Hello 2020!!!  I am so glad to turn the page on the calendar of 2019!  It has been a challenging year.  I lost my mother this year and my father two years ago.  Yes, I am now an orphan as someone so cruelly pointed out to me.  I miss my parents so very much.  This has been my first holiday without them.

I had been my mother’s caregiver since I was in my twenties and I am now 59.  So for most of my life, I defined myself as the caregiver to my bipolar, unhealthy mother.  I am now free to travel and have a life to  myself.  I am grateful that I can focus more on myself and yet, I feel guilty about that.  I have been trying to come to terms with these conflicting feelings.

Therefore, I celebrate the coming of a new year to awaken myself to create a new and improved me!  I look forward to getting more organized in the condo that I inherited from my parents.  I am so very grateful to have a home that is paid for and I can live in.

Now comes the task of cleaning out and organizing my parent’s stuff from over the past 65 years of marriage.  With the turning of the calendar page on a new year and a new decade, I have given myself permission to purge the old files from the 1970’s hidden upstairs!

I look forward to cleaning out old spaces and making them mine.  I tend to keep way too many clothes and make-up.  I need to follow the advice of Marie Condo, the Japanese organizer, and tidy up and thank my items for their usefulness in my life as I donate them to a new life.

I am so hopeful to look forward to a new year and awakening myself to new habits.  I will start room by room and organize a corner of it a little at a time. In the past, I have overwhelmed myself by trying to do too much all at the same time.  I have a new plan to take it more slowly and mindfully.  I want to go through my parent’s keepsakes and decide what to keep and what to donate.

Also, I need to go through my closets and drawers and donate those old jeans that I won’t ever fit into again!  Depressing, yet honest.  I guess that is what I really need to focus on–being honest with the space I have and the clutter that I need to reduce and donate.  Hello Goodwill!  Hello 2020!  Happy New Year to me as I awaken to a new year, a new me!!!