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Jesus Christ suffered for me so that I don’t have to suffer. He helps me to become better, patient with my mistakes as he offers healing, hope, and repentance. He treats me with overwhelming lovingkindness.

But how do I treat myself?

Sometimes I am downright mean to myself. It’s like I find myself wallowing in the mud, so I simultaneously yell at myself for being there while pushing my face back into the filth as punishment.

I sabotage my own change, not through weakness, but through cruelty as I tell myself that I don’t deserve better and that I’ll never be good enough.

I criticize constantly, picking at flaws and putting a magnifying glass up to things that don’t matter. There are physical characteristics that no one ever notices or cares about, and I point them out to myself, as if I could never be beautiful. I ruin my own time management in the simultaneous pursuit of too much that doesn’t matter and not enough that does, and then I become overwhelmed with shame that I can never get it right.

I treat myself in a way that I would never treat anyone else. I want to become better, but I am so nasty to myself that I get in the way of my own progress.

I want to be kinder to myself than anyone else in the world. I wan to become patient and loving, allowing myself to change without ruining it with my self-punishment.

I can forgive myself. I can allow myself to do better. I can release the shame. I can patiently go forward, step by step.

And as I love myself more, I become more beautiful as I come a little closer to my Savior.

It’s a new year. People often set new resolutions at the beginning of January in an effort to do better. I have not done that this year. I am instead currently working on seasonal planning, which means that instead of planning a whole year in advance, I plan the year in 3-4 different sections. I just don’t know what life will be like and what I need to work on beyond the next few months.

In addition to seasonal planning, I’ve been trying to focus my goals on processes instead of to-do lists. Changing my processes gets a lot more done than just adding everything to my to-do list.

When I’m focused on improving my processes, that means I’m trying to make good habits for myself. But new habits aren’t formed by willpower alone.

Willpower works more as a muscle, not a choice. If I try to change all of my habits all at once, I’m going to burn out quickly because I don’t have the strength to do that.

So instead of changing my behavior by pure willpower, I need to change my environment.

If I want to wake up early, I have to set an alarm that automatically goes if. If I want to go to bed earlier, I have my computer shut off the internet before bed. If I have the couch facing the TV, I watch more TV. I change the couch to face the windows, and I have less desire to stare at a screen.

I can put fruit on the counter to eat more fruit. I can fill up my extremely large water bottle in the morning so that I drink more water. And if I buy less cereal, we eat less cereal.

Often, our bad habits and negative behaviors are coupled along with a certain environment. When my house gets really messy, I often get depressed. Those things come together. So if I want to keep myself from depression, then I clean my house.

If you have goals to change your behavior, look around at your environment first. What parts of your environment are coupled with negative behaviors? What parts are couple with positive behaviors?

Instead of focusing on the goal-setting of what you want to accomplish, you also have to build your life to make it really easy to accomplish your goals. Good behaviors don’t come from strong discipline–they come from good environments.

In January, there was fog like I’ve never seen before. It stayed around for days, and the frost kept building and building on everything until it looked like snow.

It was beautiful. But I was so ready for the sun to come out.

It did come. The sun melted all the frost and that frost and fog were forgotten. Its beauty was mostly forgotten too, as the relief of the sunshine erased the heaviness of what had been.

And that’s my metaphor for the year. There was a pandemic, and in some ways, it was beautiful. But it was heavy too, and we are all waiting for the sun to come out again.

It will. Life will shift back to normal.

And we’ll look back at the photographs and we’ll remember that we’ve forgotten how beautiful it was–painful and heavy and beautiful all at once.

It’s the sort of thing you want to have experienced, but you never wish for it again in your life.

Let us not forget to look around at what is now, for even when the sun is darkened, the fog sits heavy in our hearts, and the frost begins to grow–even that is a moment that you can never have again.