“Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow;
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.”
-Alfred Tennyson

I love the feeling of a fresh new year. The slate has been wiped clean and the next twelve months lay ahead of you full of dazzling possibilities. We ignore the little voice inside that says other years have come and gone, much in the same way and with similar resolutions, but somehow we feel – this year will be different! I know it can only be if I make it so.

I have not drafted finite resolutions or a list of ten things to accomplish, but I have identified the things I want to concentrate on this year and built in some daily activities that will hopefully help me to achieve these goals. My goals are encompassed in 3 themes: health, my purpose and love.

Health

I know, this is so horribly cliché but it’s true – I have really neglected my health and allowed myself to indulge in unhealthy eating habits and a sedentary lifestyle. I need a drastic change, but I know this isn’t going to happen overnight so I plan to tackle it a day at a time.

My first step is to eliminate dairy. This has been a long time coming because I know it has been wreaking havoc on me for years, but after giving up gluten upon being diagnosed with celiac disease, I just couldn’t bear to sacrifice one more thing. I have paid a high price for this and I am ready to now try living without it. Because this is a self-diagnosed allergy, and because it is not hard core like a celiac’s methodical avoidance of gluten, I am allowing myself dairy on special occasions (and really special, such as birthdays, not “I’ve had a hard day and want a latte” occasions).

A dairy-free and gluten-free diet also helps to eliminate a lot of bad food just by default. No grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch, no pizza for dinner, no specialty coffees with empty calories on the in-between. It also leaves room for good, whole foods – like pomegranate salad and fresh avocados. So far it has been going well, except that is, for feeling deprived and starving. I got creative by frying an egg in olive oil and learnt that dry toast (GF, of course) isn’t so bad. I suspended the diet (or caved into my base cravings, you know, semantics) for my brother’s birthday dinner and indulged in crab dip and decadent sundaes. If anything, it was a reminder that it isn’t really worth it because it leaves me feeling so unwell (but New York Cheesecake will always be worth it, because yeah, you only live once).

Of course, the diet (or otherwise known as healthy eating) is only one part of the puzzle and the next goal is getting active. My couch lounging and low energy is a cautionary tale of what happens when you skip one too many workouts – you fall out of the habit of being active and suddenly the idea of going for a run seems daunting, exhausting, something to be avoided. And yet, when you are active every day, it is addicting. I know how amazing I feel whenever I work out, how great running is for clearing your mind, and how my body adapts and responds to the demands – and loves me for it. To say I am going to run a marathon tomorrow is unrealistic, but I can take steps every day, from walking to running to yoga, that will help to reshape my body and my lifestyle – and then, one fine day, a marathon won’t be such a crazy idea.

I would be lying if I said that I am not in part motivated to get fit in order to lose weight and tone my body. It’s frightening how suddenly it happens, the change from being able to eat anything without gaining a pound as a teenager to suddenly all those pounds finding their way to places on your body by the age of twenty-eight. How did that happen? Where did that come from? When you don’t recognise yourself anymore, you know it’s time to change. And of course, I do have a magic number I would like to see on the scale, but I know that the most important thing is losing inches, gaining muscle and how my body feels. And that’s why the weight loss is only a part of the equation. The most important part to me is to actually BE healthy. I am terrified that the years of gluten wreaking havoc on my intestines, combined with sedentary lifestyle and food comas, will lead to irreversible health problems. Diabetes. Cancer. These can be the long term results of bad habits and environmental factors and I want to change that now. I know I can’t out run disease, but there are things that are in my power that will help safeguard against it. Lastly, I am hoping that these changes will give me a lot more energy, which I am going to need in order to accomplish my next set of goals.

My Purpose

This one is so intimately, unequivocally, ferociously important to me that it is hard to describe it here. It has taken me many years, and many failed starts at different ideas and careers, to arrive at where I am now. I have tried on many different hats but so many of them didn’t fit right and even more were only because they seemed like the logical hat to wear – the smart choice. It was around my 25^th birthday that I admitted to myself that I didn’t belong in the business program. I was working on my BA in Business with an unclear end goal all while working full time as a manager in the spa industry.  I wanted my missteps and mistakes to have been for a purpose, to amount to something, and I thought that this was a way to tie it up in a perfect package. It was a way for me to justify how I had ended up working for this company instead of going to school full time (or travelling, or anything…) and that was because I was meant to be a business woman. It was confirmation bias and I used it to validate my life choices. It was around that time, my quarter life crisis, that I finally peeled back the veneer and admitted it – this is not for me. I was good at my job, but mostly because I cared about being a good leader for my team. And I was doing well at school, but only because I worked hard and persevered.  Business was the smart path, the rational path, but not my path. My path is to follow my passion – and that passion is to write.

That was a great moment for me – the day I woke up to myself. All the pieces came together, and I realized that while I was chasing other goals and beating myself up about all my poor life choices, the voice within never went away. Suddenly I realized that I have been doing this all my life – writing, writing, writing! I have been reading, creating, imagining and scribbling down my thoughts in countless journals, online postings and pieces of scrap paper. I have been developing myself into a writer without even knowing it. And now I was set on making it my career.

The rest of it didn’t go as smoothly, but it’s what I have been working at now for three years. I have made a lot of changes since that time, not least of all moving cities and jobs, but have always maintained my drive towards achieving my dream. When I turned 28 a few months ago, the pressure felt like it mounted exponentially. This is do or die, this is crunch time, this is “we’re losing daylight, baby”.  This has to be the end of living someone else’s dogma and the start of a life that I will create.

My goal this year is to take real, tangible, steps towards building my career and to officially, legitimately, be able to say: “I am a writer.” To do this, I have set daily writing quotas for myself to help create the habit of sitting down, every day, and writing. I am committed to making this blog an actual blog. I am doing freelance work, albeit minimal work, for a local content company. I am taking classes to complete my BA in English (on that note, try telling your parents you are changing your major again, and this time, to English and watch as they can barely conceal their panic). I am journaling. And I am writing my manuscript (or, more specifically, will be writing my manuscript) – that oh-so-elusive holy grail in every writer’s dream.

I know this dream of mine is wild, crazy, immense and scary – but the best ones always are. I know there are more rational paths and more realistic goals, but settling for something less than what I believe I can achieve would be untrue to me. I know there are so many people who hate their jobs, so many who want to build their careers, so many people more talented than me and further along the path, but none of those are reasons to not go after what I want. I might fail, yes, I might… but I also might succeed… and that’s a risk I am willing to take.

Love

I know, what can I say, another stereotypical resolution. Yet, to me, love encompasses all the other things in my life that make my loftier goals worthwhile. It is the most important thing, because without it, I am nothing.

I have already been lucky in love because I have found a partner to share my life with. I can only hope that our love continues to sustain the peaks and valleys of life, as it has done for so many years now.

We are very fortunate to have a big family and my hope for the year ahead is to still have them all close to us. Family is everything and you have to make room in your life to keep family a priority. If I could wish for anything, in the theme of love, is to have deeper and richer friendships. I want to maintain the friendships I have that mean so much to me and not allow them to fade away because of distance. In the age of social media, I feel like there are so many peripheral friendships in my life and what I am really craving is a few good, real, friends. I want to keep my heart open to friendship and new experiences in my life.

As with anything, every day is a chance to change your life, and we are not restricted to the ringing in of the New Year. If I fail to meet my goals today, I can still try again tomorrow. But for now I feel enraptured in the promise of things to come, of all the things I can create and achieve in this year ahead. And I am excited to get started.