Best Year Ever?

I’ll drink more water. Start there. Take your vitamins everyday. Sleep. Stretch. Read. Go outside. Maybe let that timed electric toothbrush make it the full 2 minutes. If you add all of that up does it mean I’m doing it right? I’ll turn it into a clickbait top 10 list, BUILDING THE NEW YOU. I’m fine with the current me (you), I’d like to just treat this person right.

I am starting this year in a completely different place. I have a new-ish job, that in the 6 months since I’ve started has turned into one of the more rewarding and stable aspects of my life, some of that is by virtue of comparison (to previous jobs, to other facets of my life) and some is because there is not enough I can say about working within a culture that rewards intellect and skill over being the appropriate shaped “peg” to jam into a corporate setting. Being freed to stop dressing up like someone else (a normal cubicle jockey) and being allowed to focus instead on the work itself rather than the personal drama of the workplace is so fundamentally liberating it pains me to think of going back to an environment that diverts so much energy to the bullshit of office politics over the actual work of contributing to the business. Oh, and working for assholes < — never again.

So as far as my professional outlook, 2017 is already kicking 2016’s ass (unless you count landing this job as a 2016 accomplishment and let’s just call that an even split.

I’m living solo for the first time in… forever. Roommate-less, legit solo. On the couch in my underwear, dishes piled in the sink if I want (ew, no), hey I should take that trash out, a-l-o-n-e.  I cut my hair differently.

I’ m still making pottery, three years running now. I think I’m finally in a place where I want to start pushing myself to try harder and more complex projects. Bigger, more intricate, more focused. I’ve considered upgrading my status in the studio from student to community artist but I’m going to hold off a bit longer while I wrangle with some financial items. (see the whole…  living alone thing – it’s a bit more expensive).

I had dinner with a friend a couple of weeks ago and she said that she’d read a “resolution” challenge that suggested you find three specific words to define your goals or motivations for the coming year and she’d thought about it and opted for one word instead. A part of my brain spent the remainder of that dinner ruminating on what that particular word would be for me. Everything I come up with sounds like a word a stupid college girl would get tattoo’d above her ass but it seems inescapable so fine, passion. That’s what I choose.

This year will be the best year ever, if only because it will be about both the things I want and don’t want. What I don’t want is to waste my time on anything that I don’t feel passion for. Hobbies, activities, people.  Life is achingly short, this is true if it lasts until you’re 25 or 50 or 100. If you’re doing it right, it’s never going to be enough time.

So yes, this is the year that I’m getting divorced and turning 40 and possibly having to sell my house and the first time I will likely owe the IRS money (fuck me). And I live alone and I’m starting over and I’ve spent the last three months running around not taking the best care of myself (exercise anyone?). But I refuse to let any of that bog me down. I have spent a lot of time in pain, doubting myself and wondering what idiot lived inside me that thought I had anything figured out, for the record I don’t, and neither do you.

But I started the year in a good place. I traveled to California to visit my best friend. I have a job I that I enjoy. I get to make art. I fell in love with someone. And so fuck the milestone birthday and the taxes and the reboot, the year will be good because that’s what I can control, how I deal with it, what I decide. So this year will be about music, and art, and travel, and books, and food, and the amazing people in my life, all the things that make me feel better about being alive, hideous-facist president, rapidly-dying cultural icons, total life-upheavel be damned.

This year I will (want to)…

Hike, go outside, walk, spend time in nature whenever I can.
Read. Put my phone down for fuck’s sake when I could have a book in it instead.
Travel  – near and far, whatever makes sense
Push myself at work so I feel better about what I’m contributing (classes, conferences, what else?)
Art – view, witness, create. Go to exhibits, plays, events. Make pottery, take more photos, find ways to combine my interests (getting my tattoo finished this year makes me feel really good about this too)
Music – shows, shows, shows.
Self-care – exercise, food, sanity, (also omg this is dumb but I’m going to start carrying a knife again). I’m good about these things but they’re the first to be neglected when routine is stretched. Find a new hobby (yoga studio?, get a bike?, start walking literally everywhere haha)