For 2019
“Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind? Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and auld lang syne.”
Happy New Year my dear readers! I hope your holiday season has been spent surrounded by your loved ones and in the happiest of spirits. Thank you for your continued love and support for Itsmayalala in its first year. Your suggestions and recommendations for future blog posts and ventures have been incredibly helpful in developing my blog and brand. I hope 2019 will bring with it many more opportunities to engage with my readers as well as evolve into a platform dedicated to uplifting them. With that being said, here is my annual year in review post for 2018! Another year has begun and I’m still out of breath from the last. 2018 was truly a whirlwind of emotions and events that challenged my relationships in Seattle and Los Angeles as well as my overall college experience. December brought with it the sudden conclusion of a long-term friendship as well as the end of a new relationship (the first of which resulted in a significant change to my on-campus living situation).
When I returned home for the holidays, I remember thinking that I had been cheated out of what was supposed to be an amazing Sophomore year; that my first semester wasn’t supposed to end that way. I spent days scrolling through old texts and listening to voice mails I couldn’t bring myself to delete in search of answers to what went so wrong in my relationships. I wanted to know why my plans for the last 6 months had failed. I will forever be thankful that I had these individuals in my life for the short time they were in it, but not for their role in the exploitation of my trust. Looking back at everything, all those days waiting by my phone and long nights spent worrying about the coming year, I realize now that it was wrong of me to blame the loss of these relationships on my hopes for maintaining them. I may never find the closure I desire to move on, but I have the opportunity to alter the way I view them and how I approach future relationships.
Reader, I believe that it’s important to start this New Year with that idea in mind. The point of New Year’s resolutions shouldn’t be to make an all or nothing game plan for the year that lies ahead, but a guide for self-realization. With that being said, here’s a quick look at the word ‘resolution.’ The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines a resolution as:
A firm decision to do or not to something.
The action of solving a problem, dispute, or continuous matter.
Let’s deconstruct the first and more widely accepted definition that has probably been plaguing every one of your social media accounts since the first day of the year. With a new year comes endless new possibilities for the exploration, realization, and improvement of oneself by your terms. This, of course, has traditionally served as the driving incentive for making (and more recently, posting) one’s goals for the year. Rather than perceiving your resolutions as a clear-cut plan for the new year, it may be more helpful to use it as a guide to maintaining your personal goals. There is no use in dwelling on what should or could have been when working towards was can be. It’s impossible to know who you will be from day to day or how dramatically your life may change over the course of an entire year. By using your resolutions as guidelines rather than specific plans for the future, change won’t seem all that threatening anymore.
The second definition can be more easily describes as tying up loose ends in one’s life. There’s no denying that there’s something inspirational about the act of finding solutions for the not-so-great moments in life. My year ended without finding such a solution (or closure) for the aforementioned relationships and I doubt I will in the coming year. Consequently, I began this new year in mourning for what I had lost in 2018 and in fear of what was to come. Then, I received a text message from someone fairly new in my life that I have yet to get to know and I once again felt to promise of hope. It was a reminder of all the beautiful possibilities that await me this year and of how change can be as much of a blessing as it is a curse. I have always struggled to welcome change and the unknown with open arms but I’m willing to give it a try in 2019.
Happy New Years readers! I hope 2020 will be full of love, inspiration, and happiness.
Xx, Maya