#129 - Rabbit rabbit! It's reflecting tiiiiime

Well hey, hi, hello there, welcome to the last month of 2023!

The year is officially in it’s “wow how do I have so much left to do before the End Of Year” phase, which we’ve handily named: December.

And, fun fact, with this very essay, I have completed my #1 New Years Resolution for the year, which was to once again publish & send out 52 Subtacks!

(We did it, gang!!)

Was it the exact same goal I had in 2022? You betcha! I wasn’t interested in Growth this year, I was interested in maintenance. The thing about having massive realizations and breakthroughs about yourself/your life thus far, is that it can get really overwhelming. Especially when we don’t leave time for debrief & integration!

For a visual, just take a gander at my journals from last year vs. this year:

So! 2023 was my year of Learning How To Relax. Because I wanted to really understand what it actually felt like to take it easy.

And I think I did! I’m not like suddenly a ~Chill Person~ but I now understand the fundamentals of what helps me relax. What I need to do in order to let myself off the hook of feeling like I’m not doing enough.

(Making “rest” into a task is the only way my Virgo brain was going to take it seriously as a skill, and I did! And now I’m like crushing my days off. It’s incredible.)

So, as far as New Year’s Resolutions go, I’ve become a fan of them. I think having long-term and short-term goals and actually sitting down and figuring out what they’ll take Present Me (rather than the overpowered Future Me I imagine in my mind) to get done, has been the thing that has fundamentally shifted my perspective on life at large.

We currently live in Hack Culture, where we want things to take as little time as possible. But I’ve never wanted to be described as a hack.

So in terms of quality of life, I’ve personally found that sprinting through everything leaves little time to notice changes in ourselves, to appreciate the beauty of the things we’re speeding past, or to understand what our Best looks like when we give ourselves adequate time to plan and realistic outcomes to want.

I have been long-stuck in the Procrastinators Paradox Model of leaving myself as little time as possible to get something done so that the result is “the best I could do in the little time I had…” instead of “the best I could do.” and that habit has been a hard one to break, but it now guides me when determining actual reality and the time things really take when it comes to goal setting!

On Sunday, I’ll be sending out a long-form walkthrough detailing the seven-step process I use to set my yearly goals.

And if you want to set time in your calendar to do this, we’re running Goal Setting 2024 as an virtual workshop at Facilitator Cards, hosted by Meg (my sister/boss/professional facilitator)! It’s $23 suggested donation because we know paying for things helps people feel more accountable, but any dollar amount—including $0—is welcome! (And we really really mean that!)

But since I know most folks are not interested in that level of granularity, I wanted to highlight the first step in the process. The part that takes six minutes to do and I think can really help illuminate what’s often not obvious to ourselves.

Step #1 - Surface Emotions

We’re gonna start by writing three Minute Papers. Teeny-tiny two minute long reflective essays.

Set a timer (for each or the whole thing depending on how much clock-glancing stresses you out) and then respond to these three prompts in this order:

1. This time next year I want to feel…
2. This time next year I want to be…
3. This time next year I want to have accomplished…

Now read those essays. Notice anything that stood out, anything that surprised you or felt especially true or powerful or intriguing. For bonus points: grab a highlighter and go to town!

Look at you, getting to know yourself better in just six minutes! Isn’t journaling amazing?

I’m going to stop there (because so much more in this vein is heading to your inbox on Sunday!) but I just want to take one more earnest moment to say: I know it can feel super fucking hokey.

That’s okay. It kind of is.

Lean into it.

If you think I don’t feel a bit goofy or silly or too-obvious while writing my responses, I did and I do! I’ve just decided to push past those emotions because they’re not coming from within myself, they are coming from the perception of what others might think/say if they read it. And like, I don’t care anymore! I don’t care because no one is living my life but me, and this is the shit I’ve found that helps me live my life in accordance to what brings me joy.

The point of life is to live it, not fret about others' opinions of benign actions. I’m leaning all the fuck in on radical honesty and earnestness because I’m just bored of disaffection and ~coolness~ defining any part of me or how I express myself to the world.

Okay well, it’s a rainy day here in Brooklyn but I get to go see one of my favorite comedians tonight so the fact that I have spent at LEAST one hour at work every single day this week sobbing my eyes out is getting balanced! (Realizing that it sounds like I was crying about work, and thankfully no, I love my job, it was more a constant breakdown and honest depiction of feeling crushed by the necessity of capitalism while the world horrifically rages on around me!)

Balance can happen in the middle, or by averaging the experiences on either end of the spectrum.

I’ve decided to stop living excuse-to-excuse. Which is daunting but soooo necessary.

And with that, welcome to December! I’ve been on a Gilmore Girls rewatch and that show does snow & winter extremely well, I feel very ~in the mood~ to drink hot chocolate and wear big fuzzy slippers and talk talk talk.

Thanks for reading, thanks for being here, thank you for letting my words into your life it really means more than I can express!

Haaaave a great month enjoy all the twinkling lights!!

From The Vault:

Last year: #72 - Back To December

Two years ago: #15 - I'm Still Mad About The Movie Long Shot