Ring, Ring

I thought it was about time to ring in the new year somewhere online as I do intend to keep blogging this year! It's just going to change quite a bit. I'm not doing resolutions this year. I'm not even setting goals for myself for the year. I've come to learn over the years that making resolutions and setting goals is really not a good thing for me. I tend to set them impossibly high and inevitably fail because they're unattainable. THIS YEAR I WILL TAKE CARE OF MYSELF! How unrealistic and how broad is that? Many of our resolutions and goals are almost set up to be viewed as failure when in actuality, they're often not. We do plenty of things to take care of ourselves, the best we know how throughout the year. But when we set this concrete picture in our mind of a perfect existence of what "taking care of myself" looks like, it'll never be achievable. There are too many factors beyond our control to ever have that perfect picture. So this year, I'm going to do the best that I can, a day at a time. That's not a goal, that's not a resolution, that's just what I'm going to do. And sometimes the best that I can probably WON'T be too great :p But it's nice to at least acknowledge that it's the best I can for today and take the weight of impossible goals off of my shoulders.

This past year sort of showed me that there needed to be a big change like that. This was the first year that I didn't do an end of the year reading recap and honestly, I'm ok with that. When I finish this post, I think I'm going to post on Stuff as Dreams and put it on hiatus officially for now so people don't wonder where the hell I've gone to. It won't be a permanent goodbye from there. I like to leave the possibility open of going back there. But for now, the commitment that I feel when I'm blogging there is just overwhelming. I need a more private place that feels more like a journal than a book blog and this has become that. Though this will also be a place to talk about books too I'm sure, though probably much differently than I talked about them on Stuff as Dreams. I DO think I still want to keep track of what I read though, so maybe I'll start a new page for that here.

My holidays were really nice and just exactly what I needed them to be this year :) The only shitty part was a migraine that started on Christmas Eve and didn't let up for 4 days :/ I haven't had a migraine like that in years. I had to get my neurologist to call in a steroid pack to finally break it up. We did Christmas eve at my dad's house like we always do and it was nice to have tradition during this time of what's been chaos! Everyone had a really good time I think and it was really nice to have the time together. With everyone getting older now and with my dad's cancer, it's more and more rare that all of us are in the same room together, so that night was extra special.

Christmas morning was spent with tradition too with me and my sister sleeping at my mom's house and opening gifts first thing in the morning!! The only difference was my sister's boyfriend was with us too which was nice. I've really come to appreciate family even more this year. Tradition especially has meant the world to me when everything else has been so full of change and so unknown. If you haven't figured it out already, I do NOT do well with change and I don't like to have things left unknown. There's this part of my brain that wants to know everything about anything that's going on and I hate uncertainty. With my dad's cancer, I've learned more medically than I have in my entire education leading up to me working in intake at a hospital. It's probably NOT the healthiest coping mechanism, but, it at least leaves me prepared and educated. So spending the holidays without any surprises and falling into the comfort of family was so wonderful.

New years eve, I spent most of the afternoon and night with my mom and then went by my dad's to ring in the new year with him at midnight. It was a rough night with him honestly. He had a bad night. More mentally than anything...I think the coming year makes him nervous, but we had a really good talk that night and I think he took what he needed from it and things seem to be better for him since. He found out two days before that his tumor had grown. It has only grown 7mm, but the fact that it grew at all is discouraging. So treatment is about to get stepped up even more with radiation 5 days a week getting added to his chemo. He's going to have a lot of fighting to do :/ It will be an interesting year!

I'm going to try to lay out my plans for reading for the month this year at the beginning of the month! Not so much as a goal, but just as sort of a present to myself. It's almost like I get to go pick a few treats off of the shelves and lay them out for the month. Of course I can switch them out if I want to, but it gives me something to look forward to :) So that's what I did today....I picked out a few books for the month of January, a nice mix of fiction and nonfiction, adult fiction, YA, poetry, essays, things I've been wanting to read for a while and things I've just discovered :)

I'll leave you with this beautiful poem that I discovered last night that Adrienne Rich opens her collection, The Dream of a Common Language with...it's called "Power". And it's exactly what I needed to read right now.