From the front to back, well, is you feelin' that? Put one hand up, can you repeat that? Tryna tank my year, see I don't need that ...
I'm confident that my readers are NOT uncultured swine, but for the casual stragglers who somehow found themselves stumbling through what's left of the internet and landing in this very strange corner of it, feel free to click the link for educational purposes...We'll wait!
Now that we're all caught up, Happy National Quitters Day!!!
That's right, it's already the second Friday of the new year (can you even believe?), and it is prime quittin' time! If you don't already know by now, today is the day most people have already blown their New Year's resolutions. Isn't that wild? All it takes is 7 - 14 days to just totally give up on something you were stoked enough to even bother committing to in the first place? I would've thought It would take closer to 20 - 30 days to crap out, especially when you factor in the end-of-the-year momentum, and all the optimism about fresh starts, and the conviction / passion to make lasting change ... All of that combined creates a kind of buzz I thought would be a little bit harder to kill, but not according to the good people behind the Strava app — mentions are not necessarily endorsements, it's probably perfectly fine, but I know nothing about their product, personally — what I do know is that they looked into their users' behavior, and coined the term, and seven years later, we're celebrating(?) it! I've talked about this a little bit before, but you can read more about the day itself over here, if you're curious. As for me ..?
Can you really quit something you haven't even started? I know, you're thinking: How is she always one step ahead?! It's the curse of the eternal optimist, I'm sure! I am forever a glass all-the-way-full kinda gal, but I'm also a toe-dipper (how many metaphors can I drag into this?) ... I will absolutely cannon-ball into the deep end (both figuratively, and literally ... I never got enough swim time growing up, so I am a complete child, to this day, around any type of water - I wish I could be marvelously elegant with big hats, and pithy poolside reads, but I'm not, I'm a straggly haired, mascara dripping fool), but first, I'm going to test the temperature. And that's what I've come to realize about ringing in my new years from now on, I'm not going to force things anymore.
Take it easy, I can hear the raucous laughter from here!
I'm not going to white-knuckle my goal-setting anymore, and while I suppress my control-freak ways in this area, I'm sure they'll squish out in some other bizarre places I'll be sure to come back and tell you all about, but until then, I'm not going to make myself feel bad for "under-utilizing" my time from December 25th to January 1st. Frankly, I think it's weird to be constantly optimizing everything ... We're not bots running on code, and honestly, I don't want to fall into this weird trap of trying to program myself like one. Life should have a romantic sort of ebb and flow to it, I think, and the rigidity of plan-maxing at the end of the year kind of kills a piece of my soul, especially when I've always viewed the last few pages of the calendar as a cozy, dreamy time to sort of relish the final moments of the year, not pitch it in the bin whilst racing off toward the next.
That being said, I have also spent more New Year's Eves than I'd care to admit, misty-eyed in my spot in front of the fireplace wondering how another year was already over, thankful for everything I did have, and honestly I did have a lot - when I think of all of the suffering all over the world, I mean, I've lucked out in more ways than I can begin to count and I never want to be unappreciative, but I was also utterly devastated that I wasn't living the life I felt I was supposed to be living, and that I'd somehow essentially wasted over 300 days (again) ... Year over year, my days had just all sort of begun to smear together, and I was adrift. Nothing stood out. Nothing felt real, add to that, in this weird limbo I occupied, I had some people around me who would've benefited greatly by my confusion, and were attempting to rewrite reality right before my eyes. I couldn't see where I'd been, I was forgetting what I'd done. Had I even accomplished anything? Yes, of course, but what? How, and where had I spent my time? What made it so much worse was hearing my New Year's 2006 conversation with my mother ringing in my ears every year thereafter: Welp! It's the start of a fresh new year, so you'd better hurry up and figure out what you need to do first so you can hit the ground running, and get all the things done that you've just told me about, because before you know it, it's June. The year's half over. Then you look up again, and it's December 31st and you've got nothing to show for it, but an old list you never got around to!
We can laugh about this conversation now, but for several years, it was not funny, well, to me at least.
How can I explain it ... If I'm the eternal optimist, my mother would be Licensed Joyologist Hellen Madden, just, you know, with a lot less acrobatics. Flash-forward a decade from that phone call, and I bought myself a daily planner for the first time since college. I had no idea what I was going to "plan" per se, for the first time in my life I didn't have any. I had about a thousand questions, but no plans. The only thing close to a plan that I had was this: You're going to start paying close attention to every damn thing you do, and don't do until you figure it out! As I opened my new kit, I thought about a boy I dated for a little while in high school. He told me much later on, "You always had a plan. I was so jealous of your plans," and it's true! I really did have a plan for just about everything (and several back-ups at that), but you don't really think much of it at 16 beyond daydreaming, and you certainly don't think anybody else notices, but it had been nice to find out that such a small, yet crucial part of me had been seen. I knew what I wanted more than anything else was to get back to Me again, and so that's what I did.
What I learned in the process is that it is very hard to get anything to shift if you're just out here raw-dogging change. Like, if you want to modify or correct anything in any real sort of way, you're going to need a system, and finding that system that works for you can be frustrating and incredibly difficult, if not down right painful, but you're going to need something that gets you through the hard days. I had the misfortune of starting to read The 12 Week Year last January, and (hilariously) it was NOT what I thought it was going to be! Since the first time I heard of the book, several years ago, I thought it was going to be about setting up your year to be played out in the first twelve weeks, and then for the next 40 you just kick your feet up and coast ... Wrong. It's all about condensing your year into 12 weeks over and over again so you're constantly experiencing peak performance, and let me tell you by the end of Chapter 1 I was exhausted! I'm going to give it another shot, and restart it this month (and finish it!) and see if there's anything I need to include in my tool kit, but first I'm going to take this weekend and get back to me.
So. It's been a week. I've dipped my toe into 2026 ... And all I can say is, ready or not. Here I come.
xoxo
