When Your Heart Knows the Truth, it Never Forgets

I don't make New Year’s resolutions. I’m not entirely sure why, but I think it has to do with the fact that resolutions are well meaning goals that most people abandon within the second to third month of the year. Most involve fitness, living a healthier lifestyle, and I remember moments at the gym in January where you couldn't find a machine to work out on, and by Valentine's Day the gym was empty. For me, I feel you should make daily goals, and work toward achieving those. A once a year resolution seems ridiculous to me. It's like saying this is the only goal I want to achieve this year, and then failing at it. I know some people actually succeed with their resolutions, but experience has taught me a good number don't. The idea of setting a resolution just doesn't appeal to me, never has.


There are things I would like to accomplish this year that some would say are resolutions, and I do hope that I can find a way to accomplish them.


I didn’t write for myself as much during the year as I had hoped to. I was too busy writing for others. This year I am hoping to change that, and do less work for others and more for myself. I've already started the process of writing blog articles for a fitness site and a beauty site that I created, but it's going to take time to build them up. I've begun the process of pulling notes out of my notebooks and typing them on to the computer. Once I'm in the flow of moving words from paper to word processor, I find myself writing paragraphs from my head, and completing large gaps in stories, easily hitting a thousand words and sometimes more, in a short span of time. I am hoping to use those short stories to produce my first e-book of shorts. E-books can be as short as thirty pages. Seeing that number makes the process of producing less frightening, but it still feels like the fitness resolutions some people make and then abandon. I am working on finishing two novels that I began a long time ago, placed on a website, and then pulled down. After having reread my work, and looking at the word counts I already have, I am at novel length for these stories. I know I have what it takes to complete projects, but time is a factor, and there is never enough time to do everything I want to do. Time slows down the process. Writing is not a resolution for me. This is a career goal. It's the most important goal for me.

The world wide web has made earning an income at home so much easier, but it still takes more work than most people realize. If you are thinking you'll get rich quick on-line, you are dead wrong. Most people who have had success on-line worked hard, produced lots of content, and then added advertising to that content to generate an income. There is a point when you can run on autopilot because you have built up enough on-line that it generates residual income, but you still have to spend time producing new content in order to remain relevant. So yes, those cat videos that go viral on-line has netted someone a hefty profit, but those people started from nothing, and worked to build something. That's a goal of mine, to build websites with my own content, and build a following. It takes dedication and perseverance to succeed at this type of on-line business. The reason most people fail in this type of work is because they give up too soon.

And then there is this fashion blog. This year I've really started putting an effort into writing for this space. I would like to increase the amount of posts that I produce. I don't know how realistic that goal is considering how many other balls I'm juggling, but I also feel like this is my home and that I owe it to myself and my followers to come up with more content about myself so that they can get to know me better.

When I work towards something, I take a whole lot of time preparing and agonizing over details. What that means for me is hours and hours of writing, and reading, and then rewriting. It means hours of research. It means hours of window shopping and programming so that I receive compensation for what I promote. It means accepting products for review, testing the quality, and then producing an article or review for the company sending it to me. It means writing for others so that I receive a paycheck while working towards achieving my personal goals.

For all my preparation, I still have moments that I have to face where I feel like I am diving into the deep-end of uncertain waters, and I do get insecure. Say I've just finished a story (or a blog post), and now I am sitting in front of my computer screen, with the little arrow hovering over the publish button, about to release a story I originally wrote for myself, and now I'm contemplating releasing it to the public. These are moments when I question if my writing is good enough, when I question if I even have anything valuable to say, and sometimes I feel like I need reassurance. These insecure moments are terrifying for me, and they are never easy, but they are necessary. These moments remind me that I can’t let fear rule my life. When you are writing you should be writing for yourself, and there should be some expectation that someone someday will read your writing.

So no, there will be no New Year’s resolutions this year because it is not my style, but that doesn't mean I won't set goals for myself, or that I won't be working hard to achieve them.