buckle up

I don’t get enough restful sleep these days to appropriately sum up how I feel about resolutions. It’s something combining ‘fun tradition’ and ‘setting myself up to fail’. With that said, as this new year starts I want to make sure I have all of my focus on what’s really important to me: my family, me, and work.

There’s a certain care I put into writing for the public, something I don’t do when jotting down notes for only my reference. There’s no pressure in writing for me and only me, but the product lacks a certain polish. And it’s that polish that I appreciate when looking back later. It’s important to me to capture these memories with Olen and TPS and from life in general in a way I’ll want to remember them, so I will focus on writing more here. With pictures! Lucky you.

I really need to take time and fix one of the broken parts of me this year. For most of the month of December I battled with anxiety again. It makes sense — with the baby’s sleep schedule being fragile at best, pressure to create traditions and carry them out, holiday gatherings to attend, and me trying to stay on top of work and life and all of the extras that December brings — the stress built up and built up and then one day it burst forth into a heart-racing freakout of epic proportions. And after that, it was like my body had the fresh memory of the freakout and was willing to replay it over and over again, almost every night and day. It was like I was standing on the edge of a stage about to walk out perform something I hadn’t quite mastered. Just standing there with a knot in my throat and no amount of deep breathing could make it go away.

It’s obvious even to me that I need to fix this. First up: a thyroid test to make sure the thyroid meds that were once perfect haven’t kicked things into overdrive because I’ve now lost the baby weight. (And then some, yay!) I’m really keeping my fingers crossed that’s it’s just a medication imbalance. If it isn’t, I’m going to have to turn to therapy of some sort — traditional, alternative, and/or pharmaceutical. It’s something I’ve gone to great lengths to avoid in the past few years, especially the pharmaceutical part. But I’ll do whatever it takes, because this anxiety stuff just does not contribute to me being the best me possible.

And last, I am so excited about heading into the new year with my business. Last year was a year of tremendous growth for my web sites in both visits and revenue, even though one of the sites I run is dying a slow death. (Its death, however, opened up more time for me to focus on writing here.)

I struggled a lot this year with the fact I went from “blogger” to “blogger and community manager”. My visitors use the comments of every post to chat amongst themselves — sometimes for weeks on end — and although I never wanted to police their interactions, a few times I’ve had to step in and deal with some of that good old ‘internet crazy’. I’d love to wish for none of the drama at all in the coming year, but since that’s fairly unavoidable I just hope I can have the patience and clarity to deal with it in the best possible manner when it comes up.

I ended this year with a small Twitter project that has been eye-opening and really entertaining for me both professionally and personally — details forthcoming in one of those half-written posts I mentioned last time. I will work hard to make sure that 2011 brings more awesome projects, more loyal visitors, and of course revenue.

So that’s it for this year: make and record family memories (thoughtfully!), take care of me, and totally kick ass at work. That sounds deceptively simple. I don’t know about you, but I’m buckling my seatbelt up tight for this ride.