Happy new year, everybody. It’s been quite the journey in the last year. I was left to fend for myself mentally after the clinic I was dealing with failed to return my enquiries because of medication and mental health concerns, leading me to drop them as a provider. It’s meant that my ADHD medication supply was halted. I’ve been fortunate enough to learn some stuff over the year I had the medication since diagnosis to be able to start to implement some strategies for dealing with it. One such thing was discovering the Bullet Journal, which was a huge help in starting to sort my day-to-day life. It’s also helped to expand into some other areas – such as tracking certain habits, keeping a reading log, etc. Bullet journaling was the biggest impact for me personally in 2022.
Other things came to pass too – my health has deteriorated, namely joint issues and plantar fasciitis, which I am still battling. I do need to lose some weight as I’ve put on quite a bit, no doubt the weight gain was exacerbated more by not actually being able to do the physical movement I was doing before. Hopefully this year I can get on top of it – both the joint problems (I’m seeing a GP who specialises in this sort of thing mid-Jan), and getting my weight under control. By far the easiest technique I discovered in 2022 was Alternate Day Fasting, which I actually found surprisingly easy to do. So that’s my game plan for 2023 – restart the ADF, see the GP and get myself mobile again, somehow.
Obviously in the past I’ve never been a huge New Year resolutions person – many times in my teens I would commit to some program of self-improvement, dive into it 150%, burn out after a week. This year, I’m actually doing some form of resolutions, but not in the way I would have done in the past. Instead I looked at what I would like to achieve, broke it down into some smaller goals, figured out some delayed starts to it, and went from there. I have goals for 2023:
- Lose weight – as mentioned, I’m going to start ADF again, and go from there. I’ve got a target weight for the end of the year, and how I get there is pretty flexible. Doing ADF isn’t a huge burden for me, and because money doesn’t go as far as it used to, it’ll actually be helping my bank balance too. Speaking of which:
- Clear some minor debts. I have some minor debts, smaller finance payments which I’d like to clear. Granted, two of those will naturally clear this year anyway, and I have a larger one I’d like to tackle. I’ve been working hard on removing debt from my life, and I’ve got plans to deal with this larger one in due course.
- Embrace minimalism more. I really like minimalism. It’s really helpful to me to not have tons of stuff cluttering up my life. Yes, I’ve already done so much to clear the clutter – but there’s still so much more to do. Some of the ideas are simple: Use up the existing fountain pen inks I have one at a time, and no ink purchases this year. There’s a number of things like this that I can start to implement in stages and get closer to my sense of minimalist “enough”. “enough” is the title of a book about minimalism and possessions which is on my reading list, which leads me to:
- Read more. I’ve been starting to read more again, and it’s my plan this coming year to read one fiction and one non-fiction book per month at minimum. If I read more, then I read more. Currently I’ve just started Alastair Reynold’s amazing “Revelation Space” again, and I been reading “Minimalism Vs. Consumerism” by Seth Caraway. That’s been an interesting take on minimalism as a lifestyle so far. Looking forward to reading more later.
- Journal more. As already mentioned, I did start Bullet Journaling, which has helped me organise my days, but I also like to write more in-depth personal journaling. Part of the added excitement in doing this is the above in terms of trying to actually use up the ink I have. I mean, in total I do have about 750ml (ish) of inks in various colours – and it’s gonna take some time to get through that. I don’t really need any more, but I do like the challenge and it helps me want to write more.
So there they are. Some goals are more specific, others are pretty vague and just achieving something towards them will be a step forward compared to the relative stagnation I had last year.
I’m also looking forward to hearing a lot more great music over the year, Cryo Chamber’s latest Lovecraftian album should be available on Apple Music very soon, and I have just been blasting earwax to Iono’s latest Black Anthology.
Love to hear what your “resolutions” are. Are they something you can easily commit to, or something you go hard into only to give up before the first month is out?