My New Year — The Basic Bitch Blog

I have, and well, still am a huge fan of birthdays. Especially my own birthday. I turn my birthday into a week long affair, though now that I’m older I have scaled the celebration length down a bit. My parents always made my birthday special, I think that’s where my love for celebrating it so much comes from. Then as a teenager my good friend shared the same birthday as me, and her and I would always make a deal of having a group party or doing a dinner. There was just always multiple celebrations for my birthday in those days. I know as we age, we seem to want to celebrate less and less. For the record I don’t fall into that category, but I know a lot of other people do. Celebrating every year you’re older is a blessing and shouldn’t be viewed as a negative thing. This mantra really hit home in the last few years as I’ve dealt with a parent and a best friend who have faced cancer head on. Being healthy and aging is an amazing thing that we shouldn’t dread. We should view our birthdays not only as a celebration but as a reflection of our previous year. What did we learn? What did we endure? What were we grateful for? Our birthday is now the official start of OUR new year, forget the calendar new year. We should use our birthdays to set our intentions for the next year. Outline your goals and reflect on your life and what you’d like to change. There is always room for positive changes and you are never to old to make those changes. With that being said not all of our year’s intentions can be set at one time, life changes within a year and therefore our intentions will change or we will have to tweak them as the year goes on.

Let's start with reflection of my 33rd year. I will say, it has been my most memorable to date. I mean I delivered a tiny human and I’m still riding on that high! Since then I’ve been raising that tiny little human and every day is an actual, adventure. There really is, nothing like seeing the world through a new soul’s eyes. On the other spectrum, I dealt with having to support and say “goodbye” to my stepdaughter who moved out. She’s the girl who taught me what kind of mother I wanted to be and it broke my heart to see her go. I also finally took the leap into blogging after it being a small daydream in the back of my mind for many years. I’ve had this blog name picked out for so long and honestly I was shocked it was available. I took that as a “sign” of good things to come with the blog. Through the blog my path has crossed with so many lovely and unique souls. I thought the internet was full of nasty negative people, especially the way the world has gone the last year, but this blog has helped me realize there are super wonderful people still out there! I know there are other memories to reflect on but these were the biggest for me.

My 34th year is going to be filled with more life alternating changes and as I said not all intentions can be set at once for the entire year. I know, as I type this, I will have to set more intentions in the next couple of months or tweak some of my intentions I’d like to set now. Below are some of the intentions I'm setting.

I want to continue eating and living a healthy lifestyle, mind and physical body. I want to continue to make more of an effort to not consume meats and other animal by products. After becoming a mother I have never empathized more with livestock animals. Is that weird?
I also want to lessen my carbon footprint as much as my life can allow it. Yes I know my car, purchased 4 years ago, has leather seats and maybe isn't that environmentally friendly. Does that mean I’ll get rid of my car? No. What it means is I will be more conscious of how my life choices are impacting the world I’ll leave behind for my children. As I said, it’s never to late to change your ways and better yourself.
I want to be a better listener. I tend to want to help people by offering support through my words but, sometimes people don’t want your words as support. They just want you to listen to them. This will be hard to do as I have a natural urge to help people and the thought of just listening doesn't feel like helping to me.
I want to disconnect from technology at nighttime and get back to reading books. I even joined the library this year so I can save money on books yet read more of them.
I also want to ensure, no matter how shit a day might be, I find at least one thing that made me happy or thankful that day. I've created this “Happiness Jar” and at the end of each day I will write myself a little note of something that made me happy or grateful that day. On the eve of my 35th birthday I plan to read my 365 notes to remind myself how wonderful year 34 was. Sometimes a year can seem like a bad one based on one shitty experience or event that year, but this jar will help me realize I had something everyday that made me feel happy or grateful.

I’m really looking forward to what year 34 has in store for me and I plan to enjoy it to the fullest. As I said I think we need to STOP dreading birthdays because we are aging and look at them as a time to reflect, change and show ourselves some self love. With that being said Happy New Year to me and love and happiness to you all!