One of the suggestions for the New Year, New You challenge is to lay out your goals for the next year. I've been thinking about it for a couple of days now and I think I can outline my goals for 2012.
- Health - There are many, many aspects of this I can't control, especially since I don't have insurance at the moment, but I need to take that as a challenge to do what I can: Eat more healthily, more often. Get back into regular meditation. Exercise more. This is very much the "traditional" New Year's Resolution, so I need to boil it down into very specific, checkbox goals that I can accomplish. I'll probably do that using Health Month starting in January.
- Work - This is related to the insurance issue above. Right now I'm working a phone monkey job. There are some fun perks, but it's definitely not a career, it's just a placeholder to get my bills covered. What I need to do is three-fold: Magic to bring me the right opportunities, figure out my weak spots so I can take advantage of the right opportunity, and, in the long term, figure out what I do actually want to do for the rest of my life.
- Mental - I made some good progress on magical thinking (the bad kind) in 2011, fighting back from the health-related setbacks from the year before. I need to do more to unpack the baggage from my past relationships, though, and get to the root causes instead of just managing the anxiety and the obsessive thoughts on the surface. This also ties back into health, because managing my depressive tendencies is easier when I'm taking care of myself. This is more delicate work, because I can't really do anything that might cause me to be dysfunctional for more than a day or two, when my days off are scheduled, so I can only take one small thing apart at a time. One thing at a time will still get me there, though.
- Creative - My creative output was both a high and a low in 2011. I've written over 200,000 words this year according to my tracker, which is a new personal best in the four years I've been counting. I also learned welding and blacksmithing and really enjoyed doing metalwork and sculpture. However, moving put the lid on everything creative - I brought my welding gear, but I haven't tracked down a space to work yet. (I know there's one relatively near me. I just haven't gotten myself there.) I gave away my easel and most of my art supplies because I hadn't painted in about eight months and didn't have room to move it or my paintings, and I haven't touched the watercolours or papercollage supplies since I got here either. I've barely written in the months since moving either, ending up with my worst showing in NaNoWriMo in years. Some of that is due to work schedules and commuting, but some of it is just that I need to get back in the habit of doing something creative every day. This is yet another thing that's good for my mental health, too.
- Magical - My magical goals are pretty simple. Like I wrote yesterday, I let myself get separated from the things that worked for me because I didn't want to look immature, non-serious or eclectic. It doesn't matter what other people think, though. All that matters in magic is what works, and I need to re-learn that.
So right now those are very broad goals. I'll probably take a few days and break them all down into very simple goals to aim for, and go from there.