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?
Continue readingAt 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.
Continue readingEvery year I start by blogging about my goals or theme for the year. For 2022, that theme was Rebuilding: trying to find myself again after a global pandemic, setting my sights on new long-term goals to move from just surviving toward truly thriving.
I came a long way: I invested in my writing through various workshops and conferences, and I wrote more than I have in years–I also submitted more stories for publication than ever before. Not only did I earn an Honorable Mention in the Writers of the Future contest, but I also had my first short story published. (You can check it out here.) I’ve also been accepted to a teaching fellowship through Teach for America that is helping me push my teaching skills to the next level, and I’m excited to start applying everything I’ve learned in my classroom.
So what’s next? What does 2023 hold for me?
Continue readingIt’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.
Continue readingAbout a year ago, I turned keto. I had meant to talk all about it, how much I loved it, how great it made me feel, how it was grounded in science not fanaticism, but I didn’t.
I just kept saying, “Let me wait a few more weeks, let me see if this is the real thing or just a placebo.” A few weeks would pass and I’d tell myself, “I’m just so busy, I’ll do it later.”
Then summer started. Vacation came and my mental fortitude went. I found it increasingly hard to keep keto, drawn by my mental health toward high-sugar, high-carb foods and hindered by my low energy to make at home the more satisfying food I needed. So then my excuse for not writing was that I wasn’t doing keto anymore. To talk about it would be hypocritical, and besides, I didn’t have energy to write about it anyways.
So now I’m trying to get back into it, because it’s a lifestyle change that I actually liked a lot, but I’m struggling to make it happen. All my will has turned to won’t, and I can’t seem to muster the motivation I need to stick to it. The irony is that I’m right now teaching an elective called “Stress and Resilience,” which focuses foremost on stress and then on willpower.
As I write this, my kids are writing about how overcoming their willpower challenge will help them reach their bigger goals. Now I’d be the hypocrite if I don’t do the same.
Continue readingThis is the final post in my 2019 Pride Month series “Proudly Reaffirming Identity, Diversity, and Equity,” exploring present-day issues facing the LGBTQ+ and allied communities.
A joke: What do you do with knotted hose? You let the kinks out.
This post is part of my 2019 Pride Month series “Proudly Reaffirming Identity, Diversity, and Equity,” exploring present-day issues facing the LGBTQ+ and allied communities.
“Pride is too sexual,” I hear them whispering. “I’d never take my kids to that.”
Or maybe the age-old classic: “Not in front of the children!”
So queerness–at least being gay or bi or lesbian–is reduced to being purely about love, and sex is a side subject that everyone skirts around because, well, children. But let’s all remember one critical fact: those children? Made by sex.
So let’s talk about sex.
I am fond of wit and wordplay, and I find it the greatest irony in the fact that “doping” and “dopamine” are similar only as a matter of coincidence.
I am also a fan of synecdoche, both for its sound and for its meaning and usage: the reversal of a part and its whole. (As a tangential whim, I’ve always wanted to write an adventure novel in which our young protagonists must recover the lost “Synecdo Key” to progress in their journey, but upon finding it, the key is broken, and only a single part remains…but fret not, because it can still unlock the door as though it were whole.)
So, colloquially with a hint of synecdoche, I’d like to talk about a form of dope we all do.
If you know me personally or you’re a long-time reader (sometimes I wonder if any of you are still here…), my history of mental illness should be no surprise.
And it sucks.
Today starts our mini-unit on self-compassion in the mindfulness class I’m teaching. It’s a hard unit, even as a teacher, because so much of our culture says we need to be hard on ourselves–and probably much harder than we already are. It’s almost painful to be self-compassionate, and it’s about as awkward to talk about it to kids.
And on top of that, I’m still feeling sick. I got to bed a few hours earlier than usual last night, and I woke up feeling so much better–but my throat is so dry it’s raw, and I can barely open my mouth to talk without feeling the pain of it. I was talking to myself last night, and I know when I’m feeling sick I have the least amount of willpower, so all my normal challenges look like massive mountains right now.
So it’s the perfect time to talk about self-compassion.
The Writingwolf: Words and Wonders 