Goals for 2018

At least some of these are attainable!

This post is modified from my January e-newsletter! To subscribe to all that good, good nerdiness and get these ramblings ASAP, click here! 

For all of 2017, and I'm sure I'm not alone, I felt like I was careening forward. I could just barely grasp a handle, before being thrown out of whack again. I learned a lot about being a grown up this year – like that sometimes, the smallest pauses are victories. Little moments to breathe in between wind tunnels. I learned that there are periods of life, maybe long periods, where that's all I'm going to be able to manage. 

That being said, I'm hoping 2018 will let me breathe deeper.
​I'm hoping I can be more intentional.

Here are some of my goals for 2018: 
​

• Read more, read for pleasure, and, most importantly, read more diverse books 
• Develop my skills as a teacher
• Develop my skills as a director, and help my student actors knock their production of The Tempest out of the park
• Travel more – both around my beautiful city of Boston, and hopefully, other parts of the country/the world
• Take better care of myself, allergies and health wise
• Take better care of my spaces
• See more people I love
• Make every day the greatest day ever for Harriet and Suzie
• Last but not least, write 1,000 words a day

This last one is big for me. I know writers who can conquer way more than 1,000 words a day, every day, no sweat. But friends, dear readers, that is not me. For the past couple of years, I have written a lot, but in unpredictable periods of stressful productivity. I've become scared of writing, and some days, gathering the courage to face it hasn't seemed possible.

But recently, I was reading through my old journals from college, and I found the volumes I wrote while I was working on my first book, Saving Hamlet. College me was delighted to discover that good writing is not a mysteriously bestowed, completely innate talent, but a craft, that she could practice and improve on. College Molly explains in her journal, so naively and wisely, that once she started writing 1,000 words a day, it was easier every day. Not only to sit down and write the 1,000 words, but it became easier to write whenever the muse struck, too. College Molly had some things figured out. (Others spectacularly not figured out, but that's another blog post/novel.)

How funny it is that we have to learn the same lessons, so many times. My Shakespeare professor this past semester has collected many wonderful truths in his illustrious career. One of them perfectly correlates to my experience reading through these journals: "What is learning, but repetition?" 

To learn (and re-learn) that writing is not scary, we have to write, over and over. 

---