After a year or more of playing, living, and working where we lived, two things are true — we got better and worse at setting boundaries. We aced keeping to our bubbles and saying “no” to outings or day dates that could expose us to COVID. We got rusty though when it came to the blurry lines between work and life at home. I can admit I’ve struggled a ton with setting those boundaries for myself or respecting the boundaries my partner has set. So, I think we’re all do for a refresher course on boundary setting.

I signed up for a writing habits class back in December. My top goal when I signed up was that I wanted to have a more consistent, sustainable relationship with my writing practice. I wanted to rebuild my habit from scratch mostly because by the end of 2020 I felt like I had very little of it to hold onto anyway. While I didn’t talk about this publicly, I spent a better half of last year working on a book proposal that didn’t end up selling.

From a marketing and business perspective, I completely understood the why and the how. On a personal level, I was gutted. The book was memoir personal essays and not selling it felt like the world reflecting back to me that I wasn’t a good writer, that my story had no value, and that I couldn’t write the kind of stories I wanted to spend my time on.

If 2020 taught me anything it’s that resolutions can feel limiting and don’t factor in being human or the parts of life we can’t always control (aka a pandemic). For 2021, instead of resolutions, I’m choosing to be guided by a handful of intentions — phrases or words that can morph to meet the moment or the circumstances around me.