Resolutions Revisited

vir­ginia­pos­trel made men­tion of the Ban­ished Words List. I’ve just fin­ished read­ing the 2003 and 2004 lists and I did indeed laugh out loud.

This week’s Dol­lar Stretch­er newslet­ter includ­ed an arti­cle by Deb­o­rah Tay­lor Hough titled “One Habit at a Time.”

I’ve been told it takes four to six weeks for any action to become a habit. So, keep­ing that in mind, one way I’m going to insure my suc­cess at keep­ing my New Year’s res­o­lu­tions this year is by work­ing on only one new habit at a time each month. Then, every time I turn a cal­en­dar page, I’ll work on devel­op­ing a dif­fer­ent new habit.

At the end of the year, I could eas­i­ly have twelve new pos­i­tive habits in my life. Once some­thing’s become a habit, it’s sim­ply a part of my life and not some­thing I’ll even have to think about anymore.

With that excel­lent sug­ges­tion in mind, I decid­ed to look again at the res­o­lu­tions I made for the com­ing year back on my birthday.

1) Improve my health. That’s my main pri­or­i­ty right now. The changes I’m mak­ing to do that are:
A — no more caf­feine. I drank the last of my cof­fee this morn­ing and I’ve asked Sam not to buy any more for me.
I’m no longer drink­ing cof­fee dai­ly, but I do have some occa­sion­al­ly. When I don’t have it, I don’t get a with­draw­al headache. That’s good. But it real­ly would be for the best if I trans­fer my desire for a hot, com­fort­ing drink to some­thing healthier.

B — keep work­ing on find­ing a way to get the meds I need. To that end, I’m apply­ing for Social Secu­ri­ty disability.
That appli­ca­tion is in process, and I’ve got­ten the help I need so that I won’t be over­whelmed by it again. I’ve also iden­ti­fied ways to get most of the med­ica­tions I need with­in the next 6–8 weeks, and done what I need to do to make that happen.

C — find SOME way to get access to a pool heat­ed to the Arthri­tis Foun­da­tion’s stan­dards for water exer­cise. So I’ll be going to the near­est YMCA to see if I can man­age a mem­ber­ship somehow.
We’re join­ing the near­est Y next week!

D — change what I eat. I’ve already done that in some ways, but I need to keep it up. I plan to start the South Beach Diet as soon as I’ve got­ten past the decaf­feina­tion process. I’d be hap­pi­er if Sam were to do that with me, and I know it would be easier—but I don’t want to delay anymore.
I haven’t done this yet. I need to sit down with sam­bear and shad­owkatt and do some meal plan­ning. I said some­where else that I’ve real­ized that part of heal­ing my rela­tion­ship with food is going to involve being more involved with meal plan­ning and prepa­ra­tion. I have been more involved than before, but it isn’t enough yet.

E — find some kind of body­work I can afford on a reg­u­lar basis. PDH has been very good, so I should talk to keira­cait­lyn about that.
I haven’t even begun this one.

How will I know when I’ve reached this goal? Well, being able to man­age the oth­er things on my list con­sis­tent­ly would be great! But quan­tifi­ably, most of my days are cur­rent­ly at a sev­en at best, an eight at the moment, on this pain scale (and since I don’t HAVE painkillers like Ultram, that real­ly sucks). I’d like to see that change so that my aver­age day is no worse than a 6, and prefer­ably more like a 4–5.
We got a new mat­tress and I def­i­nite­ly do feel bet­ter already. I need to get new shoes soon, as I felt a major dif­fer­ence this sum­mer when I start­ed wear­ing tru­ly sup­port­ive shoes for the first time. Since those are san­dals, they’re a bit breezy for wear­ing now.

Be a bet­ter student.
I need to be more orga­nized and more real­is­tic about my course loads. I want to get As in all my cours­es with­out send­ing myself into flare doing it.
It’s a good thing I read these. I was just pon­der­ing try­ing to take lots more class­es this semes­ter. I know I should­n’t, but there’s part of me that still feels like the young­ster who could car­ry such loads and work and take care of home and hus­band with­out a hitch. That isn’t me now. So, I need to drop some of the cours­es for which I’m reg­is­tered and fin­ish my plan for mak­ing up my incom­pletes from last semes­ter. Since the semes­ter is just about to start, I think this one needs to be my spe­cial goal for January.

3) Inter­act social­ly with peo­ple in the real world more often.
I’ve with­drawn into my shell a lot in the last six months or so due to my health prob­lems. I’m hop­ing they’ll improve soon, and then I won’t have an excuse. Get­ting into anoth­er singing group would cer­tain­ly be a good moti­va­tor. I need to set an actu­al “goal” though, and one social event out­side the house a week seems reasonable.
I’m not there yet, but I have gone out a lit­tle more. curiousmay9 is very good at pulling me out of the house 🙂 I even wish that I was reg­is­tered for GaFilk or could go, but I don’t think that’s going to hap­pen. (And we might have a house­guest that week­end who we don’t see near­ly often enough.) I did re-estab­lish con­tact with a dear old friend, which is def­i­nite­ly a social thing.

4) Keep my Artist active.
I stopped doing The Artist’s Way a while back. I need to get back on the Way and hon­or my cre­ative impuls­es in oth­er ways, too. Quan­tifi­ably, I want to do some­thing cre­ative every day, if only for 15 min­utes, and do some­thing just for fun for at least 30 min­utes each day.
Hmm. I haven’t gone back to AW at all yet. I have been stitch­ing a lot, which counts. And I’ve been work­ing on design­ing more patterns.

I’m won­der­ing if maybe I should sit myself down at the begin­ning of each month and look at where I am with my res­o­lu­tions. That way I’ll be more aware of what I have accom­plished, and where I haven’t yet met my goals.