I can't believe it's Christmas Eve!!!!! Probably my favourite day of the whole year x

How are you feeling today? Hopefully excited and relaxed, but if you're not, that's ok. I wrote this post as a reminder that there's no such thing as perfect, and so much to be grateful for.

In our picture-perfect digital world, the festive season can bring feelings of inadequacy. The rose-tinted toxicity of social media doesn’t exactly help matters either!

Without social media, would we spend half as much time comparing ourselves to everyone else and questioning whether what we have is 'enough’? Surely the first checkpoint if we're so easily knocked off balance should be looking within ourselves rather than at the highly-curated showreels of other people’s lives, yet when we get a spare ten minutes to rest, it’s intriguing that scrolling is the first thing we find ourselves doing. I’m as guilty of this as anyone else.

But what if we could reframe these niggly, negative feelings as an opportunity to make way for something new? After all, the upcoming new year brings a clean slate to pursue new opportunities and do fresh things with our lives. That’s a good thing, right?

I remember hitting a bit of a wall several years ago. What made it worse is that thanks to my incessant use of facebook, I saw everyone else around me getting on with the business of life; taking holidays, doing things, being in love, basically thriving. I didn’t like the negative, two-dimensional version of myself I’d slowly become and I wanted to feel happiness, excitement and fulfilment, but I didn’t know where to start. I didn’t even know what I wanted my life to be like.

Eventually I realised that the first step was being able to identify what made me excited and happy. Once I’d figured that out, I started to doggedly pursue it. Two of my big things were writing and running, and since that realisation, I’ve made leaps and bounds in both, which has meant this has been my most fulfilling and exciting year yet (more on that later).

Of course while working towards what could be, we have to accept and embrace what is. This is another thing I had to re-teach myself as I’d fallen into some very negative habits and was seeing the world through a lens of what I didn't have, rather than what I did have. The best advice I was given was to start very, very small, so I stripped things back to below zero and tried to be grateful for anything above that, even if it didn’t feel genuine at first. Lovely cup of coffee first thing? I was grateful for that. A walk with my dog I enjoyed? I was grateful for that. Eventually I started to recognise just how much there was to be grateful for, much of which had been staring me in the face for a long time.

I’m looking forward to sharing more ofmy positive habits with you in the new year, but my point is that although it doesn’t always feel like it, we are in control of our lives. We:

- Get to choose who we surround ourselves with, and what we do

- Have the power to create happiness for ourselves if it's not magically given to us on a plate

- Always have something to get excited about, and if we don't, we can either find it or create it!

I hope you have a wonderful time this Christmas, whatever it looks like for you. If it's not worked out as you'd hoped, why not use it as an opportunity to think about what you're going to do in 2022 to bring you the happiness you deserve?

And remember, nothing is as perfect as Facebook or Instagram would have you believe. Who wants perfect anyway…?

Merry Christmas xxxxxxx