Guess what time it is? Time for reflection, anticipation, regrets and promises. We are just days away from a new year, and for the first time, I am so ready to say good-bye to this current shit storm, and am looking forward to the next.
I have always given a big fat eye roll to all that were bidding adieu to the passing year. As if the calendar actually matters. As if the ticking of the clock and the dropping of the ball could wash away all the sins and injustices of our lives. We kiss our loved ones, breathe a sigh of relief because we survived the last 365 days, and we believe that when we wake up in the morning everything will be just fine!
And it totally will! We will wake up, rested, refreshed, reset, and move on with our day. And it totally won’t! Our problems don’t come and go at the stroke of midnight, we aren’t Cinderella, sigh.
This has been my most trying year. My life has been rocky, my marriage has been rocky, and my children have been rocky AF! People that I love have died. People that I love have almost died. My animals have died (not the ones that I could do without either, those chickens are indestructible.) Money sucks (I know, join the freaking club) and everything, literally everything is breaking. And even with all of that, I am still waiting for the OTHER shoe to drop.
It’s just been one of those years where everything that could go wrong, has.
In fact, if I could describe the feeling of this year with one word it would be…
Drowning.
I feel like the last 364 days have been me holding my breath, treading water, sinking, and kicking as hard as I can while gasping for air. And I really need a break. I need dry land. I need to kiss the ground of the beach after the battle for shore. I need sanctuary, a haven.
However, I know that no clock will bring me peace. I won’t breathe a sigh of relief at midnight. There is no magic number of days that I will have to endure this stage of my life before the pendulum finally starts to swing back up. I know that every day is just a continuous climb to the top of this mountain, and every day faces new challenges, and tomorrow may be even more difficult than today.
I had fully anticipated this last year to be spectacular. We were moving, we were going to grow and get closer as a family. We were going to have new adventures and new animals and all of our dreams were going to come true. That didn’t really happen, like, at all. The bad definitely out weighed the good.
But there was still good. There were moments this year that I wouldn’t trade for anything. There are people in my life this year that weren’t there before, people I didn’t even know that I missed that showed back up completely unannounced, people who I am just so thankful for. I am doing things that I never thought that I would, I am growing as a person and finding the things that ignite my heart and soul. So I am not going to write off the entire year and wish it never happened. I am going to be thankful that I had another year at all.
I am going to be thankful that I am still breathing. And at the end of the day, isn’t that all that matters? If we can just survive, isn’t that what counts? We aren’t promised a privileged life or even just a life without suffering. We aren’t even promised tomorrow. What we are promised is that we can handle our life. Even if that means that God must think we are a complete bad ass because the shit keeps on piling up.
WE. CAN. HANDLE. IT.
We have to believe that we are given the children that we have, because we can handle them. We have to believe that we have been given the marriage that we have, because we can work through the challenges. And we have to believe that when everything falls apart and we just can’t handle one more moment, that we have been given the people in our lives to help carry the weight for us.
There are people who have been placed in my life, that I didn’t want or choose, that would drop everything at a moments notice to help me if I needed them. And there are people that I would crawl over broken glass for if they so much as breathed that they needed my help.
I fully anticipate this next year to be amazing. Even though nothing is actually going to change overnight. I am going to wake up on January 1st with the same set of problems I went to bed with the night before, I am still going to have an amazing year.
I am going to climb an insane amount of mountains, and read a stupid amount of books. I am going to continue to work on my body and learn to love it at the same time. I am going to continue to do the amazing things that I am doing because I started them months ago. I didn’t wait until after the holidays were over, or for New Years Day, I made my choices and I started them THAT day, because that was the moment I had control of.
I won’t be making promises I can’t keep. I am not going to give up coffee, or start sleeping normal human hours. I am not going to try to do anything that makes me less me. I don’t need any “New Year, New Me” goals to make life harder than it actually is. I need to love and accept myself for the crazy, psychotic, amazing, complicated, disaster of a person that I am.
If I want to change something about myself or give up something or learn something new, I am not going to pull out my calendar and see when the right time will be that I can fit it into my messy life. I am going to just do it, then. In the moment I am in. And if I fail, I won’t wait until Monday or February or Summertime or after the holidays or next New Years to start again, I will just start again, then.
So lets grab our booze and toast to a New Year and know that it means nothing more than that we are still alive. Lets stop pretending that it will fix everything. Lets stop pretending, we will be better, our lives will be better, our bodies will be better. Lets stop pretending the clock has any power at all. Whatever power is out there belongs to us to take control of whenever and wherever we want.
Stop pretending!
Pretending is for children.
And children can’t drink.
CHEERS!!!!!!