Whew – 2020 is officially in the rearview mirror. Can I hear a Hallelujah? I am certain the entire world has a different perspective on the New Year this morning compared to a year ago. I know I definitely do while I sit here enjoying the last day of Christmas decorations and enjoying a cozy fire in my fireplace.
When I woke up a year ago, I had so many goals and aspirations for 2020. A lot were the typical New Year’s resolutions; lose weight, travel more, become debt free, and excel professionally. However, as I wrote these out, I realized that I didn’t want to be typical in the new year. After thinking and of course googling ideas, I decided to choose a word of the year versus going down the resolution path. The word would be the year of “ME”. This seemed appropriate since I was only a year into empty nesting, and I had dedicated my entire life to what everyone else wanted. Sound Familiar?? I decided that I would be “selfish” in 2020. Selfish meant taking better care of myself and making more decisions based on my wants and desires versus asking other’s opinions.
The Year of Me
The year started off as expected with trips to Vegas, San Diego, St Louis, and Dallas in the first 10-weeks. Professionally I was doing very well and there were a lot of anticipated changes coming very quickly in my corporate life. My personal life was not the best but not terrible either. I had a relationship on the rocks (don’t worry it was only a couple of months old at that point and it only lasted 6 months total) and my health was not doing well. Then March hit and the world flipped on its axis. Not only was the pandemic in full swing but I was also diagnosed by two different doctors with Fibromyalgia. Neither of these doctors were any help and you can read more about that in my Fibromyalgia diagnosis post.
Let’s talk about what worked &/or what I learned during 2020:
- Working from home reduces my Fibro flares because I can control my daily schedule a little bit better than when I am in the office.
- Self-Care and Self-Discovery aren’t just two over used words but two extremely important things that everyone should focus on.
- I started The Fibro Nomad blog (yes that is what you are reading 😉) because I couldn’t find anything out there that helped Fibro Warriors in a positive way while encouraging travel to explore this amazing world.
- Spending unexpected precious time with my daughter which will become less and less since she is a junior in college.
- I was able to achieve a lot of financial goals
Now that 2020 is in that rearview mirror, it is time to focus on a new year! I am going to stick with the word of the year idea again and for 2021 it will be “Focus”. The goal is to take what I learned and discovered worked for me in 2020 and focus in on those this year.
The following will be my FOCUS in 2021:
- Self-Care – I discovered this really improves my Fibromyalgia symptoms.
- Walking My Dogs – this falls into the above category because the higher my daily step count, the better I feel. However, it is its own item because I feel it is what I let slip the most in 2020.
- Self-Discovery – this is something I used to roll my eyes out. I am in my forties, why do I need to discover myself. NOT TRUE! Life changes regularly and I learned how important this is!
- Better Blogger – I love this blog and the community of people that it is creating. I need to be more consistent sharing with you.
- Travel More – I discovered how much I like solo travel in 2020. I have been doing it for years but I truly fell in love with it early in 2020. Still being in a pandemic makes this difficult to plan trips. My focus will be to travel at least once a month even if it is more of a staycation type trip.
As we start this new year, we are still in a pandemic. There are still a lot of unknowns and it is difficult to make plans for the upcoming year. The vaccine is out and hopefully we will begin to see the world return to pre-pandemic days. We have to hold onto the hope that it will sooner than later!
Wishing you a wonderful 2021 and cheers to only seeing 2020 in that mirror!
