At the end of December 2015, I decided that I wanted to actually commit to a New Year’s Resolution. And finish it. Of course, every single year, I make goals. “I’ll work out every day.” “I’ll be vegetarian.” “I’ll eat healthy, only one cheat day a week.” “I’ll be more confident.” And the list goes on….
So I made a more realistic proposition. My goal was to take a picture every day of something that was important to my day. Something that represented what was going on in my life at the time. Something interesting.
Well, about eighteen days in, some of my pictures of the day started to be kind of boring. There was one that was a screenshot of a Buzzfeed quiz because it was getting close to eleven pm and I hadn’t done anything interesting. Literally, the most fascinating thing I’d done all day was take a couple of Buzzfeed quizzes.
It was around then that I realized that maybe I needed to try harder.
I started to try and take pictures of things that I thought were interesting, stuff that didn’t always relate to homework (but there are definitely still a few…), and by the end of the year, I was starting to have more interesting things to more accurately reflect my life.
Of course, what was interesting for me might not be all that interesting to someone else, but that wasn’t really the point. I really wanted to make sure that I was capturing my life, to show what made me happy, and not what anyone expected my life to be. In this case, I could be my own worst critic because I set my own guidelines for the picture taking resolution.
That was huge for me, realizing that I didn’t need to have anyone else checking up on me to finish what I had started- it made the pictures and resolution seem more personal, more typical of my daily life, and it gave me more freedom and power. In the past, that’s what I missed when making New Year’s Resolutions- I don’t need to make something that will change my life, I don’t have to make them at all, but if I do, I get to set my own guidelines.
I don’t think that I’ll be doing a picture a day for 2017, just because I want to give myself some time before I start the project all over again. Actually, I might not even have a new New Year's resolution, because I realized that I can control how I want to spend the New Year.
Despite that, I’m glad that for once in my life I finished a resolution- no, it wasn’t huge, it didn’t alter my life, it didn’t make me healthier or a better person, but it showed me how I was spending my time here on earth. And when I decided that was how I wanted to or didn’t want to spend my time, I could change it. Photos are a true blessing, and I’m so glad that I stayed committed to a resolution, for the first time ever.
