Every December around this time I have watched people posting about their accomplishments and goals for the next year, and it used to make me feel small and not enough. Everyone on social media seems to have vision boards that they make a reality, and lifestyle gurus recommend having a 5-year plan, and here I am struggling with seeing the future beyond a few months ahead. 

It’s been about 8 years since I ran out of a good woman’s life blueprint, and I am still inventing it as I go, and it still has not gotten easy. When all you were prepared for was to survive your life and react/adapt to what’s happening, shifting to living the life and making things happen is a daring endeavor.

Goal setting has been a daunting task for me since the set of the ready-made molds no longer fit the person I was becoming and the decisions I was making to survive. Up until my 30th birthday I was following a template inherited from and installed by my culture and family: finish school, get a degree, get married, have children… and nothing is really clear after that. Career planning was never part of my life prep as a girl, as I was not supposed to have one as a woman. I should’ve had a job, got a paycheck; but a career with milestones and long-term goals was not part of the mindset shaping. Entrepreneurship also was never presented to me as an option, because everyone I had ever known was living in the familiar safety and anxiety of the paycheck to paycheck. So, when I turned 30 and divorced my ex-husband, I did not have any ready-made ideas about what I could be and do. Zero.

A couple of years ago a friend told me about her alternative to goals idea of setting a theme or having a word for the upcoming year. “Goals sometimes make you feel really inadequate and even bad at the end of the year, if you did not get a chance to actually complete them all,” she explained to me, “and a guiding theme or a word help you reflect on the year and see how you followed it.” That felt right.

This will be my third year of setting a theme for the year, instead creating a list of goals to achieve. 2023’s theme word was “Alignment”, and I spent the year aligning everything external in my life to how I felt internally. I examined all things, activities, places, and relationships to see what still fit, what needed adjustments, and what I had outgrown completely. Before making any decision I faced that year, I asked myself which answer feels more aligned with who I am and what I want to be.

2024 has been dedicated to “Expansion”. The question I have been asking myself when making decisions has been: will this make me feel small and contracted or will I grow and expand as a result? This year I pushed the boundaries of my comfort zone; I chose to speak up every time I felt I had something to say. I traveled a lot: in-state, inter-state, internationally; I started a community of women in Tucson with the purpose of supporting each other’s path and healing. I spoke up about inequities at work, and despite it not having brought any positive outcome, I feel so much stronger and more confident for having done what I felt was right. 

8 years ago I ran out of that “good life” blueprint. I still do not have a 5-year vision. And it is ok. I choose to believe that it is ok not to know the future, it is ok to take your time to figure life out, it is ok to try things and turn around, it is ok to quit and start anew, it is ok to wish you had known better when you did not, it is ok to wish it was not this hard, it is ok to feel tired, it is ok to look inside for answers. 

My 2025 theme will be “Courage”. And the questions I will be asking myself any time there is a decision to be made:

What is the courageous thing to do? Am I making this decision out of courage or fear? 

Happy New Year!