Welcome to 2020! The year where all your dreams come true! The brand new start to not just a decade but YOUR decade! The time of the dreamers, 365 days for the ages, the new golden age of the world!

And a whole lot of other nonsense.

Welcome to the new year. Welcome to the new decade, that much is true. The world has some hefty expectations for this one, this shiny new set of January through December, and I can imagine you do too. And why wouldn't you? With all the jokes people have been making about 20/20 vision, it's not like you couldn't see this year coming from a mile away. It's barely started and people are abuzz with resolutions they're not gonna keep and promises they'll forget they made and theories they're bound to be wrong about and opinions they'll repeat a hundred times.

This may all sound like a cynical pile of garbage from a pessimist of a person barely a step in a new year and already bashing it. In fairness, I won't deny that. It does sound a little rough around the edges, but that's mainly for me. Of course I'm not planning for the new year to be all that bad. As a matter of fact, I'm not planning for the new year to be anything at all.

One of the most stressful times of year for me is New Year's Eve. I've had quite a few horrendous ones. It's gotten to the point where I unconsciously set up the entire year like dominoes and wait for it to get bowled over by one bad night and some cheap champagne. It's as if I'm expecting the worst from the year at its start, and if it doesn't go according to plan, it might as well not go at all.

I'm trying to change that.

When I first came to college, my thought was that I wouldn't consider myself a failure before I'd even given myself the chance to try. So many beautiful people around me have given me the courage to grow into that statement, but I've realized that I need to push it further. I can't give every experience in life, even the ones out of my control, the axe before I see what they become! I've been attempting what I can but stopping short at the successes and wallowing like a sap in the failures before finally moving on. I've allowed importance to be found only when it's tied to accomplishments. To lose is as good as failing before I've tried, and I've been taking it as an excuse to cut myself down. It's become a bad cycle of pushing myself into trying things and falling apart when they don't work.

And a new year does NOT help that mental state.

New years bring new pressures, the pressure to succeed, the pressure to be different, the pressure to right the wrongs of the past, the pressure to prove that you're going somewhere, the pressure to be someone valuable. It is the hope of success enhanced and emphasized and pushed to the limit. Every success can only be successful if there's another waiting in the wings, every heartache isn't as bad as someone else's, every dream isn't worth dreaming unless it's a relatable dream to the world at large.

So my new year's resolution is this: to let this year be what it is. To let 2020 happen without pumping all my hopes and nightmares into it until it explodes. I don't know what this year will be. It might be the best of my life. It might be unbearably hard. It might be some mediocre ground in the middle. But I want to find the best of it no matter where in it I end up.

This article was mostly a chance to get the pressures of the new year off my chest. I do have hope. I do have plans. I do have resolutions and promises and theories and opinions. I have dreams. But I don't want to believe that they'll fail more than I have ever believed in myself. I want to see what I can do, no strings attached. I want to try for the most and land where I can be proud. I want to take 2020 in all its novelty and glory and just live. Live for the sake of living.

No predictions. No bets, folks. I'm gonna take this year and run with it. With everything I've got.