New Year's resolutions feel like a thing of the past. Just like people are giving up tobacco and meat at a rapid pace, it seems like people have started to think that New Year's resolutions are a force of evil more than anything else. I'm inclined to agree - I don't believe in resolutions or adding unnecessary stress and pressure. That said, I strongly believe in self-awareness and self-improvement, and most of my 2018 goals relate to this in particular. Here are three of my main goals for 2018.
Grow where you are
I live with a permanent state of wanderlust. I moved often as a child, and as soon as I finished sixth form I went on an eight year craze of moving countries and continents once a year. It was great, and exhausting. I've now lived in the same city and done the same job for 18 months and the itch has rarely been more real. I glance at Berlin, NYC, Copenhagen, even Stockholm. I look at my cat and wonder if I can fly him across the Atlantic. Yet, something's holding me back. The beauty of moving countries often is that you get bursts of intensity that become small chapters of your life. I lived the klub kid life in Berlin, the student life in Wales, the diplomat life in Uganda and the startup life in London. But not moving countries once a year enables you to grow in a different way. It gives you the chance to get to know yourself when you're not caught up in a recent or approaching move. It gives you the wonderful opportunity to grow where you are.
What does growing where you are look like? Exploring your city and its surroundings, joining (or setting up) a book club, developing an events calendar, pursuing side projects, developing D&M relationships, establishing ambitious goals and finding an accountability partner to help you reach them. Finding the quirky and exciting things about wherever you might be, and enjoying them to the fullest. And so on.
Growing where I am. Here with friend, colleague and collaborator Emilio.
Reminder to self.
We should all be Mirandas
We have a lot to thank SATC for, but we can probably all agree that Miranda is the only character to pass any form of sanity test, from a feminist perspective or otherwise. Not once did she miss the opportunity to stand up for herself or her mates, nor did she avoid challenging stuff like socio-economic class in contemporary America, or societal norms around women and babies / men / mortgages. And something I personally admire, she fucked people off by telling them that "he's just not that into you" when he clearly wasn't. For some reason people still don't seem to understand when this is true in their own lives.
We can all be more Miranda-y. In my case it's not keeping my mouth shut when my racist relatives go off on a tirade. It's making the committed effort to encourage women to get out there, particularly those younger than me. It's calling out people who ask me if I'm concerned about my biological clock (yes, apparently people do ask this - I'm just as baffled as you). It's seemingly small things like making sure we have a roughly equal number of men and women in the content we publish at work, whether through earned or owned media. It's calling out BS as and when you see it, and making a concerted effort to not be part of it.
‘”Why the fuck not me?” should be your motto’
The older I get, the more I realise how far I've come with this. I think it's easy to look back at your achievements and say "ah, that was nothing", which is why I try to remember what my thoughts were prior to said achievement. Graduating from university is one such thing - loads of people do it, but as the first person in my family to finish high school, it was never a given I was even going to enrol. Lacking a sense of entitlement turned out to be a huge source of discipline and dedication at uni - but the flip side is that the same lack of entitlement runs the risk of throwing you into destructive cycles of self doubt. Self doubt isn't a bad thing per se - doubt yourself all you want, as long as it doesn't stop you from doing the stuff you want. Asking yourself "why the fuck not you?" might help you (and me) to avoid not doing stuff just because of self doubt.