Hello, This is Me....

Every year just before Christmas when the new year is looming I start thinking about what I want to accomplish during the next year and I write those goals down.  Last year I wanted to get into better physical shape, which included losing some weight and learning how to eat better and I was successful with that goal.

The other BIG goal I had last year was to be more real.  I don't know about you, but putting the "real me" out there has been difficult to say the least.  For some reason or another I started tempering who I am.  I don't know if that is something you can relate to or not but it was where I found myself, and I had been doing it for a very long time.  Last fall I started having a heaviness on my chest, constant jitters, not sleeping, that sort of thing.  My mom thought I was going through a midlife crisis. I though maybe my thyroid medication was off.  But, when you aren't sleeping at night you tend to do a whole lot of thinking, and some of what I thought about had to do with life dreams and being real.  I realized that somewhere along the line I stopped living the life I was born to live and started living the life I thought was expected of me.  And I got lost in the shuffle and ended up feeling trapped.

So, last year I decided to let myself out of the box I had put myself in.  And you know what?  Most of the time it feels great.  There are days when I still want to stifle who I am because I am afraid that if someone truly knows me, and all the little quirks that make me, they won't like me... But, I'm working on it.  And I am trying to remember that if they don't like who I truly am then they really aren't worth wasting my time on.  Because there are people who love all of me, quirks included, and those are the people that I want in my life. They are the people that won't ditch out when things get hard or messy.

I made a new list of goals for this year.  Some of them are big, life experience sort of goals.  Others are more along the lines of the "get the basement cleaned and organized" sort.  They are all written down in a journal and also kept on my phone.  I look at them often and that helps me to stay on track and working towards them every day, sometimes in big ways and other times by taking a small step.  But each step is one step taken.... one moment lived.... one touch of success....