Just Keep Trying

This week has been pretty great. I broke a couple of 100 day milestones, which I’m very happy and grateful for, and today I found out that the school I work for chose to hire me full-time. This comes with an extra $3/hr raise, which amounts to about an extra $500 a month. I really had no doubt that this was coming since I’ve been working really hard the past three months to get to this place, but it’s always nice to know that my job is secure and that I’ll be earning more money. As long as I keep my habits going, especially my waking up at 5 AM every morning to write my novel habit, then this next year looks to be pretty great.

I used to love New Year’s because I loved writing my resolutions for the upcoming year. I really wanted to start fresh on January 1st and wipe away the dirt from the previous year and become someone better. I always had goals to be more fit, to be smarter, to be and do more, but I always seemed to crash really early. January had always been my most productive month because that’s when all my enthusiasm was at its highest. It quickly ebbed, though, and by February, I was back on my old habits, and by March, I looked at my list of resolutions with guilt and regret. So by April I would start trying them again, but the cycle repeated again, so by June, I just gave up and forgot about the list. Then December would roll around, and I would get excited again. This happened for years, and I never seemed to learn, until just one day it all clicked.

I stopped writing New Years Resolutions a few years ago. I purposefully tried starting new habits a few months before January because I wanted to enter the new year with momentum. Many of my current habits started that way. When I was 70 pounds heavier than I am now, I decided to start working out with more purpose during December. I was at 216 lbs on December of 2011. I’m now at 173 lbs as of Monday. At my highest, I was over 230 lbs in early 2011, and under 160 lbs earlier this year. I started this blog in September, and I plan to continue with it throughout all of 2015. And I’ll be coming into January with three full months of Insanity workouts and over 100 days straight of writing 300+ words in my novel.

One thing I love to do is keep track of what I’m doing. I like logging my weight every Monday, writing about my life in this blog, and simply just writing down ideas, notes, anything, and dating them. I like to look back and see what kind, if any, progress I’ve made. It’s always encouraging when I look back at old journal entries where I bemoan the fact that I’m not where I want to be and realize that I did get there. I did lose that weight, I did finish my first novel, I did get a great job.

For 2015, I don’t plan to write any resolutions. I plan to continue living life the way I’m living it now but hopefully better. I’m not sure what that means, but I’m confident I’ll figure it out. And I’ll hopefully have furniture and the rest of my stuff¹ from California. One thing I do plan to do with every new year, though, is trying to make it the best year I can possibly make it. But nowadays, that just means making today better than yesterday, and that’s something I always try to attempt.

As long as I’m trying, right?