What’s In Store for the New Year?
Hello, my beautiful friends. It’s been like 7 months since I last posted but every time I say I’m going to shut this thing down, I can’t bring myself to do it. My grandpa loved reading my posts and because we lived in different countries, it was a way for him to stay up to date on my life. He would be disappointed if I stopped blogging. So here we go…
New Year’s Eve and resolutions give me mixed feelings. I love the end of a cycle, closing a chapter, feeling optimistic for what’s to come but at the end of the day, It’s still just another day but we as a society make it bigger than it really is. We could all choose to change our habits and pick up better ones at any point in time in the year, but it’s just so much easier when everyone is doing at the same time. I feel like it’s just better to lean into it. I know that most people will won’t be able to follow through with their resolutions and that’s usually the case for me. I have a bad habit of making unattainable goals and resolutions and then when I inevitably fail, I feel like shit. So this year, I’m taking a little different approach and trying to really identify the issues in my life and coming up with sustainable, realistic solutions.
In the past, my resolution would be to lose weight, and usually an unreasonable number that would require nothing short of an eating disorder. This year, I still want to lose weight but looking at my habits, I have to try to find what will really make a difference for me. Apart from losing weight, I want to feel better. So this is how I came up with my first resolution: Eat vegetables every single day.
This may sound simple but there have been days and weeks that I’ve gone without them with no problem. And that, is the problem. Vegetables are so accessible and honestly pretty good if prepared properly. Also, my mom says I loved vegetables when I was a baby so I feel like I just have to get myself into the habit of eating them again. I want them to become part of my routines so that it doesn’t feel like I’m forcing myself to eat them anymore. But at the same time, I need to get over this idea that eating has to be for pleasure, sometimes you just have to eat what you need, even if it’s not a Michelin star meal. I wanted to start yesterday on the last day of the year so that it wouldn’t feel like it was new on the first day of the year, but as I type this, I realize that this sounds kind of silly. Regardless, I threw some salmon and asparagus in the air fryer last night and it was done in less than 20 minutes. So easy and delicious — I can totally do this. Today’s veggie of the day was baby spinach. I was hungover so I wanted a sandwich and threw in a handful and it was perfect. Was it life changing and delicious? Nah, but it added texture and it didn’t take away from my sandwich. Baby steps.
Along the same vein, I order almost every meal every day so my goal is to cook more and order less. I have this app that tracks my spending and almost every month I get an alert that my most frequent charge is with UberEats. It’s just so easy and I always say that it’s so hard to cook for one person. That’s honestly just an excuse. It’s really not that hard to cook for one, I just hate eating leftovers for like the whole week. During the pandemic I was cooking all the time and I loved it, so why can’t I do that again? I think the part I hate the most is the cleaning up and doing dishes. I always let them pile up and then I have to do so many dishes when I should have just washed them as I cooked. My plan is to cook simple things that I know taste good so that 1) I’ll eat them and 2) I don’t destroy my kitchen in the process of cooking. I am under no impression that I’ll stop ordering food completely but I definitely have to bring it down. It’s also so hard to control what goes in your body when you’re not the one preparing it.
Okay, so not all of my resolutions are food and weight related. As many of you know, I was laid off last year and that was really hard. It’s always hard leaving a relationship or partnership when it’s not your choice. I had seen many layoffs in my short career but I had always been on the right side of them. I never thought I would be impacted and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about my career. One thing that I have always stood for has been continuous improvement. I’m not sure if it’s because I was raised as an athlete and because of my competitive nature, but I always want to. be better. The last time I switched roles it was because I was getting too comfortable in my previous role and I wanted to be challenged. I don’t want to lose that and I think that I was starting to. So my resolution for this is to learn a new professional skill. In my job search, I’m trying to focus on finding a role that I feel comfortable doing but also one that will push me outside of my comfort zone. For many years now, I have built my brand around building Tableau dashboards but I want to evolve with the world and learn about how we use data in creative ways, particularly with Artificial Intelligence. I want to make sure that I’m learning new skills and adding new and valuable experiences to my resume because I’m too young to be complacent in my career.
I’ve played tennis my entire life and honestly I’ve fell a little out of love of playing it. I still love to watch it and keep up with the players and stuff but I don’t love playing it anymore. In fact, I’ve been so spoiled at my tennis club playing on the beautiful grass courts in the summer that now I don’t want to play on any other surface. I’ve been starting to play padel a little more over the past two years but not consistently. It’s kind of like tennis in the sense that it’s a racquet sport but the plexiglass walls and fence around the court add another dimension that honestly, was very tricky for me to get the hang of at first. Now that I’ve been playing a little more, I absolutely love it and I want to challenge myself to play more padel. It’s pretty expensive to play here in New York, but it’s truly so fun and it excites me much more than playing tennis these days.
Next I want to invest my time and energy into something that I absolutely love to do. And that is to travel. While I actually hate flying, I love going places and I hate staying in one place for too long. I travel a fair amount but for this year, I want to travel to places I have never been before. Most of the time, I go visit family and friends in places where I’ve lived before or that are familiar to me. I really like the comfort of familiar places but when I traveled to Budapest, Hungary and Camprodon, Spain last year by myself, I felt so unbelievably energized. I love experiencing new places because they force me outside of my comfort zone and while I struggle with wanting to meet new people, it always ends up working out in the end. This year, I have some very exciting trips planned, some happening very soon! I can’t wait to take you guys along the journey with me. Any guesses?
Lastly, and arguably the most important one is one that I don’t want to do and one that I know will be the hardest one for me. My last resolution is to stay on top of my doctors’ appointments. As many of you know, I have a brain tumor which we don’t know if it’s malignant or benign but it’s in a very dangerous spot on my brainstem and the doctors don’t want to biopsy it unless it begins to grow and cause symptoms. We believe that I’ve had it since birth but we are supposed to have it scanned every year. I hate going to the doctor and avoid it at all costs so I missed and pushed several of my appointments in the past. My friends have had to literally call and schedule appointments with me as well as attend the appointments with me to make sure that I actually go. I don’t know why I don’t like to go to the doctor but I have to get over it. My mom had breast cancer and she was able to catch it very early because she is so on top of her appointments. I also have a deviated septum and I’ve half-assed tried to get it fixed for years now. I need to have my surgery to fix that because I literally can’t breathe and hopefully that will help with my snoring.
Anyway, New Years’ Resolutions are hard to keep up but I think that I’ve made mine realistic and sustainable enough to maintain. Let’s see how it goes. In the meantime, I’d love to hear what some of your resolutions are and how you plan to achieve them. Wishing you nothing but the best this year for you and your families.
xoxox, Marn <3
