reflections for the start of another year

and why i am not setting any goals for myself

I spent my twenties hating the new year celebrations. I went from believing I had to attend the most exciting, booze-fuelled extravaganza for it to mean anything, to doing the complete opposite, sitting on my couch with my dog, a movie and in bed before ten o’clock. I have always been one for extremes.

As I move my way deeper into my thirties, I have realised that I don’t have to wear a badge saying I love or loathe this time of year. My feelings about it can sit somewhere in the middle. This year, I was lucky enough to bring in the new year with a view of the ocean, and then later, a show of fireworks that I could view from the comfort of my own balcony with J. It did feel a little bit lonely, as it’s been just the two of us for quite some time and I’ve spent a lot of time cooped up inside because of my illness. But I accepted it for what it was and was able to enjoy the moment that I was gifted.

Acceptance is something that I am trying really hard to work on right now. I feel as though we spend our twenties rallying against acceptance. We fight things that are revealed about our identities because it is too shameful/difficult to admit that we may have got some things wrong about ourselves. We fight leaving a job we no longer enjoy, or that is detrimental to us, because it is too painful to admit that all the hard work and money we poured into getting to that point might not have paid off in the way we thought it would. We stay in relationships that aren’t good for us because the big 3-0 is looming around the corner and that is when we think shit needs to get real, that we need to start hitting all those milestones our culture has a great way of making us feel our life would be less-than without- property, marriage, kids, promotions. We are told that those are the signs that show people we have our stuff figured out, that we are doing life right.

I’ve known for a while that I don’t need to achieve all these things in order for my life to have meaning (although knowing these things and actually believing them to your core are two very different things). However, the last few years have been incredibly difficult for me in part because I have refused to accept that my life has not gone the way that I expected it to go. The job that I worked so hard at and loved so much was not sustainable for me. And instead of getting better when I left it, which I thought was a given, I got sicker. Things that I thought would bring some sort of clarity to my life, like my road-trip to Queensland, a year off working, or a solid romantic relationship, have not done so. I feel even more confused about where I want my life to go. With every step I have taken, every journey of ‘self-discovery’ I have gone on over the past two years, I feel as though I am no closer to working out what makes me me.

This, I thought to myself, is not how it was meant to go! Change is meant to be hard, I knew that, but what I expected was that the difficult period of change would be followed by more clarity. For the first time in my life I am looking in the mirror and realising I have very little idea of who I am and what I want for my life. How do I even begin to make decisions for myself when the things that are meant to guide those decisions are so unclear to me? This is something that I have been deeply struggling with of late and it keeps me up at night. I do not mean to sound ungrateful. There are so many things in my life that I have to be thankful for and I know that I have had a lot of luck. But it is truly terrifying for me not knowing what you will or will not be capable of doing each day and whether the decisions I am making are within my best interests.

I have now reached a point that I know millions have before me. I have been thrashing about, madly swimming against the current and hoping to get somewhere. But I am tired. So the best option appears to be to give in and let the current take me wherever it wants to. This brings me to the whole point of why I wanted to right this. This year, I am not setting any goals for myself.

Photo by Christian Crocker on Unsplash

This is for two reasons. Firstly, goal-setting is a particularly fraught process when you are a perfectionist. As clinical psychologist and perfectionism expert Jennifer Kemp explains in her (free!) resource ‘Effective Goal Setting for Perfectionist’, perfectionists have a tendency to set goals that require you to ‘leap to the finish without any messiness in between’, try to control the uncontrollable, or ‘are hard to put into action because they do not tell you what to do’. I am definitely guilty of all of these things. And despite being aware of these tendencies now, I don’t think I’m in the right frame of mind to actively work against them at this moment.

Secondly, having set goals can be demoralising in times of ill health. Last week I set myself the goal of going for a beach swim each day (on the advice of my doctor- I might add). After my first swim I returned home and was in the worst shape I’ve been in for a while, bed ridden for the remainder of the day and in a lot of pain. It was scary how badly my body reacted to something that was meant to be helpful. The worst part though was how much I beat up on myself for having such a severe reaction to something I was easily able to do a few weeks ago. It felt timely when one of my favourite writers and chronic-illness sufferers, Natasha Lipman, released a new newsletter in which she wrote the following about her hesitancy to set long-term goals for herself:

Having specific long-term goals, dreams, aspirations often led to huge feelings of sadness and loss when I was inevitably too unwell to turn them into reality. Grand plans just never really fit with the fluctuating nature of my health - or my own nature of “push through to make things happen” that accompanied these goals (inevitably ending in a worsening of my symptoms).

The ‘pushing through to make things happen’ is something I have done time and time again, and is likely what led to me getting to this point. The crushing disappointment of not being able to achieve what you set out to, especially when these things seem so easy for other people, is also a familiar feeling.

So, with all that in mind, I’ve decided goals are out for now. What is in instead are intentions. Once again, a favourite Substack creator came to the rescue with a strategy that resonated with me. After struggling with some of the same issues that I have around long-term goal setting, Katie Hawkins-Gaar (writer of My Sweet Dumb Brain) and her editor, Becca, decided on the following:

Instead of naming big, ambitious, long-term goals for a year that would undoubtedly be full of twists and turns out of our control, we decided to set smaller, more manageable weekly intentions.

‘Smaller’ and ‘manageable’ are definitely two concepts that I need more of in my life right now. Even better, they provided a handy Google Doc that was already set up for use, with each week of the year set out with a space for both your chosen intention for the week and a space to reflect on how it went when the week has passed (you can get that here if you are a paid subscriber to Katie’s newsletter). I love semantics, and there is something about the word ‘intentions’ that seems far less daunting than the word ‘goals’. They are things that I intend to do, not something I am working towards. If I can’t see through my intention, or it does not have the desired result, then I simply reflect on why and recalibrate for the next week. It doesn’t feel like as much of a failure.

I think (hope!) that this process will be a good one for helping me strengthen my acceptance muscle. There are SO many things I would like to work on accepting this year: my health, my limitations, my lack of control over things in my life, what other people do or say. But I now know that this will take time, that I need to pace myself, and accept that the messiness of life means things rarely go to plan.

Here’s to intentions!

Lou x

P.S. If this sounds like something that appeals to you, there is a ‘buddy’s’ intention document where you work as a pair to keep each other accountable (to your separate intentions and reflections. If you’re interested in doing this alongside me, please reach out! I definitely do better with accountability.