Good morning from January 1, 2022!
Is it weird that I still carry a tiny glimmer of hope for the new year? For a lot of December 2021, I wasn’t sure I would. I wasn’t feeling the same excitement about a new year, even though I can’t say I was a huge fan of much of 2021.
But nonetheless, I found myself looking forward to the start of a new year. And it is nice to bid farewell to the past year and feel that sense of new beginning
I don’t do resolutions anymore for the new year and I’ll talk more about that in a bit, but I do have a few traditions. The first two are very mundane and tedious if I’m being honest. But they’re still my own traditions that have oddly helped me bring in the coming year with a sense of newness, and you’d be surprised at how satisfying it is when they’re done.
Toss Expired Food and Medicine
I remember back in school when we would come back from our holiday break, it took me until at least to the middle of February to get the new year correct when I had to date my papers and notes.
Fast-forward to now when I’m not writing the date as much, but I do find it’s easier to remember the new year after spending an afternoon tossing expired food with the previous year on them.
My husband and I started doing this a few years ago when we decided to make more room in our pantry by doing an inventory and throwing out all the expired stuff. We did it in January and didn’t realize until quickly after we started that the fact that every single thing that said the previous year’s date or earlier can all be tossed without even having to look at the month! Both of us are neurodivergent and love finding and creating easy and efficient systems like that so we kept it up since and even look forward to it!
It made throwing away stuff easy because our default became to toss something as soon as we saw a “familiar” date, but seeing the new year would always stop us in our tracks so we could save the item.
Even though it’s not quite the new year, I got a head start and did this with our medicine cabinet, which after two years without much contact, we didn’t need to use very often. I must have emptied out 2/3rds of the medicine we had. But, even though it’s not quite the end of the year, it was really easy to be able to go through all the bottles, boxes and various packaging and quickly scan them for the Use By date.
By the way, when I say I “got a head start,” what I mean is I’ve been putting off cleaning the Christmas-Mess of my living room so much that my own Procrastination-Hyperfocus led me to deep clean the medicine cabinet instead for about 25 minutes earlier this week 😂
One more quick thought about expiration dates — I had a credit card I use for most of the automatic payments set to expire this year and I didn’t realize it until a new card was sent to me and my old card was 10 days away from the expiration date. It’s not a bad idea to check the expiration dates of the cards in your wallet to get ahead of any automatic payment that might lapse when you least expect it 😉
For those running businesses and/or podcasts
Change those copyright dates on your website, email newsletter template, podcast, etc.
This is something I think I get more joy out of than the average person, but I love seeing how long some of my work has been around, like my podcast.
I usually post reminders for my friends in podcasting on my social media to remind them about their copyright dates, since it’s usually something that gets forgotten about easily.
Podcasters, if you’re looking for where to change your copyright for your show, it should be in your hosting site’s Settings or Show Settings 😉 If you caught my Instagram Reel about it, you can see it inside Libsyn.
Having Words of the Year Rather Than Resolutions
Having ADHD, I really have to watch my “All or Nothing” mentality.
Before I knew this about myself or was diagnosed, I would set New Year’s Resolutions like everyone else, and that would become my Hyperfocus for a few weeks. Since weight has always been a hot button issue for me, it was usually diet- and/or exercise-related. I would learn all about a new diet plan or try a new weight loss gimmick, only to inevitably mess up or fall off that wagon, and that was it. I was done.
It used to be really difficult to get back on the wagon again and I’d inevitably give up. This happened for years until one year, I decided to set 10 resolutions with the hope that just one would stick. I don’t remember many of those 10 resolutions I first made, but I do know I kept 2 of them, technically: the first was reading at least one book a month. The other one was losing 20 pounds … although I think I also gained 25 that year, so it didn’t quite work the way I had hoped.
And even though I knew I’d end up not reaching all of my goals, even preparing for failure didn’t help that feeling when it came. It’s kind of backward thinking, in retrospect, but at the time, it felt like throwing spaghetti at a wall and hoping something would stick.
