On this day, New Year’s Eve 2023, I wanted to take a bit of time to give you some helpful reminders. The new year often causes people to reflect on the year they are leaving behind and creating goals for the year to come. This can be challenging if you are going through a difficult time for a variety of reasons, so let’s dive into them.
Just Surving the Year
One of the most challenging things is looking at your goals for a year and realizing that none of it happened. In addition to that, maybe some very unfortunate and traumatic things happened in the year. This may cause you to be hard on yourself. You might feel like you didn’t accomplish anything at all. This is your reminder that surviving your circumstances in it of itself is an accomplishment. Maybe you didn’t save the money you wanted to or didn’t run that marathon. But you made it through a tough year in your life and there were likely many accomplishments you had that you didn’t plan for. Keep going and you will reach those other goals in due time.
You Can Go 1 Step Forward and 2 Steps Back
Another challenge may be that you feel like you had an accomplishment and then something else happened to make you feel like you are going backwards. This can be really deflating and may make you feel like you are never going to reach your goals.
A good example of this actually happened to me today. I took a huge step for me. Deleting my ex from social media and changing my name/profile picture. This is huge because my profile has been frozen since the day I ran away. Now I won’t see his posts anymore and I can feel more free to share when I want to. Then afterwards I went to the store. I saw a car behind me that looked just like his and the driver looked just like him. The driver had an angry look on their face and drove up on my tail and tailed me through a huge parking lot. I just kept driving and didn’t stop. I had a big panic attack which made me feel like I went backwards. Going from feeling so brave to feeling totally unsafe and not going to the store was deflating.
I want to remind you and myself that these tough moments do not negate our winning moments. They are still big wins that show growth. It is also important to give yourself grace and remember that our journey and life itseld isn’t linear. However if we look at our path over a year’s time we will see that we truly made a lot of progress. I promise that you are doing great and we will get there. The fact that you are still a wonderful you is enough!
