Balance

I’ve spent the last couple weeks thinking about what I want to achieve this year, and my ideas keep circling back to a singular theme: balance. I’ve spent the last couple years rebuilding my hopes and goals for the long-term and focusing on consistency in areas I care about, and now it’s time to make sure my approach to all these domains remains, well, balanced.

So what does my Year of Balance entail?

Consistency in Review

At the start of this year, 2023, I took a look at my life and decided the theme for the year should be consistency. In 2022, I focused on rebuilding myself–pulling together the pieces of a world turned upside-down by a global pandemic and revisiting my personal and professional goals (and in regards to my writing, how I want that personal goal to become professional). This year was focused on continuing that growth toward something more consistent: regular writing, positive work-life balance, and improved physical and mental health.

I’m happy to say I’ve had many successes, but I’ve also had a few misses.

So let’s look at 2023 in review.

Summer Sails Away

It’s hard to believe the summer is almost over, but as I write this, my last Friday of summer vacation is fading into the background. So have I met my summer goals?

Ha! Not at all. But I have managed to do a few even greater things.

Back in the Habit(ica)

Here’s how I got through my last two years of undergrad: I used a website called Habitica.com to gamify my to-do list. I added assignments, personal goals, and generally good habits to my list of habits, dailies, and to-dos, and getting gold and experience points for crossing things off the list helped motivate me to get it all done.

Then I started working full-time, and my daily routine became so routine that I didn’t need to keep track of things in the same way as I did before, and my use of Habitica dropped off.

I’ve tried to go back to it a few times, but it’s just never worked…trying to codify my entire life in it was just not realistic anymore. But I think I’ve got a new approach that’ll help me keep to it better, and I think I’ll need it just to get through the summer.

Long Term Goals

Isn’t it ironic that after I post about ending blogging, I get inspired to blog more? It’s actually not surprising, though: it’s summer now, and I have free time again.

So maybe I was a little hasty to say I’d stop blogging forever–but I needed to write that last post to process the possibility. Now that I have, I can look at things more holistically: The problem with blogging, no, the challenge preventing me from blogging is work.

And in the summers when I don’t work, I can blog more. So much like how beloved TV shows have seasons and off-seasons, maybe that’s my approach to blogging: I’ll blog in the summer when I’ve got time, and I’ll go on hiatus when the school year starts.

But what’s any of that got to do with my long-term goals? Since the start of my blogging career, one of my most returned-to topics has been my goals, so it makes sense that my first new post of this summer’s season is, yet again, about goals–but bigger and better.

To 2022: What I Need from You

It’s been a long tradition to make my first post of the new year about my goals and ambitions for the year ahead. My goals have been growing and expanding for years…and over the past few years, I’ve yet to actually fully achieve all the goals I’ve written about.

Goals, I thought, were a better way forward than resolutions. The latter, I claimed, sought to fix what was broken about the previous year, but I didn’t buy that brokenness approach. Goals, I thought, would provide a north star without subscribing to that mindset.

Turns out there may yet be a better approach than all of this.

Progress: Failure

My last post began with the words “I’m overwhelmed, exhausted, and terrified.” That post was published eight months ago. It’s a testament to how hard the year has been that I’ve not managed to write a single new post since then. I had such hopes, such dreams.

Today, I want to talk about failure.

Normally, around this time of year, I look back on my goals for the year and reflect on my progress. This year, my progress toward those goals all ended in failure. So I want to spend less time talking about where I’m not and more time talking about how I got here. Maybe that’s a better use of my time than listing off failed accomplishments. Hopefully, it’s a better use of yours, too, as you read this (if anyone does…I’ve been such an inconsistent blogger, I feel like I’ve failed all those who were active readers before. I’m truly sorry).

With my preamble out of the way, what the hell happened this year?

Creating Spaces

There’s a story in Judaism that before God could create the world, he had to create space in which the world could be created: in Kabbalah it’s called tsimtsum and means “withdrawal.” So God withdrew to create space for creation.

When I was in college, the leader of a workshop on leadership told us he liked to always share his own ideas last in a meeting. “People aren’t going to listen to your ideas,” he said, “if they’re holding onto theirs. So after they share their ideas, they’re more receptive to others’.”

By speaking their ideas, making them manifest outside their bodies, they’re emptying something inside them that you can now fill more easily, with less resistance.

And when schools were shuttered in March, in order to work effectively from home, I had to rearrange furniture, gather the relevant supplies, and build a home office in the middle of my dining room (it was the only place I had, really, but it works).

In all these cases, it’s obvious that when we create a space for something, we can make it happen. Except, well… there are things I’m passionate about that I’ve never made space for–so is it any wonder that I’ve been neglecting these passions for years?

Out of Sorts

“I hope you’re pleased with yourself,” Hermione Granger said to Harry Potter and Ron Weasley on page 162 of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. “We could all have been killed–or worse, expelled. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to bed.”

Ron responds: “No, we don’t mind. You’d think we dragged her along, wouldn’t you?”

The movie plays differently: a slight inversion at the start and a spot of humor in the end.

“Now, if you two don’t mind,” Hermione begins, “I’m going to bed before either of you come up with another clever idea to get us killed–or worse, expelled.”

And Ron says, “She needs to sort out her priorities.”

Which is precisely why, dear reader, I’ve brought you here today.

The Big PVGs

Or: a response to “30 Behaviors That Will Make You Unstoppable” by Benjamin Hardy.

When I spoke to my therapist in early April, he suggested reading Hardy’s article to help me get some ideas for “what works,” you know, that post I procrastinated writing until a few days ago.

Likewise, even though I opened Hardy’s article while I was still on the phone with my therapist, and I kept it open for the next two weeks, I didn’t actually sit down to read it until two days before my next appointment–what happens, I thought, if he asks about it? (Spoiler: he didn’t.)

As I read through these 30 things that promise to make me unstoppable, I felt a plethora of feelings: some of it reminded me of what I read in The Four Desires; some of it sounded too prescriptive, like the “shoulds” that instill shame which Brene Brown warns us against; and some it made me wish for something more, like inspiration and imagination.

But part of me also realized, as I read Hardy, that it’s been a long time since I actually evaluated the big PVGs in my life: my priorities, my values, my goals.

I figured this all out, once, so I’d figured it would end there. But it never does.