy. I make it my goal every year to write more and each year I feel like I fail regardless of my intention to not make my goals absolute. Since writing is so important to me and is something I want to do in the future, I feel much more critical of myself for “failing” to accomplish my goal. This year I truly hope to feel as though I accomplished writing more. I think being in school is a good opportunity to really get back to my writing.
- Relationships – I am lonely. I have wanted to write a post about my lack of friend relationships since graduating from university all those years ago, but I have yet to find the courage for such a post. I think being an adult and finding friends is rather difficult. I think the feelings of loneliness are amplified by social media where everyone looks to be out having fun and living the life. I want to make the goal of finding more friends in my life and fostering the relationships I do have so that I have more people in my every day life than my family and partner.
- Self-care – Some days I am so good about taking good self-care, others I am terrible. I think it is even more difficult now that I am in school again where attendance is mandatory and will effect my grade to the point of failure of a course. It has been hard transitioning from being able to take a self-care or sick day when I needed at my prior job to now going to class no matter what because my grade will be effected. I need to work on finding more and different ways of self-care that work around this BS policy.
- Planning – I have been doing a lot of thinking about my future in the past several months. Is this program the right program? Should I stay in school or find a career now? Do I even go to graduate school? It is a lot of think about and a lot to contemplate on my own. I still have not quite figured out the answer, but I think I am getting closer. I think the path I am currently on with getting a second degree is the right path and will lead my to my ultimate goal of a pants-free, stay-at-home career.
- Body – Another blog post that I need to write is on my body image. It has been a tough transition from my eating disorder back to nearly the same body I was in before it. I have been struggling for many years as the weight I lost during my disorder returned and how my body compares to others who are in recovery/recovered. I really need to focus myself on not necessarily loving my body, but simply being neutral about it. Some may frown upon the idea of body neutrality, but I think that is enough of a goal for me and what I feel I can accomplish in the future. Maybe one day I can love my body, but my main goal is to simply stop hating it.
- Struggles – I have been without much therapy at all for a little over a year and there are few if any resources where I am now living. It is hard to go from therapy a couple days per week to none at all. I want to acknowledge how well I have been doing and at the same time acknowledge how difficult certain things still are. My goal this year is to reach out when I need help and continue to work on my own through my struggles and issues.
- School – I was awesome this past fall. I realize that I am in undergraduate courses and some lower level undergraduate courses, but I still had the best semester I have ever had in all my years of school. My goal is to remind myself of how smart I am, how well I have done thus far, and continue to do well.
- Organization – I have had difficulty organizing since my move, whether that is organizing my time or my space. I really want to try to better organize my life so that I can accomplish all that I want to accomplish and have the space in which to do it. It may feel unobtainable at times given my time constraints and whatnot, but I know I can make little changes that will impact the overall goal.
kristin bulzomi 