Hey, it's Anna. In our episode last week, we told you about how writer Saeed Jones approaches

personal reflection around New Year's, not with resolutions, but with determinations.

He wrote a new essay about that called We Are a

Determined household and as we start this new year we wanted to share it with you.

We're also collecting your determinations for the coming year.

So as you listen, think about what you want in 2020.

And then record a voice memo and send it to us

at deathsex money at w WNC.org.

Happy New Year and here's Saeed.

At some point every December when I was growing up,

my mother would set down the newspaper she was reading or mute the episode of Oprah she was watching and look over at me.

Said, have you ridden your determinations yet? she'd say, no mom not yet I'd reply. Knowing

she was about to say what she said every year. We don't make resolutions in

this house. We make determinations. I would watch her,

bemused, even as I felt my teenage skepticism giving way to her persuasive earnestness,

and then she would hit me with the closer she had been

refining for years. We are a determined household, she would say.

It got me every time.

My mother raised me as a single parent in the suburbs of North Dallas,

sometimes working two jobs to make ends meet and pay for the heart medication she desperately needed,

but often had to skimp on.

And especially trying times she'd wake up two or three hours earlier than usual so that she could chant in front of

...