My Word of the Year in 2020

Also known as “One Little Word”, my word of the year is a word designed to be a focus on what I want to guide me throughout the year. It’s big in blogger and planner communities and I’ve gathered different words throughout the last few years.

2016 was my first year I did a word of the year – prosperity. A quote from what I wrote in that blog post:

Well I don’t know how much flourishing I’ll have in a financial respect (hello student loan payments), I want to flourish in what I do. Whether that’s a new job, publishing books, or something I don’t even see on my radar right now, I want to prosper in it.

I want to prosper in my faith and religion, especially. I worked for the Catholic Church for two years, and while I absolutely loved it, I’m in a different place now, being back at home. I want a personal revival, in a way.”

In someways, 2016 was the hardest year of my life. After a long grueling search for a job, I found one that brought me here to Austin. The job was hell, the culture was toxic and as soon as the election was over, I was dropped. Granted, there were mistakes I made, and I totally get that. But the culture was so bad, I developed anxiety over simple mistakes like a typo. Overall it was a terrible experience and there wasn’t much prosperity in 2016.

2017- This year, in the midst of no job and no aspects of a job, I had two words of the year: consistency and resilience.

Resilience was something I had. Consistency was not.

In 2018, I didn’t even try a word of the year. These 2016-2018 was just trying to survive whatever life threw at me.

I must have been done with it by 2019 because last year,I had an entire phrase not just a word. I wanted 2019 to be a year that I got shit done, in spite of myself. I had four examples I wanted to accomplish in spite of myself and I made progress on three of them.

2019 was a transformative year for me, in spite of myself. 2019 was a year where I had to rationalize what I thought was important to me (books, blogging, being a total introvert) with what I didn’t know would become important to me (my relationship, going out with friends, realizing that it’s okay to be close to people). With those lessons, I had to give some things up that I thought were important but didn’t ever get time – which made me realize they weren’t so important.

It was a lesson I didn’t realize I needed to learn, but now that I’ve sunk my teeth into this idea, I want to hone in on these things this year and really see what I can do with a clearer focus.

Which is how I got to my word of the year, this one little word: core.

core – the central or more important part of something.

I have four main focuses I want to pay attention to this year as a part of my core. I made a cute little page in my planner and I’m ready to focus this year. This year, if it’s not a core part of me, I don’t want to waste extra time on it. I want to take care of it and be done with it. You’ll see more of me this year – this is a core of mine, more stories.