on 2021 and the year to come.

New Year might be my favorite holiday. It’s overshadowed by Christmas and under-appreciated by people who don’t have the patience and dedication for resolutions, but it’s one of the best holidays because it’s always about personal growth and reflection. It’s a natural stopping point where you can look back on the last twelve months and ask yourself how you’re doing. As someone who has a difficult time with feelings and taking care of myself and being present, it’s the perfect opportunity for me to slow down and just be. It forces me to reflect on where I’ve been and how I’m doing and take the time to think about where I want to go next.

I know everyone says that January 1st is just another date on the calendar, that a single day doesn’t change your life. You can change your life whenever you want! On any old Tuesday! Why do you need a new year to make a new life? And while I understand that sentiment, that’s just not the kind of person I am. I do things cold-turkey. I need a special holiday to force myself to make changes. Everybody has their crutch, and mine just happens to be the date the calendar turns over.

In the past, I’ve had a number of ambitious resolutions. One year I gave up pop and sugary drinks and only drank water. Another year I gave up added sugar. I’ve had a “read 100 books” resolution and “cook 52 recipes” resolution. I’ve done a number of iterations in attempts to turn myself into the very best version of myself, and currently, I still don’t feel good enough. I use resolutions not to shame myself or to strive for perfection, but more to give myself the kick in the pants to try something new and challenge myself to live life in a way that I haven’t yet done. And sure, I don’t always read 100 books in a year and now I do drink pop and eat added sugar, but knowing that for a whole year I was able to live in this way gives me the courage and willpower to embrace some of those habits long-term. Now I’m not afraid to try a new recipe or read audiobooks on 2x speed or go to a yoga class. I don’t have to make a whole resolution to keep up those habits because I’ve experienced them enough to implement them in my daily life.

Going into 2022, I’m trying something different. Which is to say, I don’t really have an official resolution. I have some goals, some places in my life I’d like to focus on, but I don’t have a concrete challenge. In fact, this year my challenge is to take care of myself. A wild concept, I know. What I noticed most in 2021 is that while I did have a lot of difficult months, my biggest problem is that through all the grief and struggle and stress, I have somehow lost the ability to take care of my body and my mind. Somewhere along the way I started believing it was okay to eat a single meal in a day. I stopped grocery shopping. I no longer read books or watch TV or write stories. True, I do spend a lot of time exercising at the rock climbing gym, but I don’t actually take care of myself. I don’t drink water, I don’t floss, I don’t even stretch my muscles properly before I work out. All of which will catch up to me if I’m not careful.

In the past twelve months I’ve been in survival mode. It’s the way I used to exist in college when it was finals week and I just had to get through a few more days of papers and studying and tests and then if I just made it to break I could eat and sleep and take a chance to collect myself. To clean my room, to go to the store, to take stock of where I’m at. And if I’m being honest, I have been stuck in that place since…January. And sure, my survival has looked different since then. Some months I was struggling financially. Some months I dealt with a lot of grief. Some months I was numbing myself out by hanging out with friends or working too much or obsessively reading or going to rock climbing five days a week. Every month my coping has looked different, but at the end of the day it has only been a chance for me to put off the real work that needs to be done. The real self-care that comes with burn out. I keep expecting there to be The Break. The moment where time stops and I can rest and people stop expecting things of me. But the truth is, life doesn’t stop. When you’re an adult, the world will always expect things from you. You don’t get a month to rest or relax or start over. And therefore, in the last twelve months, I’ve never really given myself a chance to regroup.

I cannot be the best version of myself if I don’t actually stop to take care of my needs.

(Tough words for a Type Five to hear, but this is where we’re at.)

For better or for worse, 2021 has been all about my relationships. While I’ve been struggling in my own brain, I have also spent a majority of my year thinking about other people. My friends, primarily, but also my family and my co-workers. How do I support someone who’s lost the love of their life? How do I make my friends feel listened to and cared for? How do I set boundaries and navigate the boundaries of others? I think I’ve talked more in the last year than I have in the last four years combined, and that’s all because of the people I’ve been spending my time with. I’ve learned a lot about friendship and how to care for other people, and I’ve also learned a lot about myself and what I’m looking for out of the relationships in my life. I’ve learned how to love people and how I myself want to be loved. It’s bizarre because I spent most of 2020 terrified that once we came out of lock down I wouldn’t have the energy to spend time socializing, but now I’m the type of person who must spend time with her friends at all costs.