But about 7 years ago when I was first learning about mindfulness, I heard about picking a Theme Word for the year instead of resolutions. The idea was to pick a word you wanted to embody that year and strive toward. I found it was less intimidating than making a very specific (and sometimes lofty) goal. It also meant I wasn’t confined to work on just one thing for 12 months, when I am more of a person who likes to switch focuses every few weeks or months it seems. But having one word as sort of an anchor has been a much better way to make decisions on what projects and opportunities I take on.
For example, in the year 2019, I picked the word Growth and it was a year I got out of my comfort zone a lot because of it! I worked toward growing my podcast, which in turn helped grow interest in the book I had written the year before, and that was also the year The Story Behind was nominated for a Webby, which was huge for an indie podcast produced by just one person!
That was also the year I helped behind-the-scenes of the first major women’s podcasting conference, She Podcasts Live! I didn’t realize when I first volunteered to help a friend, the amazing Jessica Kupferman, I would meet so many amazing people and be introduced to mentors I had followed for years, as well as grow my podcasting editing and consulting business.
By the end of the year, I was tired and felt like I could use a really long Introvert break. I couldn’t have predicted that by the next year, I would get that break from people for much longer than I could have ever imagined.
In 2020, I picked the word Balance, and later in the year I realized True Balance was nearly impossible since that came with the idea that everything needed to have equal attention. I was setting myself up for a lot of perfectionist tendencies to show themselves, which in turn helped me recognize and work through them. I was more or less looking at the focus in terms of work-life balance, which we all know was thrown way out of whack that year for so many. Trying to balance everything felt like my focuses were competing with each other, when in reality I needed to be able to have everything work together in more of a flow. I ended up changing my word for “Harmony” about halfway through the year because of that. It also meant giving myself more grace when certain things needed more focus than others.
In 2021, I decided to level up and I picked three words to focus on for the year: Open, Flow, and Adapt. I found they were all good words to keep in mind since it was a year full of a lot of change. I hesitate to say this was the worst year of my life, but it was pretty bad. A lot of the time, I would use some variation of an affirmation like “I am open-minded, I go with the flow, and I can adapt to the changes I can’t control” to help me stay present and even curious when things became overwhelming or confusing.
Learning to roller skate was a great exercise in using those three words in a physical way. I never thought I would ever learn to roller skate, but the day I realized that I wouldn’t be able to think about anything else until I got my first pair of roller skates I reminded myself of my words of the year and I remained open to the idea. As I progressed and began taking a few training and dance classes online, I learned about the state of flow that skaters get into when they’re grooving to a song. Whenever I get into that flow myself, I am absolutely elated. I think it plays a big part in the mental health benefits I’ve found with skating.
And when it comes to the word adapt and roller skating, that’s pretty much what I’m doing the whole time — as I move and roll around, I’m constantly adapting my muscles to keep me going, shift my weight and balance to do the tricks I want to do, plus adapting to each movement to make sure I won’t fall (my No. 1 objective when it comes to skating).
At the end of every year, when I would assess my accomplishments over the previous 12 months and see if they aligned with my theme word(s), they always have and I can celebrate my progress.
I wasn’t sure I was going to continue the tradition in 2022. In fact, I’m not fully recovered from this past year that at one point, I considered dropping the tradition altogether, but I realized I really enjoyed having one word to focus on so I decided for this year, my word was going to be courage. I have a sticky note near my computer right now that says “I have the COURAGE to share what I LOVE” and I’ve already found it helpful when I’m feeling vulnerable or when my Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria acts up and the Itty Bitty Shitty Committee in my head is telling me that I’m not good enough.
If you’ve seen me post about this blog over on Instagram, believe me when I say I look to this sticky note quite often before doing so. And my hope is that you also have that courage this year 🙂
What do you think?
Have you ever tried focusing on a word of the year? Or are there any tasks or projects you like doing every year? Let me know either in the comments here or over on Instagram!
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