January Woes

January is a dark month for me. This is my thirty-fifth January and I have now had enough of them that I automatically dread them. I know what’s coming. I know this month is bad for me. I try to be intentional with how to combat it, but it’s always ugly.

We’re half way through January 2019 and I have already found myself praying for the sixth time, “God, how many start overs can I have?”

Start over with being kinder to my kids. Start over with trying to be on time to things. Start over with healthy eating. Start over with going to bed early. Start over with more time with Jesus. You name it. I am so. sick. of. starting. over.

I have a picture of how I want to be. In fact, I am a woman of lists and I even sat down one night (late night, breaking my “bed early goal’ and “healthy eating goal“ [I was eating handfuls of chocolate chips]) and wrote a detailed list of what a perfect Manda would be like.

Let me tell you, everything seems possible as I am stuffing my face with junk and staying up ridiculously late, living the tomorrow is a new day mantra.

I did this in 2018, too. Do you know how many “start overs” I had last year? Maybe 32,745. All very similar things as 2019. None of which I could ever perfect.

As I was driving home from visiting some family today, I had quiet in the car as all my kids slept. The thought occured to me, again as I was making plans for tomorrow is a new day, that I can’t do this another year. I just can’t. I can’t keep living in the day after day after day feeling failure.

I even noticed that these expectations did indeed hold heaviness. We always hear they do, but as I was driving in the silence, I felt it. Like a twenty-pound boulder heavy on my heart, not my shoulders, my heart.

I can’t keep doing this in 2019 and I definitely can’t do this for the next decade or four decades or six. I just can’t.

All these things tell me one thing – I am trying to change the wrong thing.

This whole topic is a leftover from my Year of Unapologetic. There’s something deeply rooted inside that tells me I am not enough and that I must ALWAYS improve. That I CAN perfect if I whip myself into it. That if I work hard enough and beat myself into submission, I can do all the impossible and then some. I can conquer it and I can be perfect.

I mean, I feel I have had moments of being “put together”. They lasted maybe 2 minutes, but I remember it. And in most cases, it was insanity to maintain.

But it needs to stop. And it ends when I decide to quit.

That starts with refusing to continue the rat race of who’s losing what weight with what product, what method. Who’s training for what. Who got a new car or new addition to her house or decluttered half her belongings or took a trip to Timbuktu. It has to start with quitting it all.

And friends, I’m ready.

It’s a new adventure. It’s the unknown and maybe lonely. It’s being misunderstood and unacknowledged. It’s being misjudged and maybe some talk behind my back and fake friends disappearing. But it’s freedom for me and sweet surrender in Jesus.

It’s okay to just be. It’s been said in so many circles, “We’re human beings, not human doings,” and it just might be time I live that.

Because these start over days don’t need to be. I don’t have to wake up to success or failure, I can just wake up and be grateful. I can let the words of those striving breeze by me and just be. I can choose to walk forward on my own path.

January is hard. And it’s ugly right now, but the last thing I need is more pressures and more forced perfection. I fail daily and that will never change, no matter how much brain-washing I do. I can improve, but not in the pursuit of impressing anyone or to increase my value.

So there. That’s my declaration of autonomy for anyone that cares, but specifically for me. Really, just me. And tomorrow I am waking up differently, and I tear up at the thought.