Almost everything about 2008 was unexpected… in no particular order: weddings, job changes, deaths, divorces, lawsuits, buying a new home, selling another home, etc. I know I underperformed professionally, as a volunteer, and as a blogger, all because I doled out so much emotional energy to everything else that was happening.
I want 2009 to be different. I don’t expect to have any more control over it than I did over 2008, but I’m hoping to give myself permission to pursue some goals and ideas that I never found or made time to tackle this year.
As things settle around the holidays, I’m doing some housekeeping to get started in a fresh direction. First, still working on the name change following the wedding, I snagged this new address, emilystoddardfurrow.com, for my blog. I am deleting old blogs and accounts and have started to consolidate content under this new domain and my new name.
Second, I’m drafting a plan for 2009 that I hope to share here. I create a lot of exercises in my offline journal to figure out where I want to focus and what kind of capacity I need to do what I want. I’ve been thinking of ways I could use the blog to hold myself accountable for certain goals and also share tools and resources with others who might be interested or working on similar issues.
Finally, I’m forgiving myself for everything in 2008 that did not happen as expected and can’t be changed now or doesn’t matter in the same way. I still need to think about some of it, but I’m giving myself permission to adjust my expectations for next year.
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Great start to a new year … and thanks for including me in your blog roll
Eeep. Maybe I should have read this before I gave you such a hard time. Again, I kind of suck like that.
I think it is so important to forgive ourselves for the things we wish could have gone differently. This is something I struggle with quite a lot, and still am working on forgiving myself for 2007. I had better get cracking, since 2009 is just a few hours away! Thank you for reminding me that it is important and necessary!