Paying off the credit card was another resolution that appeared regularly on my list. Occasionally I'd get very close to attaining that goal before Christmas came along and blew 11 months of good work out of the water. I guess that would put me into the "kind of" achieving my resolutions category.
Two-thirds of the New Zealanders who had made New Year's resolutions and who responded to the poll felt they had "kind of" achieved their goals.
Surely having a credit card with a nil balance for 11 months of the year is "kind of" achieving your goal.
This year though, I'm going to nail those resolutions. I've decided that I will not be doing any extra speaking engagements this year no matter how worthy the cause or how much emotional blackmail I get from event organisers.
I still have my Paper Plus commitments so I won't be going completely cold turkey but this year I am finally going to do what I've been saying I'll do for the past decade and stay home at weekends and spend time with my family and friends.
I'm going to publish another book. (Okay, so I've written it and it's at the publishers as we speak but it might really, really suck and never make it to print, so it counts as a resolution.)
I'm also going to get married. After all, everyone (except perhaps the Pope) should do it at least once in their lives and at the ripe old age of 48 it's time I too showed the courage of my convictions.
Admittedly, it helps that I have a fiance I prepared earlier. Wanting a wedding without a groom in sight would make this resolution very difficult to fulfil. And it's true there is a date set and caterers booked and a venue organised so I'm well on my way to achieving my goal. But the official invitations haven't been sent out and we've yet to decide on how the ceremony will go so there'll be a bit of effort involved in ticking off that resolution.
I'm also, finally and definitely this year, learning to ride a horse properly and learning to care for one, with the ultimate aim of owning one. Again, this is a goal I set in the middle of 2012 but as I haven't actually set about achieving it yet, I can shift this resolution over, legitimately, to 2013.
Reading that sentence again, I will also split infinitives more often. Rewriting the sentence would have been more grammatically acceptable, but less easy to read on what is a lazy time of year.
One resolution that will be a little harder to achieve will be accepting my curly hair and living with it.
When I think of the yawning vistas of time I spend in the hairdressers getting my frizzy hair tamed, it makes my teeth ache. And yet I feel compelled to seek professional help before I believe I can do a professional job when I have to appear in public.
On the radio, I'm fine. Nobody cares about what you look like. Public performances are a different story. And it's easy to see where the peer pressure comes from. When you look at successful women, not one of them, bar Trelise Cooper, has curly hair.
Every other high-achieving woman ruthlessly straightens every wayward follicle and presents herself as groomed and glossy.
Not me. (I hope.) Not this year. (I'm trying.) I'm going to go au naturel-ish.
There's that kind of achieving your goal thing again. I'm not ready to go grey. And I will still have to use product to tame the frizz. But I'll wear the curls I was born with. If not with joy, at least with forbearance. In fact, that's how I intend to live 2013.
I have more plans than I've had in a long while this year. I have more to be grateful for than ever.
So this year, I will live each day if not with joy, at least with forbearance. Because I'm grateful to be here.
