2024 Goals | New Turning Points, New Horizons…

Happy, happy new year, folks! I hope that 2024 brings you everything you hope and wish for and that your life is filled with love, light, and strength. ❤

Today’s blog post is all about my 2024 goals. But before that, a little background, a little introspection as one does at the dawn of a new year.

There comes a time in your life when you become conscious of a turning point, of those sharp revelations you have about how so many fears you had weren’t as big as you were making them out to be, of acknowledging that some solutions were obvious but you were getting in your own way. What happens next is completely dependent on what you do from here on out. Do you want to ignore these revelations? Do you want to take immediate action? Do you want to take life one day at a time but also put it off for another day? What is it that you’re going to do? What direction are you going to steer your life in?

When I say ‘you’ and ‘your life,’ it is my way of looking at myself from without. To treat myself as someone who needs my help because Lord knows I don’t help myself out a lot in so many ways that matter. So when we entered 2024, it felt like a blindfold came off from around my eyes. The turning point that I was just waxing poetic about washed over me when the year turned and the aftershocks are still ringing in my head.

My question is: Why choose such a cliched date to make a point? Why not make itself obvious when my mind realized that I had to do something about the abysmal state of my life’s affairs? Why do I need such an “occasion” to start improving the quality of my life? And why, pray tell me, does it take a village to start when the power to start rests in my own two hands?

I don’t have answers to these questions at the moment. But I have started to make changes to my lifestyle, some that I started last year and will be continuing this year. I won’t question things that so obviously promise to make my life better. Instead, I’ll make goals that I want to achieve in this new year for a new life, a new me, and make sure to stick to the processes that will take me there. I used to cringe when I heard or saw ‘New Year, New Me’ anywhere. I still do. But I now understand that many-a-times, this is genuineness talking, that it is a start-over for people who are looking to improve their life and not just a social media gimmick.

Like I did for 2023, I want 2024 to be the year in which the best kind of change happens and I am able to do things for myself in more ways than one. Some of my 2024 goals, again, have trickled down and are upgrades/improvements on goals from previous years, and I won’t categorize them because everything seems interwoven, interconnected at this point.

Here we go:

---

Travel more. I’m currently in a country that offers so much natural beauty that every day that I sit at home seems like a waste of time. I know that’s untrue because more often than not, it’s my inability to walk or exert myself that’s the obstacle. But for someone who once had dreams of traveling the world, ending up holed up in a house, groaning with pain, no thanks to rheumatoid arthritis, can be a big let-down.

So one of my topmost 2024 goals is to see more of whatever corner of the world I am in. I want to travel more. I want to bask in the beauty of nature because if our visit to Darling Harbour is anything to go by, I simply adore greenery. I love sitting on a bench as people walk by – tourists, citizens on a stroll or job, anyone – and watch as sometimes, proposals get staged, impromptu parties erupt on yachts, and the sky watches us as if it is a proud parent.

---

Become healthier. Becoming healthier is a term I use to indicate that I want to shed the fatigue and be kinder to my body, while losing weight in the process. If I can walk up 3 flights of stairs without feeling like my body is about to give up on me, even a kilogram lost is great. But this also means that traveling will become easier. And although my arthritis won’t disappear, I will probably become better at handling it, at having and maintaining expectations of what I can and cannot do with it. I started taking baby steps where I tried to fix my sleep schedule and edited my diet a bit, but I have a long way to go before I reach proper good health, relapses notwithstanding.

It doesn’t help that people’s expectations pile up when they take a foot if I give an inch, which results in my becoming taciturn about sharing anything related to this. These are the very people who will say, “Do it. It’s for your own good,” but will not understand the downsides of piling on to someone who is already suffocating under a ton of their own stuff. Let me do this for myself. Understand that I NEED to do this for myself.

---

Get to 6000 subscribers on YouTube. I didn’t want to include this in my 2024 goals but YouTube is a big part of who I am on the Internet and making a goal for it seemed like the right thing.

The problem, however, is that the YouTube algorithm has turned on its own head. Where once I used to gain 160-200 subscribers in a month, I hardly gain 35-40 these days. And yet, I love making YouTube videos, which is why making them will be my main focus and reaching this milestone will be a flexible goal rather than a concrete one.

