Happy New Year!

Time to get your proverbial shit together!

Fear not, this is not a typical article on 5 ways to get your shit together in the New Year. I would definitely not be the person to write that post. I would be more the person to write the post, how to get it together for maybe 2 and a half weeks at most.

Without getting too graphic, I have a rather large bookshelf replete with books supporting the self-help industry. I have been trying to become “the perfect me” since roughly 1997. I’ve had this image in my head of who I’ve wanted to be. She looks like this:

But the problem is, I can’t escape the real me, who shows up most often times more like this…

At the tender age of 46, I have begun to try to embrace the authentic me. I’ve always been that person who has been accomplished on the resume and somewhat of a mess “off-stage.” But in reality I’ve prided myself on my “real” side. Or sometimes I’ve referred to it as my “F-you to society” and it’s barbie-like expecations. Or maybe I just don’t feel like doing my hair. In any event, I try to embody Jennifer Lawrence in Silver Linings Playbook:

So here we go again…

5 Ways I’ll try to get my shit together AGAIN in 2022

• Once again, I will try to lose weight and shake off the myriad of bad eating sins heretofore committed. These include but are not limited to: the chocolate cheesecake from Christmas Eve, the mashed potatoes and gravy from Thanksgiving, all the mini Reese’s cups I ate in secret just before Halloween, the cheese fries from the shore this summer and the unlimited amounts of cheese stolen by the refrigerator light at night.
• Once again, I will try to cook ahead of time in bulk so I can properly feed my children so that I can stop singlehandedly upholding the restaurant industry. I feel bad when they come to my desk at the end of a long day and say, “Mom, is there dinner?” and I don’t have a dinner or even a semblance of a plan to make dinner or actually any of the ingredients truly needed to make that mythical dinner if I so chose.
• Once again, I will try to keep the house clean so that if someone visits unexpectedly, they will not call CPS. It never ceases to amaze me the filth that we can acumlate over a mere 12 hours time…truly, it’s a family talent. From laundry accumulation to dish pilings by the sink to socks on the floor and finally the mound of mail by my desk, they are all a never ending existential representation of my inner state of mind.
• Once again, I will try to exercise more so that I can somehow capture that energy that all those healthy people have because they work out. Those people always amaze me. They glow with the radiance of vitality. I glow more with the pallor of one who can’t tan.
• Once again, I will try to not let work dominate my every evening thought so that I can escape the cycle of OCD that most definitely has found it’s way to me from my gene pool. Unfortunately, it’s not the kind of OCD that keeps your house clean. It’s the one where I just keep obsessing over every little thing I could have done differently over the course of the day, how I could have been better, where my shortcomings were and the overwhelm of not being perfect for the start of the day tomorrow. No wonder I’m always exhausted…

No matter the outcome of all these plans, I just want to embrace more often the humor that has kept me going all my life. If I can harness that more in daily life, I’ll be on to something. Cheers to your resolutions for 2022!