My Brain's Not Broken

For the first time last year, I didn’t make a New Year’s resolution. I had my reasons and I stick by them, but in the back of my head, I knew I was feeling some type of way about the concept of New Years’ resolutions. Mostly it’s because they’ve never worked out for me. There’s an inherent belief that when we do what we’re supposed to, things will go our way. That extends to a lot of things in life but in this case, that meant every year, I was ready for things to go my way if I stuck to my resolutions. That never really seemed to be the case.

Going into 2019 I had a few very big plans that did not come to fruition. That wasn’t because of success or failure, but because some of those things were really not meant to be. Once I understood that I made the decisions I needed to make and tried to move on. But it wasn’t easy then, and it’s not easy now.

Seeing how those plans didn’t work out made me nervous to make goals for 2020. My mental health and life situation are currently in the same state right now, which is rare for me. In both cases, things have improved and they feel stable. But where am I going? What am I doing? How am I improving? I honestly don’t even know what I’m working toward right now. It’s especially strange that this is happening in both instances because I’ve always kind of relied on one of these areas to need more fixing than the other.

Having an ambitious spirit isn’t helpful when you don’t know where to place that ambition. I’m at a unique point in my life right now, and I don’t quite know where to go. Looking through last year’s posts, I realized I asked a lot of these same questions in April 2019. So what did I say then? Enjoy the good memories. Celebrate the little victories. And while mental health disorders can set us back, they can’t erase the progress we’ve made. And I made progress in 2019.

Thinking about this brought two quotes to mind. Both wonderful on their own, I’d like to connect them for my own use here. The first is Ralph Waldo Emerson:

“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”

But what if we don’t know what trail to leave? Let’s see what Lewis Carroll has to say about that:

“If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.”

I might not know where ‘there’ is, but taking a step forward will help me get there. And then another step and another step and another…and let’s just see what path I end up making.