a new year = a new word

So much has happened since I last wrote, and perhaps more importantly, actually published a post on my blog. I had the baby I last wrote about. Although, he is now 4 years old and becoming further and further away from a baby everyday. I moved back to Ireland and into a mobile home. Then out of the mobile home when we bought a house. There was a pandemic. I started a course to become a sex educator. Oh, and we got a dog. That’s just the bullet points and perhaps the good ones at that but you get the drift. A lot has happened.

So that’s where I’ve been - where am I now?

Well, if you’re a long time reader of what is now a very much reduced version of my blog, you’ll know that I don’t really do resolutions or goals for the new year. Instead I pick a word. This word is something to hold onto throughout the year, a north star or a way of providing some direction I suppose. It is also a reminder of any things I may want to achieve in the year without making specific and maybe unachievable goals.

So, this year my word is ‘self’ which can be defined as the following:

“a person's essential being that distinguishes them from others, especially considered as the object of introspection or reflexive action.”

At the beginning of the week I turned 33, and throughout the last year I have realised through much soul searching (and therapy) that I really don’t know a lot about myself. Of course, finding oneself is an ongoing journey. One that perhaps never ends as we change and rediscover our new selves over and over again. But fundamentally I’ve been having trouble knowing who I am. What makes me tick, what I love, what I’m passionate about, who I am outside of being a wife to be, a mum, a daughter, a sister and a friend. The great thing about choosing ‘self’ as a word is how many other words it goes in front of. Self-awareness, self-discovery, self-care, self-efficacy, self-love. So many options, and perhaps for this reason choosing ‘self’ is almost cheating, but I don’t care if it is because all of these ‘self’ words are the words I want to use to guide me in 2023.

I’ve spent a long time doing what I thought other people would want me to do because it has been the easiest option. I’ve always been a ‘whatever works for you’ kind of person, but that’s actually stopped working for me now, or perhaps it never really worked for me in the first place. I’ve always been afraid of confrontation or rocking the boat, even if it has been to my detriment. One of the reasons I stopped writing was because I moved back to the small town I grew up in and got so paranoid about who was reading it and what they would say or think. But really, who the fuck cares?

So this year I’m going to choose to have some self-confidence and get this little space up and running again, because it’s not actually for anyone else, I started it for my…