Happy New Year!

New Year’s Eve is my favorite holiday. Part of the reason is because I thought it was one of those holidays that not a lot of people think of when asked. It needed more love, I guess. But the bigger reason was that I love what New Year’s Eve entails: saying goodbye to the old, to the mistakes, to the successes, to the regrets, and starting anew. For a while, I would tell people that I love change, and while I do think change is something I usually welcome with open arms, I think sometimes I just like the idea of change. The possibility of it and what those possibilities mean: escape.

This year, I want to be purposeful in change.

Last year, I didn’t have a lot of real “resolutions” or “goals”. In fact, I think I bemoaned a friend of mine for wanting to work on writing up some goals for the tail end of the year together. There was something about making goals concrete that was too scary and unfathomable to me.

This New Year’s Eve, I spent surrounded by used Kleenex, huddled up in my favorite blanket on the couch sick. Thank God I had the company of my best friend who just had wisdom teeth surgery! Being sick wasn’t the best way to bring in the new year and it certainly didn’t help that I was on the tail end of my hormone therapy cycle. I was feeling low and soon my mind fixated on something that had been irking me for a couple of weeks. I didn’t feel that different at the end of the year than I did at the end of 2017. And yet…It was like that Wallflowers song, “One Headlight”: “Man, I ain’t changed, but I know I ain’t the same.”

At the end of 2017, I was in the same place relationship-wise, mentally, emotionally. I feel a little stalled in that way. And I think the reason I let myself be stalled was because I put everything on hold toward the beginning of 2018 for top surgery (future post to come!). I stopped being as social, I worked almost every day at my side hustle to make sure I had enough for the surgery and even though I was working out, I wasn’t making progress with working out my brain, my emotions, my mental health. I froze everything to make sure top surgery would happen. And then post-op depression happened (more on that later!) and well, here I am.

I made some great strides in 2018, specifically completing the huge goal that was top surgery and writing more than I’ve written in a long time, read more, budgeted better, made some new friends, and spent more time with my best friend (week-long sleepover!). But I didn’t feel like I was that different from the person I was at the end of 2017. Maybe that’s minimizing my accomplishments of 2018, but I really just want to do more work than I did last year. I got a little lazy. I got a little stubborn. I’m ready to make more progress in 2019. So yeah, when I say “fuck me up 2019” I mean that in the most positive way possible.

First goal? Write 500 words every day, which can include the novel I’m working on (or any novel, really), poetry, essays/non-fiction, blogs and journal entries. So far, I’ve met that goal every day!

Shh, I know it’s only been three days.