A part of me wants to resist the urge to make a ~new year new me~ post, but given how truly awful my 2017 was, I want to put as many positive vibes into 2018 as I possibly can.

I’m not looking to dwell, but my 2017 included the following:

• 2 separate trips to the ER, including minor surgery
• being forced to move back in with my parents
• concerns about my work performance
• having to start taking insulin injections
• ever-increasing anxiety about the state of my country

So not… great. I started 2018 with this tweet:

fuck you 2017 i fucking beat you

— pride over time for wrath (@sopdet) January 1, 2018

That’s the attitude I’m taking into the new year. I survived last year, I beat it. It died at the stroke of midnight, and I still breathe, my heart still beats, and as much as it and the people in power in 2017 tried to kill me, they failed. So with survival of 2017 comes the goal of surviving 2018, too. Does it ever end? No, the years start coming and the sure as fuck do not stop coming.

So, guess I should hit the ground running.

I have three main goals for 2018:

• as a participant in Get Your Words Out, write 120 total days
• pay off $1400 of my current credit card debt
• get my monthly glucose levels to average to under 150 mg/dL

These aren’t easy goals, but they’re also attainable. I like that these goals really force me to make a lot of different choices and changes in my life, but I don’t have to focus on those titchy goals that feel less concrete. For example, getting my glucose levels down is going to come from a combination of medication, diet, and exercise. I could make a goal to work out at a certain frequency or to avoid certain foods, but I know I don’t find those compelling reasons on their own. But my blood sugar–as a measurable indication of my better management of diabetes–is a result I can see easily, and I can also easily see how small efforts can affect my results. Same for the writing, because I don’t have to work on a word count or a specific project, but it gets me to make a habit out of writing, and I’m hoping that building the habit will lead to bigger word counts than I expect, or maybe even the start of a project I can realistically complete.

And ultimately, these goals aren’t my ideals. Ideally, I want to pay off my credit card debt entirely so that when I use my credit going forward, I can pay it off each month. Ideally, I want to be writing most days of the year on short stories or novels. Ideally, I want my blood sugar levels to fall within the expected healthy ranges without taking insulin. But these ideals aren’t anything I can accomplish in a year. Long-term, I’d like to have them done by the time I’m 40 (which isn’t as far off as I’d like!). So these are all really good first steps for me to take this year, and if I’m successful, they can lead to further improvement to those ideals in the next few years.

I don’t want to add “write more posts here on this blog” to my goals, but I’m hoping that will happen as a result of all of these things (obviously, particularly with the writing goal!). It would be nice to use this more regularly, to give myself a place to express more than 140 280 characters at a time. I admit, I tend to consider writing a post and then talk myself out if it, telling myself no one cares, no one will come here to read it, or if they do, they won’t interact. But maybe that’s on me to be more active here and encouraging of readers to stick around.

Anyway. I’m cold and I’ve got a fic to pick at, a walk to force myself to take outside, and then it’s back to work tomorrow. I’m already planning how I’m going to beat 2018, even as I hope it is a far kinder fight this time.

Photo by Kristopher Roller on Unsplash