In four days, all of us will likely face the challenge or be filled with dread. New Year’s resolutions either fill us with a sense of victory or defeat as we look at the long year ahead, hopeful to make the best choices we can day by day as we travel through.

As you raise a glass this Sunday in anticipation for 2018, I challenge you to believe in the magic of new beginnings and look at the next day, the first day of a new year, as a start of a 365-page novel just waiting for you to tell a story only you can.

I haven’t always been one for New Year’s resolutions. There was a time when I thought most people were foolish for looking at one day in a new year as the beginning of any sort of change.

I laughed as people would talk passionately about all they hoped to accomplish in the exciting time of year where the calendar would turn. I honestly believed I would never be like them.

Why, I thought, should I ever believe that just because we add another number to the end of the year that anything could change for me, or about me?

What I have found as I got older, and perhaps wiser, is what I really was lacking in those moments of self-doubt and disbelief was preparation.

If I had prepared myself to meet the new year head on, maybe I would have been more excited about it, much like the rest of society.

I have learned that, when I’m prepared, anything is possible — even for those of us who dance around the belief of whether or not “a new year, a new you” is honestly true.

I believe preparing a way for the future enables success. It creates purpose. Regardless of if goals are met, or maybe only halfway accomplished, working towards something we desire creates hope. And maybe that is the purpose of the resolution tradition all along — ope in the idea that all things change, and change, although scary, can more times than not be a good thing.

Stepping out on a limb this week, I gave myself a Christmas present preparing already to accomplish a New Year’s resolution of my own. Setting a precedence that not only am I prepared to meet the new year head on, but I’m preparing to also make all my dreams, wants, hopes and wishes for it come true.

What was that limb you may ask? Stick around a little longer and read more of my columns and you might find out.

More importantly though, in that process, in that stepping out on a limb, I felt determined that no matter what, this next year, was going to be my year!

So I challenge you to prepare for a good year. Have hope in all that can and will change, and raise your glass ready to greet 2018 with determination to make it your, and all of ours’, best year yet.

After all, if nothing else, we all owe it to ourselves to do something each and every day that our future self will want to thank us for.

Brittany Fuller is the community editor of The Jessamine Journal and Jessamine Life magazine. She can be reached at brittany.fuller@jessaminejournal.com.