Phew, so 2020 is finally over, thank goodness. For me, like I think for a lot of people, it was both a time in which I did a lot of reevaluating, and a time when I felt stuck.
Here’s what I mean. I was in serious denial for like the first four months of the pandemic. I had already booked several international trips for the year. I was planning to study abroad over the summer. And it wasn’t until like August that I really came to terms with the fact that those things just weren’t going to happen. After the denial came the depression, and I had a really low few months when I just felt directionless. I felt the desire to move on to a new phase of my life, but totally incapable of making any changes.
I’m not going to pretend I’m totally past that, but I have a lot of hope for this new year. Life is obviously not going back to normal just yet, but I think the worst is behind us, and I’m choosing to be optimistic about this year (even if it’s possibly a naïve optimism).
And one of the things I want to do this year is practice a little more self-reflection, which is why I’m starting this new blog.
Disclaimer: I suck at blogging.
My first attempt at blogging was back in 2016 when I tried to write a blog about my experiences studying abroad my sophomore year of college. (Huh, I wonder if that website is still out there somewhere…) But I was always too busy having fun to write about anything, so that didn’t really work out.
Then I tried starting a blog about my corgi, Bingley, when we got her as a puppy. I think I wrote one post on that blog and never came back to it. Dog-blogging just wasn’t my thing.
My most successful attempt at blogging was when I was working as a travel agent, and I started a travel blog to try to attract clients. The site looked awesome, but I never could figure out how to monetize it, and I was bad at the business part of blogging. I didn’t bother to learn about search engine optimization or google analytics. I just wrote stuff sometimes and put it out there. I was also really bad about posting consistently.
Because here’s the thing, I’m a good writer, but I’m bad at the business of blogging. Good bloggers are writing for an audience. I wrote for myself. It was my digital scrapbook, and I never put much effort into making my blog more than that.
So, here I am, it’s 2021, and I’m starting a new blog. But here’s the thing. This isn’t a business. It’s my online journal. I’m going to write about whatever I feel like whenever I feel like and figure out some other way to make money.
I thought I’d start off with a post about my goals for 2021. I’m definitely a goal-oriented person. I love setting goals and making plans. But Covid is definitely still a thing right now, and I can’t make goals and plans quite the same way I would in a normal year. It’s hard to know what the year will look like, which continues to be a source of anxiety and stress. But it’s fine. I just have to set different kinds of goals, ones that don’t depend on whether or not I’m allowed to leave my house in the foreseeable future. (Wow, I didn’t mean to be so dramatic there.)
My biggest goal for 2021 is to finish the first draft of my novel. In all the time I spent at home last year, I finally got around to starting a novel and actually making progress. Like my many failed attempts at blogging, I’ve had many failed attempts at writing fiction. I will have an idea, write the first four pages, and then never come back. This time, though, I’ve stuck it out. I’m currently around 15,000 words in, and I want to finish the first draft by the end of the year.
In line with the above goal, I want to figure out my career. After graduating with a degree in English literature three years ago, I haven’t been able to find a career. I’ve been working. In fact, I’ve done a lot of things since graduating, many of them all at the same time. But I’m tired of just working a bunch of different jobs. I want to throw myself whole-heartedly into one thing, and I want that thing to be something I can be passionate about for many years.
The main qualifiers are 1.) I want to do something creative. I’m happiest when I’m being creative. 2.) I want to be my own boss. I like setting my own hours and working when I feel like it. And 3.) I want to work from home.
Being a novelist ticks all those boxes, and it also just so happens to be the career I’ve always wanted since I was about nine. But I’ve held back from devoting myself entirely to writing because it’s not a guaranteed thing. I might not get published. I might not make any money. Up until now, I’ve wanted something to fall back on, in case the writing thing doesn’t work out. But I don’t think I’m ever going to make it as a writer if I have to sacrifice so much time to my day job. So by the end of this year, I want to make a serious attempt at making writing my career.
I can’t quit my job just yet because one of my jobs is teaching a couple of third graders, and it doesn’t seem fair to just leave them part-way through the school year. I also need to figure out the money thing…
Another big goal I have this year is self care. My mental health was not great for most of 2020. And I’m not totally over that yet. But I’ve realized how important it is to be gracious with myself and to make time to take care of my mental and physical health instead of just concentrating on being productive. To me, self care looks like more yoga, being conscious about my meals, going for lots of walks, spending time on my hobbies, and not checking the news. Our culture says that if you’re not constantly moving forward, you’ll get left behind. But for me to really take care of myself, I think I need to just be okay with getting left behind a bit. There will be other opportunities for me to work really hard and do whatever it takes to make things happen for myself, but it’s not worth sacrificing my well-being. If I need to take this year (or however long) to focus on taking care of myself, that’s more than okay.
It feels a little bit like cheating to say that self care is one of my goals, but I’m going to try not to let “self care” become an excuse for being lazy. I still want to be intentional with how I use my time, just to recognize that using my time meaningfully and beneficially doesn’t mean spending every waking moment working.
2021 is off to a bit of a slow start so far. I was hoping the pandemic would be over by now, but unfortunately, Covid didn’t get the memo that it was supposed to magically disappear when the calendar switched over. But having a different type of year doesn’t mean it will be a bad year, just that I might need to set different types of goals and have set different expectations for myself.
So here’s to accomplishing all my goals for 2021. Hopefully, the world will get back to normal sooner than later.
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