AN OPEN LETTER TO ME (AND ANYONE WHO DOUBTS THEMSELVES)
Welcome to 2024. Have you chuckled yet? Made yourself laugh thinking about your younger self and the shear level of angst you could muster on a Tuesday morning in 2014?
I spent the majority of 2023 trying to prove to myself that I was making the right decision. About my future and how to spend it. About my past and how to reconcile it. I needed to settle my ledger. I guess I was trying to balance the check book of my existence with no pen and no concrete knowledge about check books and balancing them. It always felt like I was floundering up. Getting lucky and dancing on the edge of destruction but now in that fun, music video, sexy way. In that “should I be left alone with myself? That “Horse in charge of a dog” level of unstable.
Looking back now, I’m being dramatic and I had a firmer handle on things than I led myself to believe but stay with me! I had been convincing myself that I wasn’t in charge of me and it was working. (I swear this isn’t just doom and gloom, i’m about to pendulum swing into joy in about a paragraph or so.)
So what’s different in 2024?
To be honest, nothing. I’m still the same person with the same propensity to doubt myself but I’m trying a little something different. What if I treated myself like I was my biggest fan? Like I only wanted to see myself succeed no matter what? It doesn’t cost anything to just believe in myself and I already live in a country sustained by Krispy Kreme and delusion. I’ve got nothing to lose except a little stress and a few points off my blood pressure. Maybe I’ll drink more water and write a screenplay. Put myself in more rooms I don’t belong in and learn to ride a bike. I can do anything. We can all do anything, we’re just constantly looking for someone else to tell us it’s cool or possible or worth doing. But we don’t have a personal hype man so maybe we have to be our own hype men (hype people? Why does the hype have a gender?)
Now don’t take this as some “New Year, New Me” “self-help” BS. You don’t have to follow any of this and I’m just throwing spaghetti at the wall know that the wall is made of sticks and spit. I’m just saying that, of all the things you could do this year, believing in yourself is low- hanging fruit.
I am allowing myself to thrive in spite of myself. I am letting myself have it.