Days of Love.

My sweet friend Shelby has been doing this series for a couple of years, and I was thrilled to be a part of it this year!

Here's what I had to say about love (but you should read the rest of the series as well because they'll make your heart all kinds of happy). 

February: Be more honest.

I know, I know, it's February. The "love" month. I should have picked "be more loving" or "be more sentimental" or even "teach yourself to like the color pink even though you've refused to for years." 

But I didn't--because I think being more honest kind of leads to being more of those things (not the pink thing. The loving and sentimental things).
I'm also a terrible liar--so why did I choose to work on being more honest for February?

I think we all like to hide from reality behind knee-jerk responses and carefully calculated subject changes.
I'm notoriously bad at letting people help me solve problems and even worse at showing my emotions.
Being vulnerable isn't one of my strengths--but I'm working on it.
That's why this month, I'm trying to be more honest; more honest about my feelings, more honest with the people around me, and more honest with myself especially.

I think I've always equated feelings with weakness. Being vulnerable about anything meant that I wasn't capable of handling something on my own, whether it was an essay I was struggling to write, an event I was planning where I may have bitten off more than I could chew, or coming to that point in a relationship where I realized that this was good but acknowledging that would mean I had something to lose and losing is one of those things I hate.
I'm one hundred times better at helping people fix their problems then fixing my own--or heaven forbid, making somebody help me figure mine out.
But (and this is huge for me), I've realized that I make things a million times more difficult for myself if I'm trying to keep everything inside and figure things out by myself.

We (or maybe just it's just me here) in this world filled with the idea that things have to be perfect to be good. Nothing is perfect, not everything is easy, and good grief, some of us have really really bad
days.
This month, I'm teaching myself that it's okay to have a bad day, it's okay to be emotional about things, and it's okay to really feel.
Maybe this love month will make me less heartless after all. ;)

January: Be more present.

I'll admit it, I'm absolutely terrible at keeping my New Year's resolutions--but I know I'm not the only one. By the end of January, they're more like really good ideas that would have been cool than things I'm actually working on to make myself a better human. 

That said, I wanted to go into this year with goals for myself, because #newyearnewme, right? But rather than making a list of things I was likely to forget or abandon in the next 31 days, I made a list of 12 things I wanted to work on, and assigned each one a month. 

Now, I'm sure that approximately 0% of you people reading this actually care, but this is my way of being accountable: my place to record what I'm doing, how I did it, and how it worked. So read away, or don't. You choose. ;) 

January: Be More Present

I'm a ridiculously sentimental person. I hate deleting photos and emails, I mark big events or my favorite memories in my planner (and then keep those planners forever), and I just barely (we're talking two weeks ago) threw away all  some of the notes and letters from when I was in JUNIOR HIGH. 

It's my way of remembering the "important" things, despite my terrible memory. 

As I was cleaning up my inbox + camera roll + messages over Christmas break however, I realized just how unnecessary all of that was. 

I'm going to remember the truly important things, even if I don't have 15 screenshots of texts about it saved on my phone. 

And then Dumbledore reminded me that "it does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live" and I realized that daydreams fell into that category and dwelling on the past wasn't helping my future. 

So for January, I'm going to work on being more present. More appreciative of the here & now rather than ultra-nostalgic for the then & there. 

For me, that meant deleting the dozens of screenshots of texts that weren't important + 4-year-old text conversations with people I haven't spoken to in months because "there's some good stuff in there," clearing my inbox of two years worth of emails that I poured my Monday mornings into, and getting rid of things that had meant a lot to me once upon a time but were nothing more than trinkets with a touch of nostalgia that were cluttering my desk + the top of my dresser. 

The important things will always be there--and that's true for every part of life. 

There's just so much good happening right now that I don't want to miss a single second of it because I was caught up in what was instead of what is.

Master Oogway said it best. "Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift; that is why it is called the present."