I know it’s early to be talking about the end of the year—we have eleven more days! But with travel plans and being home with my family for the first time since last Christmas, my status on these goals will be overwhelmingly the same when New Year’s rolls around (except I might read another book).

When I wrote out my goals for 2017, I had no idea where I would be today. I was looking back on a year that had gone decently and looking ahead with a longing to take bigger steps toward my professional and creative goals.

In the resulting post, I wrote that in 2016 I’d learned to be kinder to myself. This year, the overarching theme has been:

Take the first step.

Usually we stop before we begin. Whether in friendship or creative pursuits or on our way into something we’ve never done, some place we’ve never been, we stop before we start. We reject ourselves before anyone else has the chance to.

My list of goals for 2017 was long. I shared eleven of them on this blog and kept a couple others under wraps.

I accomplished less than half of my goals, but in no way was that a failure. A glance over the last twelve months makes clear why.

2017 goals:

1. Go to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, for this writing conference and stay a whole week to see the Tetons. I didn’t go to this conference, because I moved to Colorado at the beginning of June, two weeks before the conference would have taken place.
2. Successfully complete Creative Nonfiction’s Science Writing course. Almost as soon as this course started, I realized I wasn’t interested in it, so I switched to a different course on beating writer’s block. The course did not dramatically impact my life.
3. Diligently work on unnamed book-length work of fiction so I can spend November 2017 reading and self-critiquing. I did not do this, but I worked on some of my own nonfiction work which you can read here and here.
4. Read 30 books (minimum). I did not successfully read 30 books, but according to my GoodReads log, I read 20 which is significantly more than I read in 2016. Most impactful was Written by Herself: Autobiographies of American Women. Nonfiction favorites: The Woman Who Smashed Codes and Love and Ruin. Fiction favorite: Before the Fall.
5. Get personal training certified with ACSM. I did not do this, but I started working toward it by taking a CPR certification course after I moved to Colorado. I don’t know if I still want to pursue this certification. If I ever end up doing it, it will most likely be for my own self-education, not so I can work as a personal trainer.
6. Do some freelance writing and editing. YES. Shortly after I moved to Colorado, I veered away from applying to full-time jobs and set my sights on being able to freelance full-time. I am now doing ongoing editing work for a couple different companies, and I recently was brought on to do some writing for a CrossFit blog that I’ll mention by name after my first pieces go up.
7. Get a pull up by March, five by May, ten by August. I was super close to one strict pull up when I moved. Then I didn’t do CrossFit consistently for … the rest of the year. My muscles noticeably shrunk. However, just today, I did two single reps of 110 pounds on the lat pulldown machine in my apartment’s microgym, so I could be to a strict pull up soon!
8. Do topical Bible studies on justice, light and darkness, living water, and the heart. I did just one of these studies, going through Scripture and studying all passages containing a form of the word “justice”.
9. Do in-depth Bible studies of Joshua, Ruth, Nehemiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, Hosea, Nahum, Luke, John, Acts, Romans, 1 & 2 Timothy, Hebrews, 1 John, 2 John, 3 John. According to records in my planner, I successfully studied the books of Joshua and Ruth. Soon after I moved, I started working through Acts, which I did not finish. More recently, I read through all of Isaiah following a reading plan from She Reads Truth. Next year, I want to be better about staying in Scripture all year long without it feeling like a chore.
10. Play more classical compositions on piano. Progress in the more difficult keys. I started the year strong in this arena, but when spring rolled around and I decided to leave Taylor University (and its music building where I often played piano over my lunch break), I started playing less. I haven’t played piano since being in Colorado, and listening to instrumentals is a unique form of torture: Every recording makes me want to play piano which I can’t do right now because I don’t have access to a real piano and I’m too much of a snob to make do with a keyboard.
11. Go real camping (in a tent not surrounded by RVs and campers). Yes. I camped in the snow back in September. I love the smell of campfire.

Secret goal: Switch jobs and do serious graduate school research.

This is the one I’m proudest of. I decided this spring to leave my job and move to a place I’d never visited. In the process of making that decision, I decided that graduate school is not for me—at least, not yet.

Something I’ve struggled with since finishing college is wanted to write long, complicated stories, both fiction and nonfiction, but feeling that I don’t have anything to say. I’ve felt that my lack of life experience limits my ability to write anything worth reading, and I have no interest in being a hack.

Where do you get life experience?

Some might be able to find it in a classroom, but as much as I love learning, the life experience I crave is out in the world, where everyday people are living incredible lives.

Colloquial writing advice is “write what you know.” I’m more interested in writing about what I don’t know.

Step one to being able to write about what you don’t know:

Leave what you know.