Happy New Year!

I hope you all had an enjoyable New Year's celebration! But now that it's over, you know what's coming. Yep, that's right. I'm talking resolutions.  Here are mine!

I put on my serious face for this post. My serious face wears two types of glasses. It's a look I rock sometimes.

1. Work harder on this here blog and my youtube channel. 2012 is over and I still don't have a "real" job (My "fake" job, of course, is Senior Crayon-Namer for Crayola). And I'm not gonna lie, it scares the crap out of me. I've spent more than my fair share of hours crying at my laptop after looking through every job listing in the state (and some out of the state - I hear Austin is pretty nice), or laying awake at night thinking about the future until I get so anxious and scared I throw up. 2013: year of the gritty truth!
   
        But that's my life right now, and other than trying my damnedest to find a job, I can't change it. I can't just will my life to make sense. But in the meantime, writing and making things is the only thing keeping me sane. My ultimate fear is not doing anything with my life, and when it seems like I'll never find a respectable grown-up job, it's easy to feel like that's what's happening: I'm doing nothing. So I'm going to try to put all the energy I would otherwise use panicking about the unknown into writing and creating. I need to be able to say "This is what I've been doing. It may not be much, but it's something."
   
   
2. Get on a normal sleep schedule. I'd love to be the kind of person who wakes up bright and early every morning feeling chipper and rested, but I'm not. I have a hard time falling asleep in the first place, let alone staying asleep for a whole night without waking up shaking the imaginary Alaskan King Crabs out of my duvet or something equally deranged (I want a pin that says "Ask me about my sleep disorders!" and then in smaller print "No, really. I have fun stories" to wear on my jacket).
   
        You never know if I'll join the world of the living at noon or greet you creepily from the breakfast table at 6:30 because I never went to sleep. So it's pretty ambitious for me to aim for a good night's sleep at all, but I'd really like to get to a point where I'm falling asleep at a point in time generally classified as "night" and waking up within the confines of what is technically "morning." I feel like it would do wonders for my mental health. And would probably also help with resolution number three...
   
   
3. Be more positive. Creative people with anxiety problems are the worst, because we can think of a downside to literally anything.
   
        It's a nice sunny day? The thinned ozone layer leaves us all more vulnerable than ever, meaning every second we enjoy the sun's warmth on our skin increases our risk of skin cancer and accelerates the aging process that will claim us all one day because even the beautiful things in life can destroy us.
   
        Won the lottery? What if people try to take advantage of your new wealth and you become increasingly paranoid until eventually you invest all your money in gold bars and bury them in various places around the house but someone finds out and they break in and murder you so they can find them all, and no one will notice you're missing because you got distrustful of all your friends and family long ago and self-isolated?
   
        And so forth. I'm pretty good at being optimistic for other people, but when it comes to my own situations, I let myself get carried away imagining all the ways everything could go wrong. I know I'd be happier if I let myself be optimistic, but I always feel like it's stupid to hope for and expect good things because I'll only be more jaded when something falls apart. Somehow I convince myself that bad things won't feel as bad if I can say "I saw it coming," but it really doesn't help. So I'm going to have to force myself to have that faith that naturally optimistic people have that it'll all work out in the end, that it's going to be a good day, that people are going to be nice to me, and all that jazz.
   
        And if I can't manage full-stop optimism all the time, I'm at least going to try to say to myself "Ok, this might suck. But my hair looks bangin' today." Baby steps!