Have a Good Enough New Year!

But I get the happy thing. The hopeful thing. We count down from midnight, a new year starts, and we all get a do-over. It's our chance to move forward with new determination, to renew our commitments to our goals, or to make new ones. Of course, I'm talking about:

At some point, I stopped making New Year's resolutions. I opted out. It felt like a setup. I've come to realize that I wasn't just being negative or ornery.

I softened a bit towards resolutions when my Mom mentioned the idea of just picking a word, like setting an intention for the year. I let the idea rattle around for a while, and then I chose:

Show up (two words, I know) resonated for me. It felt straightforward and powerful. Show up like being present, in this moment. Show up like, getting somewhere. Show up on time-ish.

I started to think of it as a battle cry, not just my word(s) for 2017.

OK. I've got my word(s): SHOW UP. I broke it down: 

I used to always push push push myself to show up for other people, which made it hard to understand what I needed to be well. 

If I don't show up for my alone time, I get worn out and not surprisingly, start to resist going back out into the world even more. A smart and perceptive friend of mine once responded my angst about not being able to get off my couch and do everything I expected myself to do by asking me: "Is that you can't get off the couch, or that you don't want to? Those are two different things."  I'd never given myself the space to consider that question.

Now I try to be more curious and not get all whacked out judgemental when I feel resistance to heading out into the world, especially when there are lots people wherever I'm trying to go. So that's good. But the fact remains that most of my life occurs out in the wider world. 

Sometimes, I think my current resistance to showing up is all tangled with my struggles with severe depression, even though it's been years since I've been sick.

Illustrations by Emily Ensminger, from "The Three of Us," part of Bipolar Girl Rules the World.

I'm definitely making progress with understanding why the showing up thing is so hard. And understanding why something happens is nice and can be useful, but I can't wait around until everything make sense to get done what I want to do in the world. 

SO WHAT WORKS?

I think I stopped with the New Year's resolutions because I wasn't able to imagine my desire to change rooted in something other than shame and self-contempt. And I felt stuck, like there was no way to move forward without dragging myself back under.

In a rack on the end of one of the aisles, I saw this magazine cover: