I’m not big on making New Years’ resolutions.
In my experience, they last until about February when real life comes knocking and things get busy again, leaving the resolutions tucked away in a drawer forgotten and unresolved for another year.
Over the past year, I have been pontificating about what has changed since I moved back home after college. When I think back to the way I used to be, and I can never quite figure out what it was that was missing. Sure, now I have a full-time job and can actually save some money instead of throwing it all to rent, but there’s something about my life — myself — that has changed.
This past week, I finally figured it out.
When I was younger, I prided myself on organization. I didn’t have the organizational skills in the way that you might think. There was no mistaking me for someone with severe OCD; if you looked at my room and my workspace, you would find that chaos reigned supreme. It was an organized chaos, but nothing was ever in its proper place.
No, my organizational skills came in the form of having my personal life organized. Color coordinated notebooks, folders and highlighters placed according to class, work and leisure schedules planned out to nearly every half hour, and a television premiere and viewing schedule that would make even the most dedicated fan say, “Okay, maybe you’re taking things a little too far.”
Once I left Gainesville and started teaching, that organization and routine went out the window. I was thrust into an uncanny world, familiar yet slightly altered, like awakening in the dream version of my daily life. There was no time for color coordination; no time for schedules; no time for television. There was simply a mandate: teach. My focus shifted to my career, and everything else fell behind.
With this in mind, I’m breaking my no resolutions rule to make just one.
This year, I’m resolving to be more consistent in my posts on this blog. I pride myself on being the type of person that only says something when there’s something worth saying instead of clogging up the internet with yet another blog that simply slaps together some sort of list or clickbait nonsense just to stay relevant. I don’t want to be that blogger, and I won’t be that blogger. Instead, my pledge to myself is to regain some of that routine that I have been lacking over the past three years and post at least once a week. That doesn’t mean that I’ll wait until that one post to discuss anything that is worth discussing, but I want to go back to that sense of normalcy that has been missing from my life these past three years.
From one schedule fiend to another, Happy New Year! And, here’s hoping that 2018 is the polar opposite of 2017 — a year filled with love instead of hate, laughter instead of screams, happiness instead of anger, and compassion instead of cruelty.
Alyssa Explains It All 