 Hello, my beautiful internet friends. Welcome back to my channel and welcome to 2020. As I film this, it is January 1st and I have sat down just a few minutes ago to write down my goals and dreams and vision for 2020, right? So many YouTube videos have been suggested to me in the last week about like how to set your vision for the new year because that's what everyone is doing. I see so many posts about it on Facebook and Instagram and there is, it's just everywhere. It's inundating every aspect of my internet presence. And so I thought I would do that. I'm not usually someone to write down very concrete goals and I'll get into that in a moment but I think it's important to have things to shoot for. And so I've been sitting here doing that and the overwhelming sense that I've had is already being defeated. And the reason for that is that my days are so unpredictable, so ridiculously unpredictable. I deal with chronic pain and chronic illness. This is not at all related to my leg if you guys are unaware of this but I have a brain condition and I have chronic migraines which means I get them a lot. For instance, New Year's Eve, I had a full day of normal work. I had videos to edit and then I was supposed to go hang out with friends at their house all evening and I'll let you guess how many of those things happened. I'm not gonna let you guess, it was actually zero. I had a migraine from the moment I woke up until 9 p.m. which meant that I was literally on the couch that entire time trying to get the pain to subside and so nothing got done that day. So how do we set goals? If things are completely unpredictable when it comes to our actual physical capacity. I think everyone's lives in reality are very unpredictable. We aren't in control of circumstances outside of our control but for those of us who deal with chronic pain and chronic illnesses, days are a little bit, they fluctuate a little bit more than the average person. I'm gonna let you guys in on a little bit of a secret. I think I try to keep this secret from myself most times as well but I'm actually a pretty ambitious person. When I'm not in the midst of crippling depression, I like life. I'm very grateful for being alive and I have so many things that I want to do and achieve and my head is always going on what I can do next and what I can create and how I can speak and this and that and I'm always learning and always wanting to grow and there's this disconnection that happens in my head on good days versus bad days. On good days I'm pretty sure that I can tackle the entire world and on bad days I think I am incapable of ever changing anything, ever doing anything and there's just such a disparity between those two things. As time has gone on and I've lived with chronic illness I've realized that obviously those things exist in the same person. I'm gonna have days where I can knock a lot of things out and I'm gonna have days where I literally cannot do anything barely even respond to a text message or answer a phone call. I am a speaker and a creator, video maker obviously. I work a job as well and I have a lot of other goals and dreams aside from that. This year I have a lot of physical goals but I also don't know how achievable those are because my leg is unpredictable. Like I wanna get a running blade and I wanna run a 5K but should I even put that on the list because is that really in my control? And so I thought I would take a moment to pause and look at what a good goal setting guideline might be. As someone who is dealing with chronic pain and chronic illness and pretty much always has the first thing that came to mind is the fact that I need these not to have strict deadlines. Living on planet earth I think sometimes we have to deal with timelines that are outside of our control but when it comes to what I actually want for my own life, things that I want to achieve I wanna see them happen and I wanna see them happen quickly but I also think that it's important that I remove a timeline from that because the reality of the situation is I might go three days being able to take care of a lot of things and then another three days where I can't do much of anything and if I spend those three days agonizing over how I'm getting behind on my schedule and oh, what was me, this sucks that's not gonna help me, that's not gonna help me get better faster, that's not gonna help me take care of my symptoms or participate in any form of self-care, I'm just gonna be beating myself up. Having very loose and gracious timelines with myself as I'm setting these goals is something that I have found helpful. The next question that comes to mind is should I even be setting goals considering that sometimes my body can stop me from achieving a lot of anything and the answer is of course, absolutely. I was journaling about that and being like I feel defeated before I even started because this and that and these things that are outside of my control but then I just kind of stopped myself and was like, well that's BS but things that I can control the days that I can do things I'm going to use those as effectively as possible. So as someone with chronic pain and chronic illness, yeah, set goals, make them big, make them cool, make them exciting for yourself. Even though I'm dealing with something that not everyone on the planet deals with, chronic pain and chronic illness, everyone has situations that they have to face that they have to adjust to and there's no reason that I should downgrade what I think is possible for my life based on the fact that it might take twice as long as other people or that it might not look the