Yo, friends and readers. I know it’s been awhile, and I totally dropped the ball on the whole I’ll-post-more-in-2024 thing I said I was going to do. Stuff happened. Mistakes were made.
But here we are at the precipice of 2025, and I find myself with a few things to say. PLUS, there WILL be a post tomorrow too, with all the books I read in 2024 (spoiler alert: 27 including one I didn’t finish and the one I’m currently reading, which I will not finish by tomorrow).
Read more: Goodbye 2024Of course, this new year–as all of them do–comes a mere week after the gift-giving extravaganza that is the secular celebration of Christmas here in these United States (which seem less and less united as time goes on, but I digress). Something struck me after this year’s celebration, and when I mentioned it to my daughter, she said the same thing struck her, too, and here it is: as you age, what constitutes a “good” Christmas gift changes significantly.
Case(s) in point: this year, my daughter asked for and received a desk chair and was excited about it. A desk chair. Because I don’t live in her head, I can’t assess whether she was more or less excited about the desk chair as she was about the American Girl doll she received when she was eight, but she made a point to say she was happy to have it and couldn’t wait to sit in it. The present that most excited me was a set of silicone storage bags and a rack to dry them on, and though it took me four days to wash them all, I’m happy to have them and hopefully reduce the number of disposable plastic bags that end up in my garbage. This is what passes for good presents in this house.
Exciting presents aside, I’m hoping to leave 2024 safely in the past. It was quite a year, friends, some good, mostly meh, and some really not great. And as far as bad years go, I think none will ever touch 2021 as truly awful, but I was really hoping for a good one. As I said in the opening: stuff happened, mistakes were made.
I’ve said before, I don’t make resolutions, mostly because most of us won’t follow through, so making them is just a really fancy way to lie to ourselves. There is one thing I’d like from 2025, more than any other: I want to be good again.
Since that awful year of 2021, when people ask that eternal small-talk question, “How are you doing (and infinite variations thereof)?” I’ve answered with all the honesty I can muster, “I’m okay.” This has been the best I could do. I’m okay.
I used to answer this much differently. Before 2018, I could regularly answer “Living the dream!” and actually mean it. Then other stuff happened (it seems to be my life’s theme: stuff happened), and some variation of good was less often my response. It came back for awhile in 2020 (a shockingly good year for me, despite the existence of a life-changing global pandemic), but hasn’t made an appearance since the aforementioned terrible 2021.
So that’s my hope for 2025. To be good again. Certainly not tomorrow; it may actually take a few months, and I realize that. But I would like to be there by this time next year. We’ll see what happens (stuff. That’s what happens). But I’m going to do my best to get there. I know that good is not something that can be achieved passively. I’m going to start by doing the things that make me happy. I hope you do the same.
Happy New Year.
Vickie Jarman 