O.K so I now know Halloween is October 31st not the 30th which makes my comic irony, well even more comic actually. Told you Aussies don't have a clue about that stuff. Actually that is not the case. Australians are very intimate with American culture, we know it better than we know ourselves and trust me, we don't know ourselves all that well.

Ohh I just found a stray m&m on the couch, score.

Now down to business. Change, I want it, how to get it.

And what is it specifically that you want to change about yourself Eva?

Good question Eva.

Thanks.

Don't mention it.

I want to stop talking to myself for one thing. I want to get my head out of the clouds. I want to come home and not be so overwhelmed by dishes and washing that I want to drink a litre of antifreeze. I want to be able to eat one biscuit with my cuppa and quietly and calmly put the packet back in the pantry without demolishing the whole pack like the Cookie Monster on speed. I want to stop procrastinating and get the sort of career that an intelligent and creative person like me deserves.

This is what I want to change and I've given myself a year to do it.

Can a person really change? I googled "How to Change" and got 582, 000, 000 results. People are obsessed with trying to better themselves. We all want to be more than we are. There are thousands of books, millions of articles, t.v shows, self-help "gurus" telling us exactly what our problem is. 'You are sick', they scream, 'you are doing everything wrong', then they tell us that the first step to change is to feel good about yourself. I have trouble with this paradox; we can't change unless we believe in ourselves, but we can't believe in our selves unless we change.

There are thousands of theories and therapies out there that all claim to hold the secret to truly change. There is literally an A to Z (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_psychotherapies): You can try attack therapy, where the therapist provokes a response in a patient by humiliating or verbally abusing them or wilderness therapy, which involves taking people out into Blair Witch country and seeing how they survive or vegatotherapy which is less to do with telling carrots about your childhood and more about physicalising your emotions.

So I thought that my task over the next 363 days should be to try as many therapies as I can afford/handle and see which one works for me and if I can change at all, just a little bit. I know it sounds like I'm very cynical but believe me I want this to work. I don't want to be like this- this vague mess of a human, forever. I want to be a better Mum to my sweet little girl and a better wife to my wonderful, saintly husband. I want to be better so I can feel better and I have a heart full of slightly skeptical hope that something is going to work.

So today I'm off on my first therapy adventure; a group Art Therapy session to which I must bring a plate of food and a hat and some old magazines. Here we go...

Hello. My name is Eva and I'm a big mess.

I'm 30, overweight and under-successful. I'm messy, disorganised and vague. I'm a mother, a wife a homeowner, a performer and I still don't know who I am or what the hell I'm supposed to be doing.

Every year I say to myself, this year will be different, this year I will change, but we all know how that story ends; boredom, followed by failure, followed by crying on the kitchen floor whilst eating cooking chocolate because it's the only sweet thing left in the house.

So, I've decided I need to take a radically different approach. I've decided that the oath to change needs to be made publicly... well sort of. I know I shall drown in a sea of well-meaning and ambitious blogers but it's out there and that means something. It means that if I fail, I'll do it in front of lots of people and I'm a performer so failing in front everyone is sort of my raison d'etre.

My year starts today. October 30th, 2009. Halloween. We don't really take much notice of this tradition in Australia but there seems to be a sense of comic irony about making a positive, Oprah-style conviction to find meaning and value in one's life when everyone else is spending the day worshiping the dark side. So in my own little quirky way the journey to change begins and we'll see how far i got on October 30th, 2010.

These blogs are going to be short. One reason for this is because, like the rest of my generation I have a very short attention span. The other reason is that I currently have a two year old jumping on me.

More soon.