Once upon a time making resolutions was an annual routine for me.

I would start thinking about them the 3rd week of December and gauge how I had done the previous year. Of course, like many resolutions, it was pass or fail and the changes I wanted to make felt like a mountain l would never be able to scale.

One April, when I was 14 years old, my mom pulled me aside to chat with me about how I was doing. She was greatly concerned, because as the oldest, I was getting the brunt of my parents fighting. She wanted to give me some guidance and help me change despite the example being set at home. She knew I would need encouragement to be willing to not follow in my parent’s mistakes.

Her talk provided me with some insight into people and, for a while, it stuck. Of course, I then went on to be a rebellious teen. Once I realized that I was only hurting myself with my decisions, I decided that I needed to get serious about changing me. It took a few days for me to work through the old thinking and start to weed out the bad ideas about myself and others. Within a week, I had made some sweeping changes in my life. I cut out a lot of media, music, and books that weren’t helping me in order to change my thoughts and attitude. I know that for my few friends these steps seemed extreme.

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