It’s February. And I don’t think I’m the only one who suddenly feels as if this is the true beginning of 2021. January seemed like a test run that we will quickly forget. If, like me, you are starting over (for real) this month, what‘s your plan?
I recently joined an accountability group full of amazing women with diverse, exciting, and important goals they’re set on achieving over the course of five months. Our goals range from personal and professional to financial and physical. During our orientation, as we talked about our goals, our amazing facilitator cautioned us against writing goals that we would be hard-pressed to achieve. And she didn’t mean goals that were just not feasible, but goals that were not exciting, goals that didn’t spark joy.
I might be the only one, but I think that sometimes we write goals and resolutions as something we want to do to ourselves and not for ourselves. Over the years, the grip of the promises I’ve made to myself has taken a menacing and even punishing hold on me. And then achieving them become synonymous with climbing Mt Everest, a tortuous plan I punish myself for not achieving even though, it was always impossible in retrospect.
When I heard her advice, I went back to the list of goals I initially drafted and took off something that weighed me down. Something that I wasn’t ready to do, but felt that I needed to because I thought if you’re not setting impossible goals at the beginning of the year, are you really doing it right?
Now my goals are things that I am excited to say yes to. They are not easy by any stretch of the imagination. They are hard, but they part of the larger conversation I’m having with myself about who I am and who I’m becoming. They are things I’ve shied away from, but I am now ready to take on, joyfully.
other women (w)rote.
To all the people I only ran into at the Best Day Party Ever (BDPE) and who I would give long hugs to and exchange jokes with and wouldn’t see until we repeated the routine a few months later, I miss you all. Amanda Mull, for The Atlantic, writes about how the pandemic has disappeared a complete category of friends because “tools like Zoom and FaceTime, useful for maintaining closer relationships, can’t re-create the ease of social serendipity, or bring back the activities that bound us together.”
Cicely Tyson was promoting her memoir Just As I Am before she passed. She spoke to Morgan Jerkins of Zora, a few days before her demise. At the end of the interview, as Jerkins thanked her, for writing the book and for her body of work, she replied, “thank you. God bless you for being with me all this time because if you weren’t with me, I wouldn’t be here.”
After being postponed for what felt like 10,000 times, I was so excited to watch the Verzuz battle between Keyshia Cole and Ashanti. But between the lateness and the general mess of the night, the live event didn’t spark joy. But this profile of Cole by the illustrious Danyel Smith during her time at Vibe magazine definitely did.
(w)rite back.
Okay, let’s hear them. What are your new year/month resolutions? I really want to know. Write back via email or leave a comment below.