same as other people. Something that I've noticed amongst the community of chronic pain and chronic illness patients is that there's a lot of adaptability. We figure out how to still live, how to survive, how to make things work and I think that that applies to goals and vision and dreams as well. Are there some things that are gonna be completely out of control and maybe unrealistic and not wise to shoot for? Sure, but the list is probably a lot smaller than I or maybe you think it is. The next thing that I thought of was twofold. The first was I really need to shoot for things that have absolutely nothing to do with my health. Like I'd like a goal or a dream that doesn't have to do with my physical body and for me this year, that is. And by putting this on video, I now have stated it out loud, which means you guys get to hold me to it. My goal is to go to an open mic and read a poem that I've written. I've never done anything remotely like that in my life but I think it'd be very cool to do and I wanna do that in 2020. And I can, it's a little bit scary but I absolutely can do that and that has nothing to do necessarily with my body. I just have to go on a good day and I can absolutely find one of those. The second thought that came to mind was I would like to have goals that are health related. I've gotten to the point after 15 years of trying to find answers for the pain that I am in that sometimes I just want to completely ignore doctors and any new form of treatment and not seek out anything because nothing else has worked so why would it work? But that's not a particularly healthy mindset to have long term. I think it's fine to take breaks but a goal that I do have this year is to continue pursuing different treatment options. There's one migraine specific treatment that's a little bit alternative and new that I would like to try and so I put it on my list to pursue that as much as I don't wanna willingly participate in more doctor's offices or doctor's visits. I think it's important to prioritize my health and my well-being and if there's something that could help. It might feel useless to me. I might feel like giving up before I've started but it's worth trying and so I'm gonna put that on my list to at least give it a shot. The final thing that has come to mind for me in goal setting is to put things on my list that are not dependent upon good days and bad days when it comes to my health. For me, I'm not great at asking for help. Still, I know I've talked about this for like a year and a half but asking for help and accepting it is something I'm still very uncomfortable with but that is something that I can work on on good days or bad days. That's something that I can still move forward with regardless of how my body is doing. I think, at least for me, it's been really important to find things that make me still feel like I have some control over my life when I can barely move when I'm in a lot of pain, when I can't leave the house, when it feels like everything's spinning out of control. I need to make sure that there are measures in place so that I don't totally lose my mind and feel like everything is outside of my control and I'm just a spinning object with no purpose because it's easy to start thinking that especially when bad days are strung together. So what is in my control even on those bad days? What goes on in my head? How my thought processes work again, long term and for me, asking for help is one of those things. I don't know what it might be for you. So fill in your own blank but that's what it's gonna look like for me. Let me know if this was helpful for you guys. I'm sure that most of this could apply to actually anyone. The reality of the situation is that all of our lives are pretty unpredictable. We don't get to choose our circumstances. We get to choose how we respond to them and with that being said, I'm going to continue setting goals and dreams and vision for the future. Even though, yeah, days are very unpredictable and that's a bummer and that frustrates me and I will continue to learn ways of dealing with that frustration and hopefully finding a way to find freedom from some of this pain. Don't know if that will ever happen but I mean fingers crossed, right? We can dream. Also real quick before I go, last week I was on a podcast. This was probably one of the best podcast experiences of my life, if not the best with Matt and Jenna Lane. They are down in Florida so we've never been in person but I have never felt more warm and welcome by people in my life. Please go check out that podcast. It's linked down below. Their podcast is called Better Than Yesterday Everyday. It's about a lot of what we've been talking about making small improvements, small changes and a lot of it is health focused so check it out. It would be a personal favorite to me and I'd really appreciate it. Matt and Jenna, thank you so much for having me on. Thanks for listening guys. I really appreciate it. Thank you to my patrons for making this video possible and all of the videos on my channel possible. Check out this link if you would like to know what Patreon is, why people join it, what you might get out of it, what that community looks like. Thank you so much for spending a few minutes out of your day here with me. If you are someone who deals with chronic pain or chronic illness, I'm really sorry. It is just not a lot of fun. The understatement of the year but I get it and we'll get through it together somehow. I love you guys. I'm thinking about you and I'll see you in the next video. Bye guys. Have her from the sky all the way by the whispers of fire.