One of my many flaws is my inability to celebrate personal achievements. I take great joy celebrating the large and small feats of those around me. I consider it valuable to commemorate moments in my friends' lives when hard work, dedication, and discipline paid off. It's important to celebrate even some of the more whimsical accomplishments. Birthdays, weddings, graduations, promotions, moving in, and moving away are all large reasons for celebrations, but the more normal moments in life, like completing a project, learning a new skill, or getting through a tough week are all possible reasons to celebrate life as well. We all go through many ups and downs in our lifetimes and the future is a mystery, but we should regularly praise God for even seemingly-trivial blessings in the here and now.

However, I struggle to find joy celebrating my own accomplishments. I am my own worst critique. No one has a higher bar for my actions than myself. I consider my own achievements and successes as expectations. For example, I was not excited when I received 'A's in school because anything less than an 'A' would have been a disappointment. My expectation was perfect grades. I was not particularly joyful when I received academic accolades because the awards were a byproduct of simply attempting to meet my own internal standards. I appreciated the public acknowledgement, but I desired to be the best in all I did and considered accolades as an expected result of being the best. All the awards and certificates I received would simply be brought home and put into my closest or tucked into a dresser drawer, never visible for me to celebrate or commemorate. I didn't want to become complacent being an achievement because I knew areas where I could have performed better. I'm terrible at accepting compliments or acknowledgements because I always want to reply, "thanks, but" and then explain why I'm undeserving. 

I live in a paradox where I try to find any reason to celebrate in the lives of my friend, but try to find any reason to discredit achievements in my own life. So I decided I should find a way to force myself to celebrate the large and small moments in my own life more frequently.

The specific methodology for how I'd make myself celebrate materialized when Mtn Dew Baja Blast went on sale at grocery stores this summer. Baja Blast is a Mtn Dew flavor sold exclusively at Taco Bell all year, but it is a seasonal flavor sold elsewhere during the summer. I'm a big fan. It's my beverage of choice to bring to bachelor parties, birthday parties, summer grill-outs, or other major summer social events. I'm crestfallen when the beverage leaves the shelves in the fall, even though I keep most of my Baja Blast consumption contained to social events and rarely have it. So that got me thinking, what if I kept a pack of Baja Blast for the rest of the year? A pack has 12 cans. A year has 12 months. The math is pretty straightforward and works out to be one can per month for a full year. But I wanted to add some significance related to the moment that I drink the can each month. I realized I could drink one can each month to celebrate something. Nothing specific, but just something. The more I thought about it, the more I became committed to the idea. So I bought one 12-pack of Baja Blast.

So that's the plan: One celebratory Baja Blast per month for a personal celebration. Cheers to personal growth!