New Years Non-Resolutions

I'm not really doing New Years Resolutions, mostly because everything that would be a resolution is part of a larger plan that has been shaping up over the past few months. Plus it seems as though people forget their resolutions by the middle of January, which kind of defeats the point.

This year earns a nice, extremely close second in the competition for My Personal Worst Year Ever, so I'm basically operating under the assumption that 2009 will be better by default. "Better by default" kind of implies, though, that things will "not be quite as terrible", so I'd prefer to go above and beyond terrible and shoot for "awesome". Because of the way my brain works, I'm not really expecting awesome, but there has to be some sort of middle ground I can be satisfied with.

2008 had a lot of changes that I either didn't have control over, or that happened as the result of my bad decision making, or somewhere in between. A combination of depression and pride got the best of me and resulted in my suspension from school. I had my first, not particularly healthy, probably-should-never-have-happened relationship and the subsequent break-up. (And the subsequent post-break-up sex. Twice. Which of course made the actual break-up bit harder to deal with.) My living situation changed multiple times for multiple reasons. My dad died, which was especially hard because we did not always have a good relationship. I spent the majority of the year feeling like I was spinning, or worse.

I'm not saying everything about this year was bad, but a lot was. Enough that I'm going to do whatever I can to make this year a positive one. Because in 2008, the bad stuff more than outweighed the good, and that's not much of an incentive to keep on going. So this year I hope to take control and responsibility for myself so that my actions can have some better consequences.

I'll post about some of my plans tomorrow, but the big thing I wanted to mention is communication. I am a HORRIBLE communicator. I don't like letting people know what I'm thinking, what I'm feeling, what I want or what I need. Even when I want to explain myself, I find I usually don't know how. It's incredibly frustrating for everyone. Example: I can be a fairly huggy, demonstrative person, but I also have times when I do not. like. to be touched. At all, by anyone, unless they ask first and I say yes. But the majority of people around me don't know this, because I don't tell them. I don't tell them because I don't want to seem weird or unfriendly. But because people don't know, they touch me anyway. And then I sit very still and grit my teeth and feel extremely uncomfortable while a friend hugs me; or a friend touches my arm and I jerk away or fling myself off a chair, and they have no idea why.

The whole thing sucks for everyone, because it results in either me feeling upset because someone is doing something to me that I don't want, or it results in a friend feeling upset because I've just been rude and strange for no apparent reason. The whole thing could be resolved if I asked my friends "Sometimes I get kind of weird about physical stuff, could you please ask before you touch me?", or if, when the situation came up, I said something like "Hey, I'm not really having a huggy day - it's nothing personal."

So yeah. Communicating better is one of my top priorities for 2009. Not because it's 2009, but just because it needs to happen. I'll post more about other goals tomorrow, but right now I'm going to get something to eat, take my dogs outside, and probably read some more blogs. Maybe watch an episode of House, or better yet, The Triplets Of Belleville, which I have wanted to see for a while now. Oh! And I get to open the gingerbread house that my mom and I made with our friends. Every year we make a house, every year it gets opened either Christmas Eve or New Years Eve, depending on how much patience we have. This is the first New Years I've been alone, but it's shaping up pretty well, I think. Animals, the internet, foreign films, gingerbread and candy - I could do a lot worse.

Three cheers for New Years:-)