What are your 2024 resolutions?

Happy New Year! It is now 2024, although the only genuine change I’ve encountered so far is remembering to use a “four” instead of a “three” when I write the date. My New Year's Eve was spent working at the bar, instead of celebrating and watching the countdown, and if I’m honest, it wasn’t that bad. In normal years, I never really made a big deal of the new year’s arrival anyway. Sure, I watched the countdown, stayed up until midnight, but then I would just go to bed. This time at least I got to make some money. 

I had known beforehand what to expect at work, with the Vikings game (what a sad time) and then the fact that it was New Year’s Eve. Turns out, not a lot of people go to the bar for the countdown and change of the year. There were about ten people there when the clock switched; they all took their shots and kissed their loved ones and that was it - fairly relaxed in terms of the bar. 

Everyone always asks what everyone’s new year resolutions are. If someone asked me, I’d answer honestly with “I don’t know.” I’ve tried resolutions in the past, but like everyone else, they usually fell apart for me in about a month or two. In high school, it was always something like starting to work out, going to bed at a decent time or eating healthier foods. You know, the classics. But after a while, I would fall back into the same routine as before, too distracted by the things in my life to bother expending more energy on keeping resolutions I had perhaps already known would not be kept. 

So the past couple of years, I’ve given up on New Year’s resolutions because there are always things I want to work on. At least now and then, if there was something, sometimes, I thought I should take care of, I’d make the excuse to wait until New Years to start. I don’t want to do that anymore: I should be starting the goals right then and there, rather than waiting. I guess that means my “resolution” is not to bother with New Year’s resolutions. Out with the resolutions and in with the new goals I want, whenever I want to start them. As I’ve been working out more, the goals I have been working on are more personal and invisible to the outside world. Working on my fear of missing out and improving my self-confidence and self-image. You know, things like that. 

Not that I have a feeling this year will be any different. Each year I sit and watch in silent awe at what happens in the world around me. Hopefully next year can be more peaceful, but that is unlikely. After all, who knows what the future brings? I sure don’t. 

My Determination: “Hope is a fickle, dangerous thing. It steals your focus and aims it toward the possibilities instead of keeping it where it belongs - on the probabilities.” - Rebecca Yarros, Fourth Wing