askyermom

I’m bumbling around here at the end of the year in a state of general blue amazement. I set three ambitious goals for my year and… did them all. There were several important side quests, which may ultimately be more important than reaching my 2024 goals, but the official goals were done with a month to spare.

I am sure I never did this before. In the past, my goals have been soft focus and reasonable–goals like let’s keep the peace until graduation or eventually, I’d like to find a job that doesn’t make me cry or it would be great to decorate my home without having to figure out what to do with the angry man.

My annual goals haven’t existed before, not really. Other than my deadlines for my first book, I didn’t allow annual goals to exist. I was always surviving something and survival was the only objective. Surviving was just getting through a season or a hurdle, managing a crisis or a stage that someone else was going through while they were dragging me along.

Goals can be pretty cool. I wanted to publish my book and establish my coaching business and be able to hike uphill while holding a conversation. My book is done, my coaching business is active and I can jog up two or three flights of stairs without getting winded. My step-meter is so proud.

Even so, I’m still not sure how I feel about being a goals person. Now that I have proven to myself (again) that I can do things, I guess I’d better make sure I’m doing some good. I already keep an eye on that, but after I read Tina Brown on the corrupting influence of private jets, I paused to consider what might be my personal jets. How will I know I have been carried away? Too big for all my britches?

What if I lose ten pounds but those were the pounds that held all my empathy? What if I invent a marvelous device, but it has a hideous price? Oh the poetry of excess worry!!

As another first, I have spent nearly a month contemplating my goals for next year. It’s a treacherous luxury to have plenty of time to mull it over. What I’m learning is that a month is too long. By spending all this time thinking about what I want to do, I am soaking in the lack of things, that is, I’m thinking a great deal about what is missing, thinking especially of painful absences. Unsurprisingly, this has contributed to the seasonal blues being much worse than expected. Depression is paying a visit for the holidays.

Crunching through depression is just extra weight on the hike. It doesn’t determine the destination, but it can limit things. It was always this way. Some of us are perpetually at a disadvantage. Sometimes one is a fish out of water for life. I’m pretty sure I’m that sort of fish.

I like to remember that I am a traveler in a foreign country at all times. I don’t know the rules or the language, but I mean well and that will just have to be good enough. I try not to shrink from my errors and misunderstandings, because they just lead to misunderstandings with myself, which is the worst kind of misunderstanding.

Oh. I have a bit more understanding, suddenly. Some of my current blues is obviously the result of having no goals for a little while. Now that I am apparently a goals person, having no goals is deeply unacceptable. This sea of ennui came on pretty quickly. It feels like that annoying heaviness that sets in after one has been in bed for days with an illness.

This is a big blinking bad omen for my imaginary retirement. I’m going to need a lot of projects, large and small, to survive a time when life is a continual vacation. I suddenly understand the people who tape themselves taping themselves to their cats. There are too many hours in the day for days with no goals.

This is a tricky predicament: too depressed for goals and too much of a new goalie to skirt the issue entirely. Maybe I should figure out how to celebrate my goals as an interim goal. Yay!! I and all my personalities did it!! Yay us!!

We can also be very grateful to have the project of setting a few goals for another year. We’re on the thriving side, after all.

Thanks. I feel better.

Love,
yermom

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