Dear (online) diary,

The new year has come around, just like it always does. It’s finally 2015! New Year’s is always refreshing for me, because I don’t like to spend a lot of time thinking about the past – which is why this blog has been good for me, because it’s given me a chance to go back and find out what I was thinking a year ago. I’m never usually sad to see the previous year go, and as far as I can tell, it’s the same now. Although 2014 was a wonderful year to me, which I’m very lucky and happy to be able to say, I’m not particularly sad. I like to think of New Year’s as a new start (I know, I know, incredibly cheesy) and I can just let go of all the feelings and thoughts and regrets that I’ve been clinging to over the course of the year. At New Year’s, I can begin again. I can make myself a blank slate and no one will notice, because they’re all too busy doing the same thing themselves. However, I don’t like to set ‘resolutions’, necessarily. When I think of the word ‘resolution’, I think of something that you’re bound to, that you have to carry out whether or not you want to. I like to set goals instead. Goals are less constricting, and they give you more freedom to achieve your plans in the way that you want. Resolutions have never worked for me because I feel stuck to them, and on top of that, I kind of feel like they’re meant exclusively to be created around the New Year’s time. Goals are something that you can drop and pick up again later when you feel a bit better about it.

I spent a lot of time during 2014 thinking about what I wanted to improve about myself and my lifestyle. Whenever I stumbled across something that I wanted to change, I just made a mental note and told myself, “Save this for New Year’s. It’ll be perfect for then.”

In that case, I suppose you could say that my very first 2015 goal will be to stop procrastinating. ;)

I’ve been looking back at the past year, and I’ve decided that I want to try and become a nicer person. I tend to blurt things out before I think through them, and some of the remarks I make are kind of cutting, even if I don’t mean them to be. I know it’s not a transformation that happens overnight, but I’m going to try and learn how to bite my tongue before I speak. I think that’s the most important skill in conversation – being able to decide what is appropriate to say out loud and what should be kept to yourself. I also want to improve upon the things I love to do while staying humble, because I think that’s important. The best quality about a person is when they are really passionate about something, but also really modest about it. That’s something that I aspire to achieve. The things that I would like to dedicate more time and work towards are my writing and my music.

My third goal is to become better at seeing through the projects that I start. I have a really bad habit, as I’m sure most people do, at abandoning the things that I begin. I’ve begun to learn how to code through a really cool site called http://www.codecademy.com, and that’s something that I hope I don’t forget about soon, because it’s really awesome to learn how technology works. I also have a bunch of different story plots that I’d like to set into motion, but again, I’m afraid to do so because I don’t want to abandon it, which I have a horrible tendency to do!

My fourth and final goal, at least for now, is to become more tolerant of the opinions of others. I won’t publicly state my opinions for this exact same reason, but I find that in general, humans tend to value their own viewpoints over the viewpoints of others. This can make us, as a whole, rather violent when it all boils down to who is right and who is wrong. I understand that everyone is entitled to their own outlook, which we should respect as a general rule, but there is no point to forcing your opinion onto others that might not share it. I wouldn’t say that I’m the kind of person who does that, but I am the kind of person that is easily frustrated when others do it. This kind of goes hand in hand with the ‘think before you speak’ goal, but I’d like to learn how to ‘think before I explode’. We have to respect what our peers do, even if we don’t agree with it. So, to sum this one up, my fourth and final goal is to become more agreeable and not as irritable.

I hope you enjoyed this post and that perhaps it inspired you to set some goals of your own this year! I also hope you had a safe and happy New Year’s with your family and friends!