A short list of things I’d like to give up in 2018:

Responding, “Busy,” whenever anyone asks how I am doing. It’s not a badge of honor, and frankly my inability to switch off is not making me better at my job, my mental health, or my personal life.

Hitting the snooze function of my alarm several times every morning.

Avoidance as a coping method. I was easy on myself this past year and gave myself permission to avoid or cut out things, people, or scenarios that were contributing to my anxiety and minor depressive episodes. I’ve had loving and patient people in my life allow me to do this because they agreed it was good for me and were willing to be generous with me. Guess what? It worked, and I’m feeling resilient and balanced again. That means it’s time to toughen up and stop using this as an option in the face of confrontation, stress, pressure, discomfort, or negative emotions. It also means I need to pay it back to the people who allowed me to lean on them by taking my turn being available to lean on.

Freaking out over stupid stuff. I am alarmingly good at this.

Being lazy. This is also something I gave myself permission to do in 2017 after a rough year. It’s also worked, which means it’s time to pivot back to energy and effort, lest self care become permanent and unhealthy self-indulgence.

Social media. There is obviously no hope of this, but I’m pretty well convinced that Twitter doesn’t make me happy.

Guilt about writing. I don’t blog nearly as much as I’d like, but I’ve decided that the only cure for that is probably more frequent, shorter, and sillier posts like this one (hi, team!). I also don’t work on my fiction projects to the degree I’d like (and a lot of this in the past year has been about that avoidance and laziness I mentioned…) but I think small but steady chipping away at this will also help. In the meantime, I’m going to stop shouting at myself in my head for not being published yet.

You know. All super easy and basic things.