Photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash

Each year I like to post my theme for the year and give a bit of a recap of the previous year.

My theme for last year was slowing down, and if I’m being honest, I may have slowed down a little too much in the beginning. 2023 started off fairly rocky. Without getting too personal, I made some incredibly hard decisions to say goodbye to some fairly significant relationships in my life that were no longer serving me. As a result, I ended up also losing a fairly significant part of my social circle. Not having much to do with my free time, I decided to really focus on myself, and committed myself even more to working out regularly (even reaching a streak of 230 days of working out in a row), extending my 1 month sober challenge to 70 days, and meditating and journalling regularly. I also really took the time to figure out how I liked and wanted to spend my time, paying attention to my daily routines and saying learning to say no to things I just didn’t want to do.

After slowing down to a certain point, I started feeling like I had the capacity to rebuild my social life and actually found myself reaching out to people I’d lost touch with over the years. Rebuilding those connections ended up leading me to having one of the best birthday weekends I can remember, discovering what it means to have a truly supportive partner, and realizing my assumed fate of ending up as a lonely, crazy cat lady probably wasn’t all that accurate. 

2023 may have started off quite rocky, but I ended up checking off plenty of unexpected things on my 2023 bingo card and would even go as far as saying it turned out to be one of my favorite years.

Now onto 2024…

When I started thinking of a theme for 2024 back in October of last year, my initial thought was for it to be a year of gentleness. 

I often have a tendency to beat myself up for not giving my all to everything I do. If I can’t give something a 100%, I beat myself up for failing. A great example of this was the day I broke my 230 day workout streak. I focused on the fact that I broke my streak, when I should have been proud of myself, a person who just a year earlier described themselves as someone who didn’t work out, for going 230 days without missing a single workout. 

It wasn’t until I had a conversation with my therapist that I realized it’s okay and normal to not be performing at 100% all the time. I mean even on days that I’m at 75%, I’m probably doing more than most people. So what if I missed 1 workout, on my birthday weekend I might add. The important part wasn’t that I worked out for 230 straight days, but that I had developed a habit of working out consistently. I may have missed that 231st day, but I worked out for 99% of the last 231 days, and even more importantly, I got back to working out the next day because I missed the feeling of working out.

That being said, as much as I do want to be more gentle with my own expectations, something about the “year of gentleness” didn’t quite feel right.

Then, randomly one day, months later, I thought to myself, “What if this is the year of investment?”

As someone interested in the F.I.R.E. movement, I know that investing financially is a long game. It’s full of ups and downs, wins and losses. Life’s also kind of like that. Some days I have the energy and determination to go all out and other days I just want to sit on the couch and watch football. Some days I’m going to stay up late hanging out with friends and others I may be in bed with my Kindle by 9:30. Life has its ebbs and flows and being in one or the other doesn’t mean I’ve succeeded or failed. The important part is that the trajectory is going up over time.

So 2024 will be my year of investment and with that comes:

• Continuing to invest in my health and wellbeing,
• Continuing to invest in my knowledge and personal development,
• Continuing to invest in my friendships and relationship,
• Continuing to invest in my home and lifestyle, and obviously,
• Continuing to invest in my journey to financial independence.

Here’s to another year! Happy 2024 everyone!