New Year Wishes for You
Happy New Year! I hope you had a wonderful holiday season and a lovely closure to 2023.
I am sure by now you have been inundated with emails, ads, social media, TV commercials, and comments from strangers, family, and friends about setting some resolutions for this new year.
Some of them may have told you to become the best version of yourself by losing weight, or going on a diet, or detoxing your body, or adding in movement, or adding in mindfulness, or adding in journaling. I am sure you have heard a variety of things presented to you about becoming your best self, bettering yourself this year, self care, and making time for you.
Because you have heard nonstop about resolutions for weeks, instead I am going to offer something else.
This New Year, listen to yourself. What do you want to do? What hobbies make you happy? What things make you unhappy? Whatever goals or resolutions you set, sit with them. Why are you doing them? What is the reason behind them and how do you think you will feel after you complete them?
I am not going to tell you what to do this year. I am going to invite you to listen to yourself.
I want you to tune out all the ads and social media content and chirping friends and listen to yourself, and go from there.
I spent many January 1sts vowing to lose weight. Telling myself that this diet would work, that by this time next year I would have my “goal body.” I told myself that this time I would have willpower, that I would cut out sugar, snacks, chocolate, alcohol, you name it, to finally be the person I wanted to be. I thought that if I did all that I would be thin, and that if I was thin, I would by happy.
I was thin. At times I was starving myself. At times I was so thin that it was harming my health. And I was not happy. I didn’t become happy with my body until I stopped dieting and started working on my body image and self esteem.
I had to unlearn so many patterns. I had to learn to accept myself. I had to learn how to love myself for who I was, mind, body, and soul. It took work. It took years.
So this year I will share some of my New Year’s Intentions with you. I actually sent intentions every year on my birthday (December 14th) and this is where these come from:
Write a novel: I LOVE to write. I always told myself I wasn’t a good enough writer to write a novel or that it wouldn’t make money so it wasn’t worth it. I unlearned those negative thoughts and now I am ready to do something I love, FOR ME.
Read 80 books: I love reading. Escaping into a book for awhile is one of my favorite things and I want to make more time to read because it makes me happy.
Spend time with the people who light me up.
Tell the people I love that I love them more often.
Adventure more: travel, try new things, giggle, just live.
These are just a few in a long list, but they all are for me, not for anyone else, and that feels like the best way to start the new year.
