Whether you “believe” in New Years resolutions or not, I think the start of a new year (especially a new decade !!!) is a great opportunity to do some reflection and think about where you want the new year to take you. The way we live our lives can make it difficult to zoom out on what’s happening day to day and week to week and it’s easy for large chunks of time to pass by without any real growth or change. When there is so much going on, I tend to enter into survival mode and only focus on getting through everything that needs to get done. When I’m in this state, I’m not cultivating the relationship I want to have with myself and with the people in my life that I love and care about. This is why I jump on any opportunity to give myself permission to slow down, take stock, and chart out where I want to take things next.

This year, I wanted to do my New Year’s goals a little differently than I have in past years. I am a classic Gemini in that I LOVE to start things and get excited by new projects but I have real trouble seeing things through. No matter what kind of system I put into place in January to achieve my resolutions, they’re usually abandoned by the middle of the month. I can’t tell you how many agendas or notebooks I have purchased in January with the intent of tracking my productivity, hours of sleep, or hydration and then not touched them again until June or July, where I’d take up my old routine for a week or two before abandoning it again. I have gotten to know myself enough that I know that prescribed systems don’t work for me. When thinking about how to approach goal-setting for the new year, I wanted to get rid of all of the metrics and measurables. I wanted to set goals in a way that I could sustain throughout the year in a way that worked for me. 

So what’s different about this year?

For 2020, I tried to identify ideas or feelings that I wanted to live into more. These were inspired by the ways that I felt in 2019 that I didn’t want to feel anymore.  Last year was a great year in many ways but it was also a year of a lot of new changes. I found it difficult to find my footing and get into a groove where I was living into each part of myself fully and wholeheartedly. By the time I left work for Christmas vacation, I felt like I was running on fumes. My hope is that by living into the things I’ve identified, I can go from merely surviving to absolutely thriving.

This is also the first year in my memory where my New Year’s goals/resolutions/whatever-you-want-to-call-them did not include some kind of weight loss strategy, either outright setting goals for number of pounds I wanted to lose per month or cloaking my desire for my body to look a different way in some kind of “it’s not about weight loss it’s just about a healthy lifestyle” goal. One of the great things that came out of last year was that I started on my journey of body love and acceptance and deconstructing diet culture within myself. It all started with reading Project Body Love by Jessie Harrold, which I highly recommend to anyone struggling with how they think about and view their body or themselves. When you’ve been exposed to certain ideals of beauty all your life, it takes a long time to separate out all the parts of your psyche that have been influenced by that culture, either overtly or covertly. It takes a long time to fully accept and love yourself, no matter what you look like. I’m still on that path and I think I will be for a long time. However, I was able to appreciate how far I’ve come when I looked over my list of feelings and not one of them had to do with my weight. 

My 2020 Goals

Create more consistently

This may go without saying, but I want to spend a lot more time this year making and being creative. Because I love the beginning phase of projects the most, I spent a lot of time last year planning projects and thinking about making. Most of the time I actually spent on making, and on sewing projects in particular, was very rushed because I either needed the thing I was working on right away and couldn’t wait to do a good job or I just felt I had no time to take my time. 

For an upcoming graduation celebration I was part of this summer, I spent multiple days in a row working on two outfits – one for me, one for my mom who was graduating. Coming home every day to my sewing station and working away at these garments bit by bit was so rewarding to me. I was more “in” the process than I had ever been when going a week or weeks between sessions and the result was something I could really be proud of. 

This experience demonstrated to me how working away at something consistently, thereby creating a practice of it, can be so much more fulfilling than doing something only once in a while. Creating makes me feel good and makes me feel fully in myself. Yet, it’s the first thing I sacrifice when any other offer comes along. In fact, this is the case for most things that I do to nourish myself. By prioritizing my making practice, I hope to consequently prioritize myself and my self-care in 2020.

Make do

We all have aspirations about how we want to live into our values but to actually do so is another thing completely. In theory, I want to live as sustainably and as a consumption-free as possible. The reality is, however, that being a maker can actually be pretty consumptive and sometimes even wasteful. I got into making though partially because I saw it as a way to limit my consumption of fast fashion and reduce my ecological and social footprint. While my current practice is definitely more sustainable than purchasing from cheap retailers with shoddy labour practices, I know I can be doing a lot more and making a lot more out of what I already have. 

Right now, I have enough fabric and yarn in my stash to keep me busy for months and more books than I can read this year. I have plenty. I have enough. Whenever the temptation comes along to purchase something to provide me with a false sense of abundance, or because I tell myself I need it to be fully satisfied or prepared to tackle a project, I want to focus instead on what I already have, what can be repurposed or refashioned, or what can be borrowed or swapped. I want to find ways to make do. 

Making do looks like:

• Working on the projects I have the materials for first before buying anything new 
• Using scrap fabric or yarn to reduce waste in other parts of my life (beeswax wraps, anyone?)
• Researching work-arounds for various notions or tools 
• Reading books I own already, swapping books with friends, visiting the library 
• Gifting handmade or pre-loved items only 
  

Be you, unapologetically 

I’m not really an inspirational-quotes-on-a-background-of-clouds type person but I’m going to get cheesy with a quote that I have always loved. The quote is from Anais Nin, who wrote: “ And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”

What Anais was talking about was the pain of growth. It’s not an easy or linear process and it’s not without pain that we look at the darkest, weakest parts of ourselves. It can be even more painful to look at these parts and instead of rejecting them, approach them with love and compassion. I think that is how we can start to heal and start to accept ourselves fully, without judgement. That is how we can start to blossom. 

For a while, I did the necessary self-work to try connect with and start to live fully into who I am but I found I was only ever able to make it 80% of the way there. I knew what I wanted for myself and I knew how much I should value myself, my body, my ideas and thoughts, but I couldn’t quite feel it. There was always the voice in the back of my head, the voice of everything we have in our society that tells us that we need to be a certain way or look a certain way or buy a certain thing to be successful, to be loved, to be happy. I realized that that voice is the same voice that keeps people tight in their buds, that keeps them from growing. For me, that voice became too painful, too risky to listen to anymore. 

There is evidence everywhere that to do things as we have always done them, as that voice tells us to do, is no longer an option. It’s in how we treat our planet and how we treat each other. I know that I have a role to play in effecting change in myself and in the systems that aren’t working anymore or maybe never worked. To do that means challenging that voice and dismantling the power it holds over me. That is the energy I want to bring into 2020. 
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I’d love to hear about what you are working to cultivate for yourself in 2020. Leave a comment below!