Word of the Year: Connection

This is the year I connect.

I usually ruminate on my “word of the year” for the entire month of January. My birthday is the very last day of the month, and I consider it my personal new year. So instead of making a resolution to start January 1st (or, let’s be honest, January 2nd), I start goal setting for February 1st.

But this year, I knew immediately what I wanted to accomplish (aside from “write more and drink less”) because of what I was struggling with at the end of 2019.

Last year was a difficult one for my family. We faced a series of intra-family challenges that made me circle my mental wagons around my husband, children, and myself. (And, yeah, that surprise puppy was one of those challenges.) So by the end of last year, I was feeling estranged from my friendship group, I felt like I was phoning it in at work, and I had given up my own blog and was hardly writing creatively at all any longer.

2020 — by its very nature as short-hand for seeing clearly — provides the chance I need to assess my own needs, and set goals and habits to benefit myself and my family in a different way.

Connecting Personally

Some people have no problem being social. I am not one of those people. It takes a great effort for me to reach out simply to say, “Hey, let’s hang out.” Asking for and accepting help is easy for me. Hanging out is much more difficult. I think I feel like everything must serve some larger purpose, like I need to meet with people in my real life to… accomplish something! World domination, perhaps! I need to start recognizing that hanging out simply for the sake of hanging out, face-to-face, is its own benefit.

To that end, I have two goals to connect to my friends:

Set up a monthly date with a friend or friends — doesn’t have to be fancy. Coffee and conversation, a beer, dinner, even a movie with drinks afterward. I would like to be less haphazard in this effort than I have been in the past. When I invite people out, I will have a date in mind, as well as a possible activity. But, of course, I will also be flexible. I want to see people to whom I am not blood related! (I love my extended family; my extended family is a lot, and if they are reading this, they know it!)

Send cards — If we know each other, whether IRL or virtually, if you would like to get a birthday card from me, please send me your mailing address and your birth date. Sending holidays cards seems to be an insurmountable challenge for me, but I think getting a card in the mail every now and again should be less trying. (If you don’t want a birthday card, but still want to hear from me, just send your address.)

Connecting Professionally

I like my job very much, and I am good at what I do. However, I have reached a point in my career where growing professionally is more than a matter at being good at what I do. My professional goals for 2020 include attending networking events (anyone here in the AMA?) and trade shows, and leaving my office every now and again to talk to my coworkers. I tend to isolate myself in the interest of “focusing and getting shit done!”, but I am determined to create a habit of reaching out and checking in.

Connecting to My Words

I want to rebuild a writing habit. More than want — I feel, very deeply, that writing is vital to my mental health.

To start, I decided to sign up here at Medium. I don’t have the energy to run my own blog anymore. Fortunately, Medium is a space where people can just write and publish stuff. I don’t expect this space to make me famous; I don’t expect it to make me money; I just need it to be here for my random thoughts and rants; for advocacy and reviews; for things I do want to share publicly.

The next habit I need to build in the next few months is a regular fiction-writing habit. I have a novel that I would like to do one more rewrite on; I have another novel or two percolating in my creative writing brain space. I don’t know that I will ever get published, but that is a secondary goal. My primary goal is to do the writing. Anything after that will be gravy. Whether one a week or once a day, I want to focus on the people in my head, and the stories they are telling me, and put them on the page.

(If you want to know more about choosing a word to be your theme for the year, see this blog post by Gretchen Rubin, who is becoming my habits and happiness guru. I apologize in advance if I become unbearable.)

Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash