My Belated New Year's Goals

Usually, I'm all over the New Year's Eve stuff. I'll write long lists of what I accomplished in the past year, do a review on my blog, and think of all of my worst moments and mentally let them go in the seconds counting down to midnight. One year, I spent the last hour of my New Year's Eve writing a page filled with close to 100 resolutions. Can't say I wasn't ambitious, right? This year was a little bit different, however. I partied hard, slept in harder, and woke up with the realization that I hadn't done a thing to prepare for the new year. Not only that, but I woke up with the horror of realizing that the last song I listened to in 2015 was "Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae)." Oh heavens. Please forgive me, better than the average human's musical tastes. (That was a subtle and accurate, though arrogant, nod to the quality of my Spotify playlists, in case you're interested.)

All of that being said, new years are important to me. I'm a significantly imperfect person, and it always feels refreshing to have a symbolic chance to start over and be better, to let go of all of the things that were sad or hard the year before and try again. I've thought long and hard about what I want the theme of my year to be, and the three words I always come back to are authentic, open, and brave. I want to be open with others and myself, honest about who I am, confident and unafraid. I went through a period as a teenager where I hated and struggled with who I was. There were few things I liked about myself, and when I didn't get validation from people I looked up to, I caged myself in and hid both the worst and best parts of myself. I was terrified of being laughed at or rejected for who I was, so I forced myself to be emotionless and personalityless. It's taken years to undo the damage that caused. I still have to work on not hiding myself every day.

At the end of 2016, I want to be able to say that that is completely behind me and that I am unashamedly me, authentic with whomever I'm with and more afraid of hiding who I am than losing the good opinions of other people.

I am imperfect and weak and funny and smart and my hair is pretty okay and I can be fun to be around when I stop worrying about what other people think. Here's to a year when I can fully embrace all of that.