I always feel a little unsettled at the beginning of a new year. Excited, but unsettled. Because it's the unknown. It's the future. And we're in the thick of it.
What will 2015 bring? Well for me it's about finding impossible things. Like a medical specialist who knows ANYTHING about my condition. And an editor who likes novels about guardian angels (there must be one out there). If I can just find these particular needles in this haystack of a world, then 2015 could just be the best year ever. At this point, I'd settle for coming in somewhere in the top five.
So I'm considering myself on the cusp of greatness, as I do every year, because it's bound to be true at some point in my life. I suppose we're off to a good start as I just published my first column. Yes, that's right. Someone was crazy enough to give me a column. It's for an independent magazine in my own humble neck of the woods, but I get to write whatever I want. And you all know how much I enjoy writing whatever I want.
So here is my first blurb about life and whatnot. My nieces and nephews were quite impressed that my picture is in a real magazine with real pages that they got at the grocery store!
Onward and upward y'all!
A Little More You, A Little More Me
*Featured in Quirk Magazine, Jan/Feb 2015*
Breaking a promise to yourself is a shockingly forgiveable offense. Others might be wounded if you betray their trust, but when you break a promise to yourself, you can basically just shrug your shoulders and eat cake. This is the time of year when people overindulge in goals and resolutions almost as much as they indulge in leftover Christmas baking, straight from the freezer. Because making a goal on January 1st and then forgetting it by January 15th will never result in any significant consequences. Not even remorse. I suppose it's just human nature but I'm still sincerely ashamed of us! Because if there's anyone you can truly rely on, it ought to be yourself.
I once made a New Year's resolution to become a fabulous soccer player. Anyone that knows me will find this completely laughable. It was the sport I longed to play when I was a kid but my mom made me take piano lessons instead. So as a fully grown woman, I bought a soccer ball and persuaded (coerced) a friend to kick it around with me. But there was a slight hiccup...or two or three. I have no athletic ability, little time to spare, no appropriate ball-kicking space, and while I have this idealistic vision of being sporty, I'd really rather be reading a good book. As you may have gathered from my clever foreshadowing, the project was an utter failure.
Because I had made a promise to myself knowing full well that I lacked the ability to fulfill it.
This goal setting tradition of ours is called a "New Year's Resolution", not "This Year's Fantasy". So after looking back on several foolish trials of former years, I've realized that the trick to a successful 2015 kick-off is to promise myself that I'll be truer to myself. That I'll develop the skills I have, improve upon the things I do half-heartedly, and become just a little bit more of the person I already have the potential to be. A little more truly me.
And not somebody else.
There are no soccer balls in my future. But there are books and languages and recipes and music. Making promises that you can and will keep is a way of being your own champion. It's taking your real life, at the very core, and making it better and happier. It's a way of proclaiming to the universe that 2015 is going to be the best year ever.
Because who's to say that it won't?
Here's the link to Quirk Magazine!
