making anti-goals again

This is the time of year that makes me crazy. People make goals left and right and they put pressure on me to make goals. What's wrong with goals? Goals make your life better. Why wouldn't you want your life to be better?

The problem with making goals at New Years for me is that I make goals all the time. I have trouble not making goals. And once a goal is made, I kill myself to make that goal happen. I don't just shrug my shoulders and say, maybe next year. I do everything in my power to get to that goal, and then when I don't anyway, I spend months afterwards remembering I didn't make my goal and telling myself how horrible I am because I didn't. That is pretty much how I spent my Sunday, making lists of things that I hadn't done yet and that I should put on my list of things to do, and struggling valiantly not to put them down anywhere. Because once written, they are indelible. If I don't write them down, then I don't feel compelled to do them.

What I tried to do instead was to think of the great things that I got done this year without any goals. Most of them are too personal to share here, but one of them has been Twitter. I could not believe that Twitter would be something I would like, but I do. I love Twitter. And you know what? I no longer consider myself to be so socially maladept that I offend everyone I meet. I discovered this by going to a couple of national conferences this year (OK, that was a goal), and I did not, in fact, offend anyone to my knowledge.

One of the things I would like to do this year is to become more flexible about how I think about my writing and my career, so that I see more clearly different ways of working on it. This is not the kind of goal that you are supposed to set. It has no measures, no time limit, and no way of deciding if I have failed or not. So that's why I am picking it, because I need some things to have no measures. Just to be a thought in my head that rattles around and lets me think. I spent some time this year working on a play and then on fanfic that I've never done before, and it was fun. I think that's the sort of flexibility I am going for. I don't know what form it will take, but I say this year, bring it on!