Technically, I’m a week late with this but today I wanted to talk about my New Year’s resolutions and how it’s coming along with the goals I had for 2021! Btw, happy mid-year, I guess? July 2nd was the day that made me realise that it’s nearly Halloween… and that means it’s nearly Christmas. Time to get festive and think about all the different stream shenanigans that I was planning to go for. Hell yeah! Either way, I made this post on January 1st where I talked about my goals in Streaming and Blogging… and I also made this one post on December 31st with my New Year’s resolutions. Check those out if you want to but I’ll most likely summarise it all anyway, so… you do you. Today I wanted to talk about my personal goals and resolutions that I mentioned in that post from December 31st. I’ll probably get into my Streaming/Blogging goals in tomorrow’s post.

Quick Summary: My personal goals!

• Be more positive.
• Eat healthier/more frequently.
• Try to stick to a set sleep schedule and set eating times.
• (Maybe) Work out/Do more sports!
• Focus more on my studies.
• Call my distant relatives at least once a month.
• Call my parents at least twice a week.
• Be less negative/cynical.

Overall, I’ve done quite well in the health department, I would say. I’ve been eating regularly and I’ve been switching things up by eating less fast food, cooking more often, and making soups and stuff that I can just put into the freezer and cook later. At least I feel a lot healthier. I’ve donated a lot of blood this year and got an appointment for that next week as well. My iron levels apparently are amazing, so I’m quite glad about that. My sleep schedule has been kinda hit or miss for me. I would fix it for a few weeks and then I’d have one bad night. I’ll take melatonin again tonight and see if I can fall asleep before 3 AM to fix my rhythm. University exists. I’ve been trying to focus more on it but it just didn’t work out too well for some of my classes and because I was being overconfident in my time management, I ended up having to do less… and less… and less… to the point where I ended up with not too many classes in the end. I’ll try to do better in the winter semester. Time Management and Adulting are hard. Since I’ve been quite busy with that and my hobbies, I didn’t have too much time for sports or whatever. “Oh no!” But what I’ve been getting quite good at is calling my parents. They’ve been less worried about me in the process. That’s a good thing. I also now have all sorts of phone numbers for my distant relatives, so I may be able to talk to them every now and then.

At last, Positivity: There is a thing called toxic positivity and honestly, I’ve been able to not get into that mindset that shrugs everything off and tries to assure that everything is good even when it’s not good. Instead, I’m still a pessimist that secretly hopes that my low expectations get exceeded. That’s been working quite well. I’ve been living from day to day and I’ve tried to find my rhythm with things but because of my frequent depressive episodes, I end up not accomplishing stuff from time. What helped me a lot was to realise that I need to take things at my own pace. I’m still young, I guess. My mindset overall has been “expect nothing and appreciate everything” – and that’s been working out well for now. Hence, I feel like I’ve been “more positive” already. When it comes to being less sarcastic, cynical, and/or negative, I’ve tried to “AAPI” or rather “Always Assume Positive Intent”. When I face criticism, I assume that it’s good-willed. I’ve been doing this before as well but sometimes when I made mistakes over and over again, I’d get frustrated or I’d end up being rather down. Instead, I now try to think of others as “good-willed individuals” even when they clearly mean harm to me. I try to bring more love to others and essentially fade out all sorts of controversies or negative subjects that may affect me mentally. I mean, obviously, I won’t fade out everything… but I still try not to take a deep dive into the Twitter trends and get upset about someone being an asshat. Instead, I ignore it. “Ignorance is bliss”, they say. Sure, the politics stuff is important and I need to keep track of that but I won’t read up on the covid numbers, the covidiots and conspiracy theorists that go out demonstrating, or the climate change laws that suck, I guess. I try to ignore those sorts of subjects and rant less and vent less and I just try to be less “negative” in that regard. It helps, I guess. I feel better because I don’t receive the constant numbers of infected people and whatever.

Still, I’m no saint (yet?) and I probably will never be one but when I mess up or slip up, I try to move on and learn from it. I’ve beaten myself up a lot over an incident that happened a while ago to the point where I ended up with a panic attack and anxiety. I broke someone’s trust with an action of mine and was completely oblivious to it because I can’t take a hint. I took a joke too far and it ended up hurting others. Similarly, I got excluded from a streamer’s community not too long ago because of said incident and some other stuff that happened. Me talking a lot, ranting from time to time, discussing a lot of topics with others, and overstaying my welcome at times made others uncomfortable. I’ve been warned about it, apparently, but I myself, again, had no clue about it. Essentially, it all ended up making people dislike me, and it just shows me that I’m still not where I want to be. I’m still not good socially. Being autistic doesn’t help but I don’t want to blame it all on that. I know others who deal with the same issues as well but do a lot better. Sure, I’m not others, but I still don’t want to blame it all on autism. I wanna make people happy and be a good friend to others.

But of course, I make mistakes. Everyone does. Mine may seem super grave and bad in my head but others probably have forgotten about it already at this point while I beat myself up over it. I mean some people will always remember because negative connotations and memories stick around a lot longer than positive ones. At least, I try to convince myself that I’m only overthinking all of this. What’s important is that I take these mistakes and learn from them. It’s important to me that I take the advice and “feedback” given to me and use it to better next time. I obviously can’t undo what I’ve done but I can live on and try to do better. I want to leave it behind and be better than my past self. I want tomorrow’s Magi to be better than today’s Magi, in essence. And sure, it will catch up to me but when it does, I don’t want to have a mental breakdown again but rather take it as an opportunity to reflect on it all. Hopefully, I will then be able to say “I learned from that and I can guarantee that I’m better nowadays!”

Hence, I’m still trying to be better. I’ll try to be more positive. I’ll try to not get into any discussions or whatever anymore, or at most make sure that others are okay with it… and even then I try to drop it once I notice that I’m getting heated or that others seem to get angry or frustrated. I just drop it or say something like “agree to disagree” and I may apologise for my wording if it was wrong at any point. I essentially leave it at that and move on. I mean, I love discussions and debates. I’m in the fucking debating club of our university here, too. Hence, I try to use that as an opportunity to scratch that itch of mine to discuss just anything or have a debate over stuff but I don’t try to do it as much online because, in the end, a lot of the intention gets lost in translation. Hence, full circle: I assume positive intent and it goes wrong most of the time because other people sometimes get furious or angry with me. I’ve had that in the Blaugust community once where someone got super upset at me and I thought they still had a friendly discussion with me. I try to get better at that, too.

Overall, the goal is not a goal, I guess. It’s more of a journey. Me getting over my social awkwardness and my issues with taking a hint, picking up on negative feelings, and all of that… all of that won’t be fixed in a matter of weeks or months. It will take ages. But I’ve gotten better at it IRL and hence, I really do believe that I can apply that experience from offline to better myself online as well. 

So, I would say that I’m doing good resolution-wise and I know that nobody takes them seriously but I personally really do. My “being positive” goal is more of a “being better” goal, I guess, and hence, this will probably be a resolution for next year, too, but I’ve been doing good so far, I’d say, and I’m hanging in there, trying to be better for the rest of the year (and beyond!) as well.

Hope you enjoyed this “little” update on the resolutions. I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s post btw! On top of that, my 2-year Bloggoversary is coming up soon and I have yet to figure out what to write about. Maybe I’ll take a look at an old review and rewrite it again… or I’ll finally write about Dungeon of the Endless in a review. We’ll see! How are your resolutions coming along? Did you give up on them already or not have any in the first place? Did you accomplish them already? Let me know!

Cheers!

This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well.