2021 goals to claim for yourself.

To say that 2020 has not been the year any of us expected it to be is a gross understatement.

This year, pretty much everyone had plans and goals which were flushed down the drain due to COVID; personally, for example, I started off the year expecting to sit my A Level exams, excited to celebrate finishing them by going on a big holiday with all of my friends, and gearing up for moving to uni and experiencing the infamous event which is freshers, a rite of passage for students across the country deemed to be one of the best weeks of your life. Of course, none of these things happened.

However all year, although it can be very hard some days, I’ve really put a lot of effort into finding the positives in every situation we’ve found ourselves in, rather than the negatives (eg I got to spend a lot of time with my family back in the first lockdown, I was given a rare opportunity to take a few months completely off and rest, and I still made some new friends at uni despite being in lockdown!)

So for our final post of 2020, I decided to ask my friends, family, and the Girlish community to share in the spirit of finding the positives in the negatives by sharing with us some of your New Year Goals!

Disclaimer: these are NOT the standard, clichéd resolutions which you can’t help but be engulfed by every single year when January 1st rolls around, because for a lot of people, those kinds of resolutions surrounding weight, fitness, appearance, diet etc can be extremely damaging for their mental health. As the contributor and friend of Girlish, Damsel After Distress, wrote recently in one of her blog posts, ‘after the year 2020 has been, just making it to a new year is an achievement. I have goals for 2021 and things that I want to change but none of these things are going to happen on new years day and they are not going to focus on making myself into anything I don't want to be.’

I could not agree with this sentiment more.

Whilst I am a true believer in having to have goals and ideas of what you want to achieve in order to be able to work towards and manifest them, this year I’m trying to filter my resolutions in order to focus on the goals such as ‘pass my first year of uni’ and ‘spend more time with my friends’, rather than ‘get skinny’ and ‘glow up’.

So with that said, here is a list of 2020 goals, contributed by the Girlish community, which you may even be able to claim for yourself:

Goals for 2021

Get an internship in my field.

Be kind to myself

Accept the things I cannot change and change the things I cannot accept

Self publish my first collection of poems

Get a 1st in my uni degree

To read more books

To put myself out there more and be open to new experiences

Turn the hustle into the day job

To find myself

To work through taking my antidepressants and figure out who I am without my depression

To graduate

To share my art and not feel embarrassed

To stop talking myself down

Go on holiday

Go to the theatre

See my family happy and healthy

Host a big party (when all restrictions are lifted)

Move out

Go to the cinema

Finish my first year of uni

To learn new things

To learn about self compassion rather than self esteem

To inspire people

To listen to other people more

To write a book from scratch

To learn how to meditate

Give my body a break and work on accepting myself as I am

To be a nice person, especially to myself.

I hope you found some of these goals useful and inspiring, and I also hope that you are able to remind yourself, as we enter the new year, that a date should not pressure you into changing anything about yourself at all.

Happy New Year from all of us at Girlish. We can’t wait to see what the New Year brings.

Love, Hannah x