---

Read what I want to read, but also more new releases. This is a goal that has shifted and changed so much over the past few years that I no longer know what exactly it is I am saying. However, as a book blogger, I know that I need to keep up with the times if I want to stay relevant. And that means reading newer releases. That doesn’t mean that every one of my yearly reads has to be a new release. That’s an impossible feat, even if there are a ton of books that get released every year. I just want to be able to read a few that catch my eye, enough to keep up with the times. Of course, my memory being the little shite that it is, might just ruin everything for me, a cliff that I’ve been dangling from for ages now.

---

Be consistent with blogging. This is another from last year where I wanted to become consistent but couldn’t, even though the bar I set for myself was a pretty reasonable one. Let me try to stick to this one and hope that in 2024, I post more consistently and not disappear for ages at a time. Welcome one, welcome all to the annual Melodramatic Bookworm circus!

---

Become fluent in my new language. I don’t know how I will be able to do this, because I don’t know anyone who can speak this language. We all know that speaking a language is how one improves. Immersion is necessary. But the lack of people to talk to means that this repeater among my 2024 goals is looking way more difficult than ever. I’m not completely hopeless in this matter but the situation doesn’t give me much hope either. (That was a convoluted sentence if I ever saw one.)

---

Constantly revamp my Bookstagram. Bookstagram is a strange place to be. While on one hand, book lovers gather to share our love of books, on the other hand, it can become a limited place no thanks to Instagram’s garbage algorithm that claims to cater to users’ tastes but instead limits the ways we can reach new people. The platform constantly changes its algorithm and has become toxic to the point where people like me who use it as a way of life have to dedicate all our time to figure it out with no returns at all. But does it listen to us? Is there a way to make it listen to us? Unfortunately not.

So basically, what we need to do is keep figuring it out. And for that, I need to test out different formats to see what medium will work. And for that in turn, I need to keep revamping my Bookstagram. This is more out of necessity but there’s also that part of me that started Bookstagram in the first place that wants to do these. Because as a visual platform, it could be a gorgeous, gorgeous place (like it once was) without all the petty changes they make.

---

Work on my travelogue. The last year has taught me so many things, most important of which was the fact that there are 10 different ways of looking at things and I was looking at them through just one window. What I considered an amazing trip had so many shortfalls, be it character-wise or decision-wise. And yet, it doesn’t make it any less of a milestone.

I still want to write this travelogue, even though I’m no longer sure about what to write anymore. Maybe using a different angle will help. Maybe revisiting that trip, my 2015 visit to the USA, the first time I traveled abroad, will refresh everything and help me out. Maybe, maybe, maybe… Of course, for that, I’d have to open the damn Word document, which has remained relegated to a corner of my laptop for more than 2 years now. Either way, I at least want to make a decision about what to do with this travelogue by the end of 2024.

---

Work on my pending short stories. These short stories are so vague that it feels like I conceptualized them in a dream. The moment I sit down and think about what I want them to be, my brain short-circuits and forces me to redirect my attention to a different matter. And yet, short stories are my brand, if I even have a brand. I love writing short stories because they are so flexible and versatile. So even if I don’t complete any, I at least want to outline some of them before 2024 ends. If not that, then at least make a decision on how to move forward.

---

Outline a new/old project. I can’t say anything about this project because I myself am not clear on many details. I don’t know if I will revamp my half-finished manuscript or if I will start a brand new story. But I do have a couple of ideas that I want to implement and turn this into a readable document of sorts. This is one of my 2024 goals that I don’t talk about a lot but want so much to do. If nothing, I at least want an outline. Please keep your fingers crossed for me. I need all the help!

---

Figure out a way to make a steady income. I don’t think I have to explain much about this. Book bloggers don’t make a lot of money by talking about books online. So I need to figure out an income stream that will sustain me and my love for books while giving me the job satisfaction that I’ve never quite been able to capture.

---

While these might look like pretty straightforward 2024 goals, I have a feeling I’m going to be jumping through hoops to tick each one of these off. That’s okay, though, because I’m prepared this time. I know that it will take work and I’m A-OK to do that work.

Bring it on, 2024! Let’s do this!

What are your 2024 goals? Do we have any goals in common? How are you planning for 2024? Let me know in the comments below. I’d love to hear from you! ❤

Once again, a very Happy New Year 2024!

I’ll see you soon in a new blog post.

Until next time, keep reading, keep watching, and add melodrama to your life! 😊  

---