How To Make Changes This Year That Stick

It’s much easier when the process becomes part of your identity

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

For the first time in forever, I’m not spending the twilight zone between Christmas and New Year recovering from some combination of burnout and emotional dumpster fire.

Instead, there’s space in my head to think about what I want my life to be; to acknowledge what’s working and let go of what’s not.

Over the past year, I’ve started to glimpse what it might be like to make things happen for me, rather than life being a relentless onslaught of things happening to me.

I’m cautious because of all the times I thought I had it together only to spiral back down to where I started. Convinced I had banished negative ways of thinking only to have brutal reality rush in and fill the hole.

I’ve put in some pretty solid work unlearning the damaging messages of my childhood; beliefs unwittingly reinforced by the choices of my adult life. Woven in between were diagnoses of autism, ADHD and generalised anxiety and the quandary of how trauma shapes and is shaped by neurodivergence.

I read articles and followed links. I listened to podcasts. I read the important books: Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents by Lindsay C Gibson, Untamed by Glennon Doyle…