MEMO TO ME: Stop Complaining About the Things You Do To Yourself.

• Author: Puterbaugh, Dolores T.
• Position: NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTIONS

Some people are agnostic about New Year's resolutions. When I was young, I made long lists of them: the projects I would complete, the changes I would make. A merger of Martha Stewart and Wonder Woman ought to have turned up the following Dec. 31 but, of course, it was just me again, with clutter, chaos, and good intentions in my wake. I would again valiantly write my long list and cry every New Year's Eve because something was slipping away. Then I created categories: health, creativity, organizing. I stopped being so sad on New Year's Eve. Now I have a motto instead of a specific prescribed behavior or outcome, and am excited because: Hey! We get to be alive!

On my refrigerator is a letter-size sheet of paper with my New Year's motto in large print. A copy hangs near the computer in the home office because I need reminders. I have shared it with friends and family and even some clients. One client laughed and said it sounded like advice for everybody and perhaps she is right.

It's written in second person so reading it isn't abstract and distant. It's me, therapizing myself: Stop complaining about the things you do to yourself.

However, I don't do annoying therapist things like steeple my fingers and tilt my head when I say It. I never steeple my fingers. That would require sitting across a desk from my clients, as if I were the assistant principal in charge of student behavior and they were errant teenagers. I don't see the utility in that arrangement.

Tapping the complaint brake pedal has heightened my awareness of self-inflicted trouble. Sometimes it's easy. Yes, I'm the one who postponed grocery shopping and now the milk is a little funky; stop complaining about the things I do to myself. I delayed making that bloodwork appointment and now have to fast until midday? Me, who wakes up hungry in the middle of the night but somehow waits until morning to eat? Yeah, I'm going to be fun to be around; no use complaining about something I did to myself.

Sometimes I pretend it's harder than it is. Oh, poor me, the day is so overpacked. Well, I'm the one who sets the appointments for work; if I don't like the schedule, then I ought to talk to myself about that, eh? Instead of complaining about the things I do to myself, perhaps?

My client is right: this is something that permeates life, this tendency to complain as if self-inflicted troubles were imposed upon us from outside. Usually, some mix of external events and our responses to them are...