hello again, old friend

Well, it's 2011 now. I am not so sure how I will get used to this. For the past million years I've either been in school where the new year was drilled into you the first week back to school in January when you'd write the wrong date on your paper then laugh and erase it, or I was the one writing the date on the board every morning as a bold reminder of the new year. I've already referred to this year as 2010 many times. I imagine I will be stuck back in 2010 forever. It was a good year for me, so out of all the years to be stuck in I guess that's a good one. But I'm not a fan of being stuck anywhere, so I guess I'll have to wake up and recite the date a few times like some obsessed compulsive person until it gets into my brain that this is indeed the year 2011.

I've been absent from my little blog, and I opened an Etsy store and immediately took an unintentional hiatus from it. Bad timing on my part, I suppose. Eh, that's life. I'm not one to make resolutions in concrete that will be devoutly followed, then feel like a bum when I trail off the path in March. I recently read an article in Vogue's January issue, an interview with Natalie Portman. I'm going to go ahead and use a quote now from Ms. Portman.

"I'm tough on myself in terms of the standards I want to live up to, but that's also part of my pleasure: knowing you are being your fullest self. Being your fullest self is a lot of work."

This resonated with me. I think I am too hard on myself for all the wrong reasons. I feel like I'm at a point where I want to know exactly what my fullest self entails. I know it involves being the mother/wife/sister/daughter/friend I desire to be, making things, baking, cooking, relying on spell check because I apparently just tried to spell "involves" with an 'e', reading, writing, (no, not 'rithmetic too), keeping in shape, and an infinite ______________ for the rest of list because I'm still figuring it all out. That alone is a long list, and will indeed take a lot of work.

So here's to being our fullest selves, being hard on ourselves for the right reasons, and learning about ourselves and the world more and more every day.