Building a solid foundation
As another year ends, a lot of people will look back on their achievements and celebrate. They will come up with lofty, ambitious goals and resolutions for the new year. And most of these goals are abandoned very quickly as we all get stuck back in the same old routine or get weighed down by the constant updates being pushed our way about the terrible things that are happening around the world. Personally I feel like 2025 has been increasingly exhausting, and I have been avoiding a lot of the worse aspects of the internet whenever possible. Lately just having to be A Person and keeping up with the standard maintenance that my flesh suit requires leaves me with very little energy to do anything other than just exist. And I’m sick of feeling this way. I’m sick of saying I want to go places or do things or learn something new, but never actually following through with it.
It got me thinking about my parents. Their time consisted of three main pillars; working, keeping each other company, and caring for their kids. Their friends were coworkers. Their hobbies were ones they could do at home or with each other. But that is a precarious way to live, lose one of those pillars and the others may not be able to handle the extra weight. That’s how people end up living alone, rattling around a too-big house with no idea what to do with all their free time. My mother put all her eggs into the basket for me and my brother, and didn’t take into consideration that we would move out of home and start our own families, and that those relationships would be higher priorities for us. So she gets sulky when we tell her we’re staying home for Christmas rather than travelling to go see her.
And if I keep living the way I am currently I could very easily end up with a similar fate. So instead of a standard set of New Years Resolutions I’ll be focussing on a more broad goal of building and nourishing my support network. Mostly that will involve finding ways to get myself out of the house and actually doing them. It sounds like a fairly easy goal to achieve, but the biggest challenge for me will be pushing past the very self-sabotaging parts of my brain and making the effort to try and spend time with friends instead of assuming they have more important things to do. It’s very scary to be vulnerable like that, but it’s important to retrain my brain and not try and do everything by myself.