I often find myself feeling a little blue this time of year.  The holidays are so special to me–time off, more time with family, welcoming the light back into the world, lots of reasons to be grateful, joyful and celebrate officially built into the calendar.  After January 1st, I find myself focusing on all the ways that I have failed to be the mother, wife, and person I wanted to be in the previous year.  Depressing and hardly the way to start a a new beginning.

But gosh darn it, I love a clean slate…the promise of a new beginning.  Why do the blues always creep in at this time of year?  A time where I should be celebrating the chance to let go of my failures and embrace some of the feelings that I love best–hope.

I’ve been soul searching.  Looking at my life.  Being honest with myself.  It isn’t easy for me to acknowledge the flaws in my character, my faults as a human being, and even my personal weaknesses.  I think I tend to set my goals without thought to how these imperfections because I don’t want to believe that they are there–a constant threat to waylaying me on my path to human perfection being a somewhat decent and productive person.

I am probably never going to evict them.  My dirty little defects are a part of me.  This year, or at least for the first two-three days of 2012, I’m going to try to overcome them–to achieve in spite of them.

So the hardest part for me is to admit ’em.  Best just rip the bandaid off.

1.  I am disorganized.  Terribly so.  Even if I have a place for everything–it seldom ends up taking residence there.

2.  I procrastinate.  Sinfully.  Sometimes this is okay–like procrastinating vacuuming so that I can play with my kids.  But too often my procrastination looks more like not sorting through the pile of paper so that I can burn up google looking for the perfect article on how to sort through the paper.

3.  I love starting a project.  I don’t know if I like to finish a project because I don’t have any experience in doing so.  I think I would like it though….it has to be better than having thousands of great starts.

4.  I blow off social commitments.  Yeah, sorry about that.  Does it help that I tend to convince myself of the veracity of the excuses I make up in my head about why I can’t do x,y,z with you even though we planned it three weeks ago?  Didn’t think so.  It doesn’t make me feel any better either.

5.  I’m obsessive.  I fixate on my latest worry/project/notion almost to the complete exclusion of everything else.  It is bad and does nothing but enhance flaws 1-4.

The list goes on…and on and on and on.  But these are the major ones and I think I need to set attainable goals for once.  I think I have a plan for flaws 1-4.  Pretty basic.  But 5 kind of stumps me and I have no idea how to work with this deeply ingrained demon.

So, even though my plan is flawed–in that I don’t have a plan for number 5.  I am going to embrace the fact that I am the eternal hope junkie–the fact that I always think things will turn out for the best and allow myself to feel optimistic at the prospect of making personal improvements.

Oh yeah, I’m going to blog every single day in 2012 too…if you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you….