My type-A year of dangerous living
photographer Christel Yardley took this quintessentially Kiwi picture this week of Carter Watkins, 7, about to make a splash landing off the Whangamata wharf. The venue has become so popular with wharf-divers, fishers, paddleboarders and swimmers that the Thames District Council has introduced wharf wardens to keep everyone safe.
December 31, to me, is like a delicious personal interregnum from normal life. The year, and whatever successes or horrors it contained, is over.
The year ahead and all its challenges and triumphs has not yet begun. It’s like being on a car journey between two places – you’re not governed by the rules and stresses of either destination and can blast tragic 90s pop hits to your heart’s content.
On this day, I’d usually sit down and evaluate what I’d achieved in the previous year and write some goals for the year ahead. Annoyingly classic Type-A personality behaviour, I know. I think it’s a hangover from being the kid who loved getting her report card at the end of the school year, but instead of a teacher, I’m the judge and jury.
Today however, I’m not sure what to evaluate, because this time last year, I didn’t do it; 2017 was going to be unlike any year before it and I had no idea what to aim for.
A change in my job had thrown me off the hamster wheel and I was scurrying about trying to figure out whether I wanted to get back on. In the meantime, there would be no set amount deposited into my bank account each fortnight – the only person responsible for making sure I got paid was me. So, my one goal was less of a goal than a necessity – because the mortgage still had to be paid.
Other than that, 2017 was unchartered, goal-less territory – the type-A version of living dangerously.
Man, did I struggle with that. I’ve always evaluated myself based on the metrics of boxes ticked, challenges mastered, promotions attained, gains made. What should have felt like freedom from such strictures suddenly felt suffocating – how was I to know if I was doing WELL?!
It’s taken me all year, but I’ve finally come to the realisation that I’d been defining ‘‘doing well’’ all wrong, because it doesn’t have just one definition.
Doing well doesn’t meant arriving at the end of the year with perfectly coiffed hair, a new car and a Miss Personality beauty queen sash. Sometimes it’s just getting there at all.
Doing well is not maintaining the facade of perfection for your friends and neighbours, with lawns as neatly manicured as your nails. Doing well can be about admitting when you’re not well, in the hope of getting well. It can be about exposing your soft underbelly to help others who are not well, get well. Earning more might be a metric of doing well, but so is learning how much you already have to be grateful for.
So, if you keep telling yourself you’re not ‘‘doing well’’ enough, perhaps today’s the day to pause between the year that was and the year that will be, and change the criteria. It could result in the happiest New Year yet.
It's taken me all year, but I've finally come to the realisation that I'd been defining "doing well" all wrong, because it doesn't have just one definition.