Form One Lane

The years everything changed

So I read somewhere that you shouldn't make new year's resolutions. This is easy for me to pull off, as I never make new year's resolutions ... except when being facetious, I suppose, but that never ends well. The alternative to making new year's resolutions is to give each year a theme. I decided to do that for my recent life, and then inflict a navel-gazing 'blog entry on y'all about it.

2007 could be described as The Year Of Growing Up. I took a good, long, hard look at myself, and made some hard decisions about where I wanted my life to go, and what sort of person I wanted to be. I left my job and joined the company, on track to become a project manager. I finally knuckled down and finished my university degree. I started looking in earnest for a new place to live.

And — most significantly — I joined a gym and started my diet. For years I had been telling myself that, because I was extremely active in sports, I didn't need to exercise any more, and my diet was just fine. It wasn't. I dieted for three months before I even got up the courage to weigh myself or set foot in a gym; when I finally did step on the scales, I weighed 136kg. Human beings have no business weighing 136 kilos, and human beings who are only 170cm tall ought to be ashamed of themselves. I finally admitted I was ashamed, and started to do something about it. I don't know how big I got — I estimate at least 140 kilos — but I was still growing in early 2007, and I finally did something about it. I've probably lost about 40 kilograms since then. I guess you could say I looked at the scales, and they fell from my eyes. (boom, tish)

2008 was The Year Of Results. The groundwork I'd laid in 2007 started to bear fruit: I got more responsibility and more interesting tasks at work; I was promoted to National level as an umpire; my weight continued to fall sharply; I found myself a lovely apartment not far from City; I took up hiking and found it a deeply enjoyable — in fact spiritual — experience; I started, finally, to feel happy with who I was.

2009 was, uh, not quite so nice. Actually, it was a shit of a year. When it was over I seriously considered grabbing every calendar I could get my grubby little hands on and burning them in a giant funeral pyre while dancing around them naked and yelling for joy. It's true that I brought it on myself: on Near Year's Eve 2008 I managed to get plastered, and spent much of the evening post-midnight baring my soul to a mate, explaining why 2008 was so awesome, and that I expected 2009 to be better. That's right. I said I expected 2009 to be better. I also may have mentioned something about letting myself fall in love. I'm calling 2009 The Year I Went Off The Rails, but probably a better name would be The Year I Should Have Seen Coming.

So, yeah, 2009 really kicked off a couple weeks later, when my girlfriend dumped me. I was still reeling from this — being a big baby with no sense of proportion — when work dumped the Project From Hell in my lap. This and a couple of other extremely difficult projects saw me spending most of 2009 in the office. I stopped going to the gym. I stopped cooking for myself. I only barely managed to eat healthy by extending the definition of "healthy" to include anything reasonably low-calorie, so that at least I did not put on weight. But I've been pretty well stable for most of the last year, even despite some early-year hiking. I know exactly what I need to do to start losing those kilos again, to get into double figures — maybe even reach my goal weight this year. I just haven't been doing it.

But this isn't 2007, 2008, or 2009. It's 2010, baby. What is this year going to be? I'd like to proffer: The Year I Took Back What Was Mine. Or at least, The Year I Got Back On Track. I've already been promoted, and moved to a different location. Ironically, the work I'm getting now is more appropriate to my new position: so I have less work to do, because in my old job I was being given projects so far above my job description I'd get nose bleeds just reading my to-do list. I'm getting home from work around six, six-thirty each day, and have plenty of time to cook myself something healthy. I need to get back to the gym soon. I need to start going to bed earlier and getting up earlier. These are all small, achievable things, and they will all do wonders for my life. I've already started: I can't wait to go further.