As a Type Five, part of my own personal journey has been navigating a fine line between being selfish and being self-oriented. One of my greatest fears in life (besides being incompetent) is that I’m spending too much time focused on myself. That I don’t care enough for others. That someone who’s in a relationship with me feels like I don’t care about them enough. And I’ve spent a lot of this year worried that I am too focused on myself. But the truth of the matter is, I have not been prioritizing myself in the ways that matter. So much of 2021 has been about me taking care of other people that I haven’t had a chance (or maybe I haven’t actually wanted) to look in the mirror and ask myself how I’m doing. I’ve spent so long numbing myself, avoiding myself, throwing myself into my relationships with everyone except my reflection because I’m afraid of who I’ll see in the mirror. If I look closely enough I’ll see a girl who doesn’t eat enough, who isn’t taking care of herself, who doesn’t budget or keep her living space clean, someone who’s not processing her grief and not allowing herself the space to feel things fully. She doesn’t know where she’s going in her career, she’s afraid to create art, she’s unsure how she’ll ever find her way back to the person she used to be before a global pandemic…but more than anything, she’s terrified that the success and ambition she had in her early twenties has disappeared in her late twenties.

I think what I’m learning as I get closer and closer to 27 is that part of the self-care I need to implement in my life at the moment is knowing when to let things go. Part of the joy of becoming someone new in 2021, of starting new hobbies and making new friends and working a new job, is that it has all forced me to make space in my life. I’ve allowed myself to try new things and it’s made me wonder what parts of my life are actually necessary. What things actually bring me joy? What do I want to prioritize? What things have been taking up space that I haven’t allowed myself to let go of? I spent a long time building myself a life that has all but been destroyed by COVID, and now I have to pick up the pieces and see what still fits. Maybe I missed my chance to do full time freelance photography. Maybe I don’t have the drive to be an influencer anymore. Maybe I have to accept that some of my relationships no longer fit in with the person I am today.

There is grief with these realizations. There are parts of my life I’m pruning, people I’ve hurt and dreams I have to give up on. And it’s painful because we can never go back. A lot of these things were taken out of my hands without my consent, without my noticing until it was too late. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t for the best. That doesn’t mean there aren’t better things waiting in the wings. Because while 2021 was painful and challenging and difficult and stressful…it also has been one of the most joyful years of my entire life. And it’s hard to balance the grief with the joy, to let the two intermingle when there’s so much pain linking the two together. But the joy has to out-weigh the grief or else what’s the point?

I’m walking out of this year feeling more blessed than I have in a long time. I’m not exactly where I want to be — mainly in my career/professional life — but I’m with people who really truly care about me. I have so much to be thankful for and I have memories to get me through the months ahead that will inevitably challenge me. This year a lot of my highlights look less like accomplishments or achieved resolutions and more like scenes out of a movie. Sure, I did read 100 books in six months, but I also spent a lot of time taking drives with friends. Yes, I did lose over 17 pounds, but I spent Christmas watching all the High School Musical movies with my co-workers. Sure, I can climb a 5.10+ rock wall, but I pulled my first all-nighter and went camping and saw my cousin get married and discovered that I have a favorite bar and started drinking Whiskey Cokes and saw salamanders in the wild and danced to One Direction in a crowd and visited friends in Wisconsin and went to concerts and kept two plants alive and went downtown for the fourth of July and so many other magical moments that I can’t even write them down. For once in my adult life I feel like I’m participating in reality more than fiction and that thrills me. In a year that’s been so riddled with depression and darkness, I finally want to be alive. And that’s a bigger accomplishment than any of my other resolutions.

All of this is to say that I’m learning how to be a person. I’m learning how to live. And what I need from 2022 is a chance to reset. To reboot my systems. To clean out the gunk and remember what it means to take care of myself. Because if I’m going to live long enough to hike in Utah or see Elton John in concert or go back to New York City, I have to find some new normal. I can’t keep living in survival mode for another twelve months. To quote Switchfoot, I wanna thrive not just survive.

I don’t really know what this looks like. I’ve done the resolutions about eating healthy or getting fit or whatnot, but this isn’t about that necessarily. It’s about not putting things off. It’s about taking the time to care. It’s about prioritizing my safety and sanity instead of giving myself the easy way out. Because it’s so easy to give up. I do it every day. What’s more challenging is caring. And trying. And working harder.