By: Jayde Lazier
Photo Credits: Woman looking at Vision Board
As the new year starts again and we enter the hopefully prosperous year of 2024, many of us are creating resolutions and goals. This may take the form of meeting up with your friends and drinking a bottle of wine while you lay out your dream life on a piece of Bristol board, or it might be as simple as jotting down some goals on a piece of paper. What begins as an enthusiastic attempt to achieve a form of self-accomplishment and success for the upcoming year inevitably, for many of us, filters out into nothing more than a fever dream. But why? Why do we put ourselves through the process of making false promises and getting our hopes up just to let ourselves down? The answer is something that I recently realized as I made my own goals and hopes for this year and am finding them increasingly challenging to maintain.
I realized that by creating a vision for yourself, you’re not just placing a picture on a screen, but you’re making a promise and commitment to all versions of yourself—past, present, and future. When you let your goals of success or accomplishment fall through the cracks, you’re telling past you that she is not worth growth and future you that she is unattainable. This ideology helps me hold myself accountable for the consistency and maintenance of my goals because, by not showing up for myself, I am unequivocally disappointing my childhood and future self. This taught me that as human beings, it can become very easy for us to be ok with letting ourselves down. But once a second party is introduced into the situation, it becomes incredibly more challenging for us to let others down.
I recognize more than anyone that removing yourself from what is comfortable and placing yourself in new and uncertain surroundings can be scary, especially when the result is unknown. I recently made the jump from professional ballerina to university student and aspiring writer, a career switch that terrified me beyond belief. I went from a professional career of over 10 years, that I had linked my identity with to entering a world that I knew nothing about. I entered university, adulthood, and the world of an aspiring writer all at the same time knowing nothing about any of those worlds and absolutely no idea if anything would pan out successfully for me.
But after a year of consistency and a few dozen breakdowns later, I’m here to tell you that change is challenging, scary, and hard. But there are outlets that you can find support in. One that I found recently was the words of R.H Sin. I will be inserting quotations from one of his collections that really resonated with me entitled She’s Strong but She’s Tired. Sin’s poetic quotes detail that it’s vital to foster a loving environment for us to evolve in because “a love rooted in devotion will grow and bloom and will not wilt” (Sin 334). That’s why it’s so important to be consistent, because without consistency, you’ll just be cheating yourself out of a more beautiful and successful existence.
I’ve learned that consistency doesn’t have to be this big initial change, it starts by just showing up for yourself every day, even if it’s in little ways. If you can commit to being consistent with this small change, then, over time, this small adaptation in your everyday life will grow into the goal that you had initially set for yourself. Change doesn’t always result in the way that we hoped for. According to R.H Sin, more often than not, when we change, “Sometimes you get better sometimes you’re just different” (Sin 177). Growth does not always mean that you are improving, it may just mean that the outcome looks a little different than before. There is no singular path to achieving your goals, but what does help is maintenance, a part that we often forget about. A lot of us stay consistent until we reach our goal and then we don’t maintain the consistency that gained us our success, which ultimately results in us losing everything we worked for.
This then leads to the cycle repeating itself over and over again. Once change is achieved, “It will never go back to the way it was and you will forever be changed and though this transformation hurts you will be stronger than you’ve ever been so let yourself evolve” (Sin 351). Sin indicates that letting yourself evolve is a challenge that may hurt but is ultimately how we achieve the best things in life. So, I know I’ve talked a lot about consistency, maintenance, and achieving your goals, and at the risk of sounding like a self-help book, I just want to make my stance on this subject clear. Vision boards and goals for the new year are a great place to start, but the reality is that you don’t have to wait until the new year to make new choices. If you want to make changes in your life to be healthier or take more chances, then do it now. Waiting until the new year is just prolonging your fear of change and stunting your emotional growth as an individual. So, grab a nice bottle of wine, sit down, and create your vision board. But beyond that, make a realistic plan of how to accomplish your visions and be prepared to put in the work, because nothing worth having will just come to you, it’s your job to put down that bottle and go get it.
Works Cited
Sin, R.H. She's Strong but She's Tired. Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2020.