I am usually not a big January fan – I once wrote here that “grim is a rather nice word for January”. But this year I was here for it.

Fall felt long and hard and exhausting, the way life can be sometimes. When January arrived, I was ready to shove all of the emotions and struggles of the past four months into a box right next to our Christmas decorations and move right along.  

The Christmas decorations I knocked out in a single morning, a simple task aside from getting so increasingly annoyed at how long it was taking me to remove the lights from our Charlie Brown-sized Christmas tree that I just threw the thing out on our deck to deal with later. (I eventually aggressively stripped the lights by spinning the tree itself like a reverse Fruit Roll Up, pine needles flying and Kevin watching in horrified curiosity from inside.)

The emotions and struggles? Not so easy. Life has no regard for seasons and will continue to put you through the wringer at its leisure, and the only course of action is to decide what to do with the time that is given us (I see you Gandalf). Sure, The White Wizard was talking more about the impending end of Middle Earth (and Tolkien was talking about the horrors of a world war), but the statement rings no less true in the context of each of our tiny little lives, wherever they may be.  

Sometimes, life is just real hard. You can be surrounded by people you love, life can seem super simple and settled, there can be no tangible thing to hone in on as the Cause of All This Stress, and stressful it will be. You will still have to wake up each morning, find a thing that will motivate you to get out of your bed, and choose to give the whole racket a go. Add on that the state of the world has been doing THE MOST to destroy the ability to “give it a go” on a daily basis, and fuck, bro, that is just really tough to do. 

So, despite knowing full well this is the way of the world, what did I decide to do at the beginning of January? I tried to pack away all those autumnal struggles with some New Years Intentions.  

I called them intentions, because as a deeply grayscale person in a society that’s out here acting like everything is black and white, resolutions are far too resolute for my own comfort. But regardless of what I called them, given my mindset, writing down any long-term optmistic intentions seemed a bold-ass strategy for tackling my emotional exhaustion, new year or no.

BOLDER STILL, the more I thought about them, and about what to write for my first post of the year, I decided to share them here.  

Because the truth is this: the stupidest, tiniest little attempt at developing who you are as a person or the things that surround you? For me? That is just one of those things that never ceases to have the capacity to motivate me to get out of my bed. I don’t care if it is THE lamest cliche on the earth. An itemized list of things to aim for? SIGN ME UP.

So, copied directly from a brand new notebook (because where else would I have written them), I give you my intentions for the hot mess that very well may be the year 2025: 

1. Write more! So much more. Would love to start a new project. 

2. Add something new to my life routine. Who knows what this will be. Some ideas: Sewing. Knitting. Skating?? Language learning. DIY-ing. Something…musical? 

3. Reduce sugar intake. Basically, stop buying a weekly dessert item. 

4. Paint something (or multiple somethings!!) in this house. 

5. Find something that makes me appreciate my amazing silly body. Some kind of movement. It has done a fantastic job of getting me this far. I should probably return the favor. 

6. Be a better communicator. Stop stewing. Share your thoughts. Even when they are scary or feel dumb. 

7. Narrow career goal. Tough to do with a sort of unknown long-term (i.e. potentially moving to Europe), but at least figure out some over-arching goals. 

8. Be okay with prioritizing small beauty and finding ways to bring it into every aspect of my life. 

Will I actually do any of these things? It is entirely possible I will not. Did writing them down in a new notebook achieve anything? Not…not really. But stay with me here. 

The horrific fires happening in LA have produced some harrowing imagery, and a particular story that came out of them has stuck with me. An artist had posted a video a few days before the fires started, a simple tour of the home she and her husband had created and the studio within it. The original intent of the video was just to record and celebrate the home they had created, and how much they loved it, and within days, it became a record of a place completely and unexpectedly destroyed by a fire. And they re-posted it in the aftermath with the added caption: “I wish I had known this would be the last week we would spend in our home.” 

Sure, a home (especially a beautiful one) is a pretty universal thing to find joy in and be motivated by. Nobody looking at that video would be surprised that it brought that artist a huge amount of joy. But the tragic one-hundred-eighty-degree twist of that video just really drove home for me that we do not know what is going to be here tomorrow, what we will need to find next week to get us through the tough moments.

It doesn’t matter what you need to focus on to get you through the day, what motivates you to get out of your bed. Do what works for you, take the video of your house, appreciate your silly little body, write more. In whatever way makes the most sense, decide what to do with the time that is given you.