Happy New Year! Why I'm reflecting before making a resolution

It's a new year and with that comes new goals. Every January I find myself thinking about what can I do more to reach my end goal of becoming my ideal self. I definitely am a long term planner and love to look at the bigger picture. My yearly goals usually are centered around long terms goals I have for myself whether there accomplishable in 365 days or not.

For the most part, this vision is pretty simple: healthy, confident, working, and enjoying life at whatever stage I'm at. These have been my goals since I was old enough to know what long term goals are. As simple as these goals are I feel as though I’ve never truly reached them, and that mainly comes from me constantly setting the bar higher and higher for myself and looking down into the future further and further.

This past December I turned 20 years old. That is two decades' worth of milestones, achievements, and goals that I’ve reached. Five years before that, 15-year-old Taylor wrote a note on her phone to herself named “doppelganger” (I will always roll my eyes when I read that title). It’s a small paragraph of the ideal self I wanted to be at 15 years old inside and out.

From the outside, these were things that I always wanted like long hair and clear skin. On the inside, I described my “doppelgangers” daily life with the version of my ideal self that I wanted to be at 15 years old. This person was a lot more dedicated to their fitness and worked out at least three times a week, dedicated to their spiritual well-being and did yoga at least once a week, had a better work-life balance, and always was able to manage their time well enough to hang out with friends and family, get their school work done work, and still have time for themselves. That is truly what I wanted to be when I was 15.

At 15 I was one year into my natural hair journey, still trying to find the right products for my skin, a huge procrastinator, and my spiritual and wellness journey wasn’t discovered yet. I was pretty healthy when it came to working out and eating right but didn’t give myself enough credit because of insecurities. I truly was a dreamer and still a dreamer to this day, every time I dreamed of who I wanted to be, that was who I saw and what I decided to write down December 31, 2015.

Fast forward to 2020, I'm 19 years old deleting notes on my phone and come across my doppelganger note. I had completely forgotten about it and never opened it until that day and was completely shocked.

5 years later I was well into my natural hair journey and my hair was now at my back when straight and just past my shoulders when curly. I finally found the right skincare routine for myself and I figured out what products worked and what products didn't for me. I became a gym fanatic making great progress towards my fitness goals. Even in my moments of gaining weight I still was telling myself that the scale does not define me and becoming a lot more confident with who I was and what I look like regardless of my weight. I started consistently using planners that helped me create a good work-life balance. I didn’t make it to practicing yoga on a weekly basis but started meditating 20 minutes a week and creating a deeper bond with myself spiritually.

I had done it. I reached my ideal self and became the person I envisioned at 15 years old and didn’t even realize it. At this point, I was focused on new goals and what my new envision of myself was like. I was focused on financial goals, starting my blog, getting my license and so much more without even realizing 15-year-old Taylor was cheering me on because I’m everything she wanted to be.

Every day we make small steps towards our significant goals and sometimes we don't even realize how far we’ve come and surpassed our past goals. We get so caught up in the short term goals and habits we fall off of that we don't take the time to appreciate the ones that stuck to us and we’ve completed. It’s human nature for us to want more for ourselves and climb the ladder of reaching our higher selves, but it’s so important to look back from time to time and see just how far you’ve come to get to where you are now.

I'm so glad my 15-year-old self wrote down who I wanted to be because I would’ve never thought or remembered at 20 years old where I started from.

I challenge you to think about who you were 5 years ago. What did your ideal self look like back then? What goals have you surpassed within that time without even realizing it?