Hello, friend.
If your eyes are falling upon these words you’ve arrived at the threshold of another year.
Now you may have done so in a swift, blissful sprint across the dateline, or dragging your battered self through the last agonizing seconds of the past year.
Whether you greet today with elation or despair, you’re here now and the question is: What are you going to do with this next trip around the sun?
I may not know you but I know a few things about you:
Right now your mind is likely in some manner of reset mode as you ponder all the things you’d like to change along with the calendar.
You’re probably carefully mulling over a laundry list of personal alterations, career endeavors, and daily practices you aspire to incorporate into this newborn moment in history.
Today you’re making plans and declaring intentions and diligently power washing the slate clean of thick layers of painful regrets, poor decisions, and missed opportunities. You’re finding a rising hope in the road ahead and in the possibility of restoration it holds for you.
Yet I also know that sadly, despite the great virtue of your intentions and unless you’re very careful, this year you’ll likely end up wasting much of the time you’re given.
Some of this will happen as a result of poor planning and busyness and the invariable interruptions of life.
It will happen with rather frivolous pursuits: daily extended trips down the social media rabbit hole, unplanned overnight binge watching excursions, marathon commute gridlock sessions, and an endless number of runs to the store for that one recipe item you’ve forgotten—again.
You’ll also waste time in weightier, yet still largely fruitless matters too: replaying past mistakes you’re powerless to alter or dreading coming personal calamity that may never materialize; paralyzed with worry and weighed down with fear.
Yet, more than how you handle life’s occupational hazards of time management and head navigation, I feel burdened to caution you against one single, brutally wasteful endeavor this coming year.
I want to help you stop hiding.
I feel compelled to try and detour you away from the parade of pretending that we are all so terribly drawn to in this life.
So many of us fritter away our days wrongly believing we need to edit ourselves; that to be truly accepted or loved or welcomed we can’t be our truest true—and so we all learn to be something less.
We each grow accustomed to concealing the parts of us we believe others can’t face or won’t tolerate, and as a result most us feel as perpetual imposters; like we aren’t ever fully known by anyone. We become masters at this masquerade; necessary experts at deception and slight of hand, unaware that in doing so we conspire in our own alienation from the world.
To some degree we all live in hiding.
Friend, you and I can’t afford to waste any more daylight this way.
We can’t squander another fleeting moment being anything less than the most honest version of ourselves we can muster.
Lately I’m learning the true freedom that comes with authenticity, and so I’m inviting you into a year of unpretending; into a courageous season where you discard the masks and the pretense and the elaborate facades you’ve spent so much time erecting in an effort to receive what you already deserve.
The things you believe and the stuff that matters to you and cries of your heart and the calling you feel and the people you love and the struggles you face—they’re all okay to share.
Some really beautiful things happen when you’re as real as you can be:
You find you’re no less of a mess than anyone else.
You stop worrying you’ll be found out or exposed.
You feel the lightness that comes with being fully known.
You worry less about pleasing people with an edited version of yourself.
You discover the peace that comes when you can say everything.
You stop apologizing for things that do not require it.
You find out that there’s really nothing to fear.
Yes, friends, this year does indeed hold all the promise and the possibility you’d like to believe it does. But it also holds the ready temptation to be something less than the most authentic version of yourself as you walk into it all.
Refuse to do that.
May you find freedom in these new days.
May this open calendar make you brave.
May this be the year of your unpretending.
