I had an epiphany in my kitchen this morning. I had just finished hurriedly rinsing last evenings dirty dishes and was stood in front of my window thinking about which panic stricken task was next required for completion before work. It was at this moment, dragging my nail bitten fingertips through unwashed strands of lank unstyled hair, when this solitary invigorating thought eclipsed all others. I don't want to be this person anymore, I want to be this person instead.
This person was a sudden flourish of transformations to the current nuances of my attitude which have been holding me back for years. Some of you are now thinking that this is an incredibly easy and straightforward practice to put into place. And in theory it is. Everyone is all too painfully aware of the things which they don't like about themselves. A lot of the time people are even aware of how to go about changing these things. What they're lacking however is how to connect the two together. Or quite simply, the inclination to want to change. It's as though a clarifying beam of light has shone into the dark recesses of my forgotten ambition and banished all traces of the resigned ambivalence from sight.
Having direction in your life is a very rare and downplayed advantage to possess. Perspective can be engulfing and you feel at once both intoxicated and calm. But perhaps the most overwhelming realisation of all is that it was always there. It's like falling in love. You're suddenly alight and you can't remember how or when it started, but it was there, patiently flickering the whole time waiting for you to notice. I spent 2011 gaining this perspective and 2012 will be spent putting it into practice.
Some of you will now say that my resolution is ambiguous. And you'd be right. So I'll tell you what's going to change. I'm going to stop taking myself so seriously and let my defences come down without feeling that it's necessary to attack. I'm going to stop being nonchalant and say what I mean. I'm going to stop feigning a blase attitude and risk getting hurt. I'm going to stop thinking that being nice is a chink in my armour. I'm going to try and dispel the pretentious self-importance which has accumulated through years of over-analysing the perceptions of others.
But most importantly I'm going to stop locking facets of my personality away. It's all very well building the necessary walls by which to protect yourself with, but while a fortress of solitude is thought provoking, a fortress of isolation is detrimental. Lulling yourself with the negative and false judgements of others is very easily done, but all it does is breed self-loathing and a callous attitude which is inflicted at every calculating whim. Well, I'm not prepared to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I may not know exactly what I want but for the first time I'm being propelled in the direction of finding out what it is. If 2011 was about looking up, 2012 is about looking forward. The Mayan era may have ended, but the world is still turning and I feel more alive than ever before.
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