Word of the Year

This post was originally published on East Idaho Collective on January 5, 2022. EIM closed on February 15, 2023. I have moved my posts to this blog in order to preserve the collection of my writing. East Idaho Collective was for women to connect with each other. These posts are less about travel and more about what it was like for me to be a mom in Idaho in 2018-2023.

I have an alternative to New Years Resolutions for you. Instead of coming up with a (possibly unrealistic) goal, you come up with a Word of the Year. This word will be an overarching theme and guide for the year.

2022 will be my 9th year picking a Word of the Year. Every year toward the end of December I start thinking of things I want to do in the next year and what I want the year to look like. Then I think of words that fit the feeling I’m getting for the new year.

I got the idea in 2014 from a comedian named Jennifer Fulwiler. In 2014, she wrote a blog post explaining that her word for 2014 was Go.

This resonated with me, but 2014 was a crazy year for me. At the beginning of the year, I had four children under the age of four AND my husband’s Army unit was preparing to spend most of the year in Korea. I was smart enough to say that I just wanted to survive the year. But a few weeks after my husband left, I felt like maybe survival wasn’t enough. I decided I wanted to do a tiny bit of thriving too.

I decided to make up a word for my year. I mashed together Survival and Thrive and came up with Sur-thrival. This was a great theme for a year full of hard and yet wonderful experiences.

Here is my list of all the words I’ve used for each year:

2014 Sur-thrival (A combination of Survival and Thrive)
2015 Maintenance
2016 Preparedness
2017 No actual Word because I couldn’t get a handle on this year ahead of time, but in hindsight Risk or Recalculating would have been good themes
2018 Stability
2019 Confidence
2020 Grow
2021 Gather

I had a bit of trouble coming up with a word for 2022. For a little while, I thought the word would be Purpose, but for some reason, that word seemed scary and too big. I have a lot of projects in the works for 2022, but I’m not sure I’m ready for something like Purpose. Maybe I’ll save that one for 2023.

I ended up going back to my roots with Jennifer Fulwiler. I still follow her on Social Media and every year she promotes her “Word of a Year Generator.” Usually, I already have my word by the time she sends out the link, but this year I needed some help. I hit the button on her word generator and the perfect word for 2022 popped up: Community.

Do you pick a word of the year?

Tell us what word you have selected for 2022!