I’ve been struggling with depression (or stress or anxiety or something keeping me off balance and my hair falling out and my weight creeping up) off and on for almost all of 2012. It’s not that it was a bad year….quite the contrary. But it was intense. Like a puppy drinking out of a water bowl brimming with espresso and ecstasy and endorphins. INTENSE. It occurred to me last week that 2012 was Too Much and the too-muchness may have been the culprit of some of my whatever-you-want-to-call-its.

I New Year’s Day I stumbled across a Facebook post of Elizabeth Gilbert. I noticed immediately feeling better. Lighter.

HERE IS THE MIRACLE…

Every January 1rst — whether you’ve earned it or not —they give you a brand new year for FREE. Imagine it! A completely fresh year — with no dinks on it, no scuff-marks, no cat hair, no spills, no collisions, no breakdowns, no funny odors, no mistakes, no failures, no parts falling off it, no nothing. Just an amazing new year (with thatterrific “new year smell”) which you can use it for ANYTHING YOU LIKE! Not only that, you are allowed to throw away your old year completely — which, if you are like me, you have always completely totaled by Dec 31. You just get to push that beat-up and tired old year off a cliff, and drive away in your bright, shiny new one…and it costs you nothing. Nothing at all. They just give it to you, every year that you live.

Amazing.

Amazing and generous, is the prize of a new year.

Love her.

So, at least in some portion of my mind, I’m reminding myself that this is a fresh start. A new year. A clean, shiny new year. To do with what I wish. I haven’t yet decided what I want from my new year other than, Peace and Happiness and Health. I don’t know that I can have one without the others. I’m reminded of what Maggie said at Camp Mighty, “Your body is a compass.” I’m pretty sure she got that from Martha Beck, who I have begun ‘reading’ on Audible (Follow Your North Star). Pair that up with my love for all things Brene Brown, then I think I have a direction.

Last year, for the New Year of 2012, I was terribly ambitious. I made a three or four tabbed spreadsheet of the year’s goals with dates and notes and progress check-ins and by the time I finished the blasted thing I wanted to close it and never look at it again. Which is pretty much how that went. After failing at the goals, one by one, I knotted up in shame and self-criticism. Did you know that if you fill up yourself with self-criticism you have almost no capacity for constructive criticism? At least I don’t. If anything, that extra criticism just confirm my own gremlins.

For 2013 (or as Jenny Lawson calls it, The Library) I am planning no real resolutions. I’m just keeping a general direction of where I want to go and how I want to get there. No goals. No charts. No high expectations from which to plummet. Just a direction in which to walk (or run or bike or down dog, depending on my mood).

Maybe it’s insanity, or maybe it’s just me, but somehow I think we all need a year in The Library.  A year where it’s safe to make mistakes.  A year where it’s okay to have to escape and stare out the window without someone asking you when you’re going to get back to work and fix your life.

~Jenny Lawson aka The Bloggess