New Resolutions for a New Year

In the summer of 2007, I got out of the military after 12 years of active duty.  Because Germany was my last duty station, it was going to take the military several months to get my stuff shipped to me.  My car was the first item to make it back to the states.  I opted to have the car shipped to the delivery point in Dallas, Texas.  I decided to spend the weekend visiting my Dad in Houston then have him drive me up to Dallas where I would pick up the car.

A week after buying the non-refundable tickets to fly to Houston, my Dad called to say he had forgotten he was going to be out of town that weekend.  He still wanted me to come down to see him, but I wouldn’t see him until the Monday after the weekend.  I changed my plans accordingly.  I flew into Houston that Thursday then flew that Friday up to Dallas.  My aunt hosted me for a few days.  That accidental time with my aunt turned out to be an important experience.

My aunt picked me up from DFW airport and drove me the long way back to her place in Fort Worth.  She decided she was going to treat me to dinner and took me to a barbecue place.  During dinner, my aunt told me about the trials and tribulations that her children (my cousins) were facing in their troubled marriages.  She is especially close to her daughter, Lorrie. 

Lorrie was about to divorce her second husband and was extremely distressed that she had not finished her undergraduate degree.  She was ashamed that she had gained a lot of weight over the course of her marriage.  She was overall not happy with her situation in life.  My aunt told me that she listened to her daughter’s concerns over the years but had finally become fed up with the constant complaints.  Finally, my aunt faced her daughter and said, “it can’t be too bad, otherwise you would have done something to change it.”

Tough love…

I thought about that story a lot over the fall of 2007.  I was extremely unhappy with my life and some of the decisions I had made.  It came to a head over Christmas 2007.  I recognized I had to make a change in my life.  I decided I was not going to be a passive observer of my life, instead I was going to become the active agent in my life.  So last January, I started to think of the things I wanted to accomplish.  I looked at how I wanted to change my life.  While they were not formal, written down resolutions, I actually made a mental note of things to do.  This time, I started to pursue those objectives.

The most important of these realizations was accepting that I was gay.  Having cleared that mental hurdle, I decided to start living my life acknowledging this fact.  So my first resolution was to establish a new living situation in which I could begin to live an openly gay lifestyle.  To make a long story short, by May, I had rented a place from a lesbian couple in a pretty gay-friendly part of very gay-friendly Cambridge, Massachusetts. 

Next, I decided to pursue one of my life’s ambitions, to run a marathon.  So last January I looked for a marathon that was relatively close to Cambridge.  I knew I couldn’t run the Boston Marathon (one has to qualify for that race), but I found a marathon in Fallmouth, MA on the southern side of Cape Cod.  I trained over the summer.  I completed the Cape Cod Marathon in 4:24:25.

I made other plans as well.  I wanted to become a certified fitness instructor.  I worked over the summer and eventually took the test to become a certified fitness instructor.  I worked this fall as group exercise instructor at one of the campus gyms.

This past year has taught me to put my mind to achieving my goals.  So I plan to outline my goals and strive to achieve them this year.  I have not finalized my goals, but I am going to work on refining my goals and posting them on this blog.  I will use this as my motivation to pursue my goals and see what I can realize.  Hopefully I will also post something worth reading.

Until my next post, remember to do what you want not what is expected of you by putting a little bit of mischief in your life!