Last year, I confessed that I felt less ambitious than any year before, and that feeling has only grown over the course of 2022. I looked back on my resolutions I set last year and found that my big, broad goals for this year have essentially not changed. So I’ll leave them the same, there is no point in twisting myself into a pretzel trying to… have different goals? I am disappointed to not have made as much progress on them as I was hoping but it’s not bad to want the same big areas of improvement as I did a year ago.
I do have new concrete goals (remember my concrete vs. abstract days, wow I aspired to so much) that I am looking forward to working on this year but the rest of my goals are going to look very familiar.
We made it through 2021, which was weirder than 2020 because, while 2020 was a steady hum of lows, 2021 came with ups and downs all year like the winter surge, the vaccine coming out, devastating COVID variants, seeing family and friends again, and NYC being in the grips of yet another surge during the holidays. (And, of course, an unrelenting news cycle, as per usual.)
This past year, I feel a lot less… ambitious than I ever felt. I just want to survive, you know? I’ve even found my usually competitive nature to be significantly dampened. Games with family and friends (online, as is the case for most of this pandemic) are less stressful and still as fun when I don’t hope for or expect victory? I’m already spending time with people I care about, so anything that follows is an afterthought. It’s fine if people think I’m bad at a game; they might be right, and I don’t have to get my pride hurt about it. I remember wanting to get my mind and my body to the BEST possible condition ahead of turning 30, but by the time my birthday rolled around I didn’t care. I was just holding on.
So my goals for the upcoming year are not super ambitious, and I’m trying to be even more honest with myself so that I can achieve them. As the years start coming and they don’t stop coming, I am really thinking hard about what kind of person these goals are supposed to help me become and why I want to be her.
Perhaps because of how my 2020 goals went, or just how 2020 went did much to rein in how ambitious I was come New Year’s Day, but my 2021 resolutions were decidedly shorter in number and smaller in scope. Maybe a year of setting SMART goals (Specific Measurable Achievable Relevant Time-bound) has helped me reframe goal-setting in a way that sets myself up so that I can look forward to success rather than disappointment with myself.
In these first few extremely tumultuous weeks of the new Gregorian year, I’ve noticed that there are still ways I hope to grow into the person I want to be that I didn’t capture in my resolutions post, maybe because they didn’t feel specific enough or maybe because I didn’t want to commit to them in a formal blog. (I included a few tentative ideas for these goals at the end of my resolutions post. Looking back, I feel sheepish about hedging so much about the commitment of making them big-R Resolutions but apparently, 3 weeks later, I still don’t feel comfortable with these goals having the same priority as my resolutions.)
But I think it is still valuable for me to share what some of these other goals are, both for accountability and for the sake of documenting what was important to me to try to change, what kind of person I was hoping to become.
So, here are a few other goals I have been working towards, not just in for the year 2021 but for some time now.
Now that we have reflected on 2020, and taken out much of our frustration with the world on this year that held so much promise (I really was looking forward to deals on Lasik…), it’s time to look forward towards 2021, stretching out before us.
This year, I feel a lot less anticipation for the new year and the fresh start that is promises to bring. Maybe because I’ve been so worn down by the previous year, or maybe because I know deep down that the stresses of 2020 not only didn’t magically disappear when the clock struck midnight but are liable to stick around for much of, if not all of, 2021.
Still. I was forced to spend a lot of time with myself, in my home, confronted with my poor habits and my unmet good intentions. It was a case scenario I always feared as an extrovert: without social interactions to keep me lifted and energized, I would deflate and collapse into a shell of myself. During that time, I saw much room for improvement.
The resolutions for this year aren’t going to be as ambitious as they were in past years, I think. Concrete ones will be very specific and more realistic for me to achieve, given how many years several of them have appeared on this blog. To be honest, I haven’t spent as much time thinking about these as I have in years past, and I’m not too bothered about it. My resolutions have always been an opportunity for me to reframe my approach to my habits and a time for me to set the intention of what kind of person I want to be. So many goals in my previous resolutions had, knowingly or not, dependencies that were outside of my control. My goals to explore the city more, during a year when I could not leave my apartment? Or to just invite people into my home more, during a year when indoor gatherings were lethal? I didn’t know. And so, as a result, my resolutions this year are fewer and more restrained. I am not pushing myself too hard in 2021. We all need and deserve some rest this year, I think.
Can you believe it’s the first of September already? It’s been said time and time again, that time has felt even stranger during this pandemic than usual, but August truly sped by. It feels like just yesterday I was lamenting how quickly July was coming to an end and now it’s September!
Even though September is still firmly a summer month, and everyone rushes into cozy fall feels, the heat wave breaking in New York has been a palpable relief. I have been on a little staycation this past week, and allowing myself to venture outside of my apartment to enjoy and support my city. The weather has been excruciatingly beautiful the entire time and I could not be more grateful for it. These fresh breezes really add to the feeling that I’m at another fresh start, another new page, that I arbitrarily feel at the beginning of the year, the beginning of each month, and even the beginning of each week.
Sip of Starrshine 