Leaving 2017 Open...

2017 is upon us in a few short hours. "New Year, New Me," right? Ummm, no. That's not really my style at all. I am someone who is constantly working toward goals and I certainly don't need the clock to strike midnight of a new year to light that fire inside me for change or resolve.  I am proud to say that one of my best qualities is that I am a go-getter with a lot of intrinsic motivation for most things. But with that comes the desire to achieve every goal I set for myself almost immediately and done perfectly. That's not always realistic and it can be a real downer when I fall short. Unfortunately, this happened a lot in 2015 and brings me to one of my biggest downfalls: I am too damn hard on myself and can get very demoralized when things don't go the way I planned; especially with something that I worked hard at and/or put a lot of time into. However, while 2015 was such a shit year, I vowed that 2016 wouldn't be a repeat of that. Luckily, it wasn't! I had to make some changes in my mindset and my methods on how I would go forward to have different, better outcomes. With that being said, my one major goal of 2016 was to simply be happy. Instead of my usual objective goals for the year, I decided that in order to re-find my happiness there some were steps I had to take. I wrote out ways I was going to re-discover that joy and happiness I was missing and in the progress towards that, some of my other personal goals may just fall into place.

Although it didn't happen right away and it wasn't maintained the entire year, I think I can confidently say that I took plenty of steps in the right direction of being happy again this past year.  In short, I really loved running (and oftentimes looked forward to it), I tried some new fitness classes (but not as many as I would have liked because money was in fact an issue), I did appreciate accomplishments for what they were even if they didn't totally go in the way I had imagined them to, I got rid of some people in my life who just didn't make me feel good about myself, I quit the job that was making me so miserable, I moved closer to my family (and basically get to see them whenever I want, which has been so awesome), and I was able to travel a little too (Florida, DC, Philly, London). All in all, not too shabby. Am I the happiest I've ever been in life? Not even close. Am I happier than I was this time last year? Yes. By a landslide. Am I continuing to make moves to put me where I want (and deserve) to be? Of course. In my previous post, I even gave a recap of all the monthly highlights of 2016 focusing on all the good that happened because there was a lot of it and I wanted to remind myself of that. It was all part of the journey.

This year when I sat down to make my "goals" list, I really struggled. So much so, you can clearly see that there is no list below. I wasn't going to be fake and write things down for the sake of writing them. I started to write some things down and as the words came on the page, I kept thinking to myself "Ummm, are you really going to do that?" And to be honest, I wasn't so sure I would. This happened a couple of times. Maybe I'm afraid to fail? Maybe I don't trust myself to follow-through enough? Maybe I'm not ready to fully commit to these things? Or maybe I'm just being really, truly honest with myself. But whatever it was, writing down these things just didn't seem genuine at this moment. When I'm ready to do these things, I will. Sure, I want to be happy. Obviously. Yeah, I want to make new friends and to PR in races and find a husband and get a job that I love, but to be honest, I don't know if I know how to do all that right now. What I've tried in the past hasn't worked and I'm not going to pretend to know how to do all of it.  I'm not going to bullshit you or bullshit myself. It's not fair to either of us.

I'm in such a time of transition in my life right now that I'm not 100% sure what I'm looking for. I'm still very much a work-in-progress and I'm okay with that for the time-being. It's all about growth right? And in these times right now, in the middle of my "adult gap-year" I'm growing. I'm learning more and more about myself and I truly feel pretty lucky to be able to do that. I am lucky enough to have had some savings to allow me to take this time to figure things out for myself in so many different aspects of my life. I didn't have to jump into something that didn't fulfill me. And I thankfully had the support of my parents. I finally felt some relief in where my life was going. Sometimes time is all you need and that is something I've had plenty of lately and I am very grateful for that. It has allowed me to reflect on everything in the past year that I left behind because it wasn't impacting my life positively (work, certain people, etc...) and to be thankful for the stuff that was (my family, my running, etc...). I am old enough to know what belongs in my life and what doesn't.

So even though I've written and re-written this post like five different times in five different ways, I am leaving it here, this way, without any major goals of 2017 and I am totally okay with that. In fact, I don't see this as a negative thing at all. I just I feel I am being very honest to myself and I am leaving it all very open-ended. Anything can happen. I am leaving the year open to possibility and I feel good about that. As someone who tends to be very type-A and wanting to know every next step, there is some kind of freedom in not having everything planned to a "T" and not knowing exactly what's next. It's taken some of the self-induced pressure off myself. What I do know though, is that there is a lot of work to be done on myself in 2017 (physically and mentally and emotionally) and although I may not have it all figured out right now, I am (cautiously) optimistic about what may be coming my way and that's definitely a great start.  Happy and Healthy New Year to everyone. XOXO