The first day of a new year always has such an air of possibility. Of course, I also feel this way in September (new school year), late October (Samhain, the end/beginning of a cyclical year), and spring. Time is a cycle and a construct, and any opportunity to reflect seems like a good thing.
I don’t do resolutions. Resolutions are so black-and-white; there’s exactly one way to succeed and a million ways to fail. I know about the research that says people who set goals are more likely to reach them (which, doesn’t that seem like a tautology?), but one of the consequences and benefits of chronic illness is learning just how much we aren’t in control of and finding ways to be at peace with that fact.
Instead, I think about priorities. What do I want to privilege this year, in the endless ocean of things I could be doing?
The first is my writing. For a very long time, I planned to get to my writing when everything else was done and I had time. Spoiler alert: that never happened. Housework is endless, there are always things I want to do, and my health is variable. Beginning in September last year, I started deliberately prioritizing writing time, and it actually worked — better yet, I discovered that I love it. It’s not easy, but I love it. It feeds me in ways I can’t yet articulate. Now, my stairs currently have enough cat fur on them to make another cat, and the only reason the main floor has been vacuumed lately is that my mother gifted us a robot vacuum, but writing has happened.
The second follows on the first. It is deeply calming to me when I have a neat, tidy, reasonably clean living space. We both work from home, so we’re both here basically 24/7, which means both that it doesn’t take much for things to tip over into cluttered and that there’s no escaping it when it happens. There’s no office to run away to. And yet, I also know that I have to pace myself with the cleaning, because I can easily overdo it. So I want to create a routine in which I do one or two small things every day, and that adds up to things being tidy and clean. I know some of this will improve as the days get longer, because while I love the darkness, I am sunlight-activated. But this is something I want to focus on, knowing that some weeks will be better than others.
Finally, my health. My naturopath is amazing, and we’ve found some things that make a difference, but I also need to do three things: stop eating gluten, stop eating dairy, and find a gentle, low-key way to get some exercise without going beyond my energy envelope. The gluten and dairy bits, although I’ve done them before, are hard as fuck. It’s just so inconvenient, and when you don’t have enough energy to go around, convenience matters. But I know that my body is happier when it isn’t burdened by those things (and let me be clear — I’m not saying anything about whether those are good or bad for your body; I just know from experience what mine really appreciates). It’s a catch-22. Eating like that requires energy, but to get energy I need to eat like that. It’s the kind of thing that would benefit from someone who would cook for me for, like, two weeks or a month, just to get the ball rolling. Alas, I have to do it myself. And like the housework, it’s not going to be perfect. But it matters.
Those are my priorities for my personal, small life. In a global sense, I hope 2020 is the year we turn away from fascism, get serious about climate change on a global scale, find better ways to distribute wealth, affirm and enact the human rights of all persons, dismantle white supremacy, end sexism and ableism and homophobia and cis-sexism and all the other ways we create hierarchies, and find the political will to solve homelessness. There’s a lot to do. May 2020 move us towards goodness.
