#72 - Back To December

This is the first year I’ve accomplished a long-term new years resolution.

Last year I made a pact with myself (I told a few people about it too) that I was going to publish a newsletter every Friday, for a total of at least 52 newsletters for 2022.

I didn’t number them or make a big list that I checked off each week. I didn’t obsessively count them to see how many more I had to go—I just kind of went one Friday at a time.

Sometimes I published two essays a week. At some point, I began a tradition of writing an extra one on the first of the month to help me center my energy and declare a focus for the next four weeks of my life. I tried to not take myself so seriously, I tried to stop coming up with new ideas and focuses, and I really made a valiant effort to get shit done.

My 52nd of the 52 newsletters was published on November 18th, in which I admitted I was suffering from a major depressive bout. Immediately after sending it, I had decided that I wasn’t going to count it because for some reason I thought I would have had something grander to say. I had written so many, some of which I was even proud of, and my finish line was crossed with an essay that felt so disparate from the others. So uh, you can lead a horse to water but they may look around and go “well getting here was actually easier than I had imagined so I haven’t earned drinking this water because I should really feel thirstier if this mountain was as hard to climb as it was in my head—” and you know what, I am that horse, and I’m done being that horse. It’s so fucking lame when people can’t appreciate themselves/their accomplishments/the things that people are complimenting them on. I know this is going against my “don’t be mean to yourself” rule but this is in line with my “sometimes I just need a swift kick in the ass to get over something” mentality. Like yes, the tone of healing is often gentle and kind, but sometimes it is also incredulous and you know what, sometimes that’s more helpful.

So anyway, yaaay!! I did the thing! I wrote a ton this year and I’m really really happy that I did because writing is one of those things that I had let slip away and was the best tool I had to help me come back to myself. I write six pages a day in my journal, I write a ‘stack a week, and I’m pushing through finishing a manuscript. I’m a writer again! I did it by…writing! It was way easier than I remembered. Mostly because I let it be.

So! Now that I’m all smug from having accomplished a long-term resolution, I want to give out the ~secrets~ to how I did it.

#1 - Start When You’re Ready

I didn’t wait until January 1st to get going with the newsletters, I tested myself in December 2021 by sending out one every Friday. I don’t have word minimums (all of them have been long though because uhhhh have you met me? I’ve never been brief in my life), I didn’t give myself any genre to stick to, it was truly no holds barred just learning how to hit send over and over again until it became slightly less intimidating to do it.

Practice whatever the goal is. It’s worth easing in.

#2 - Don’t Start From Scratch

Going from 0 to 100 is a lot harder than letting yourself get warmed up. I also have a lot of weirdly high expectations that I put on the first of anything I do. When I launched this newsletter I couldn’t get out of my own head, so I wrote about how I was stuck in it and hitting send on that allowed me to go forth unburdened by the pressures of debut.

I hate the first blank page in a journal because it has heightened by false importance. So I don’t start my new journals on a new entry. The first page is now a continued entry from the previous one. No pressure! Just keep the writing going!

I think having the right materials can totally make a difference—I’m picky about paper texture and pens, I get it—but treating those materials too preciously will stop the enjoyment we should be getting from using them. (Light those super-expensive candles! Swipe that $35 lipstick on! Use the ‘good plates’ and drink the fancy bottle and indulge in the things you’ve been saving!) Once you’ve broken the seal it’s a lot easier to keep going.

#3 - Momentum Matters (but also like, only as much as we make it)

I skipped a few Fridays! (I had some cushion built in early on in terms of having more essays than there had been weeks in the year, so when I hit a wall, didn’t like the draft, or had life get in the way, I didn’t punish myself for it. I didn’t proclaim that I had failed, I just…wrote one the next week.)

And when I had a lot to say…I sent two. And when I finished writing one and had enough in me to start another, I did. And when I thought of a good headline or subject I put it in my notes app or popped it into a New Post on here. (My draft list on here is so so long.)

#4 - Attainability Mode

I didn’t want to set myself up for failure OR undue stress throughout the week. Yes, I complained about having to set time aside to get it done on the reg, yes I got annoyed with myself on Thursday evenings when the essays weren’t already finished, but like…it really didn’t take over my life. I didn’t have a ton of stress that I allowed myself to create around the task. I would have freaked the fuck out if I was sending two a week every week, no doubt about it. 100 would have been an extremely different goal, and it’s not one I’m setting myself for next year or anything either.

One a week. 52 by the end of the year. Super attainable.

Set the bar low enough to clear it.

(One a week isn’t actually that low tbh. One a month would have certainly sped up the accomplishment. Like, I would have fucking crushed if I was only trying to write 12 this year. And maybe that would have been good for me in different ways, I could have had a sense of gratification early in the year.)

(But 52 gave me something to strive for that wasn’t beyond my reach and did allow me to see myself growing in order to reach it, so, figure out the goal of your goal is what I’m saying I guess? Do you want to knock it out of the park and feel like you smashed it? Awesome! For me, I think that forcing myself to actually experience being proud of myself would have been a good thing to work on as evidenced by my lackluster abilities to do so when I reached this other goal I had set that really was aimed at discipline and sticking to a plan to finish something!)

I think I spent the majority of this year healing. I took a lot of time for myself, I prioritized my wants and needs and I kept myself going with self-imposed deadlines that all oriented my life toward the general direction of ‘improvement’. I had forgotten how to live my life for me.

Honestly, super weirdly honestly, I don’t think I knew just how little I knew myself. It’s so easy to convince everyone how sure you are when you talk about yourself all the fucking time, but the inconsistencies really racked up over the years. I was stimulating myself constantly in order to separate myself from my own thoughts — to be honest, they felt dangerous a lot of the time. I realized recently that I don’t know how to feel anger as a response. Like it’s an emotion that I just slide right by. I go from hurt to sad. I never get righteous about the treatment I receive at the hands and hearts of other people. Politics? Sure. Of course. Love a good rant about how the democrats treat their supporters like petulant children while the republicans constantly assure their supporters that they’re right and never wrong and the smartest people who have ever lived. Real thinker on why one party remains incredibly popular despite an increasingly fascistic set of policies!! But to express my own anger? About my own treatment? I didn’t know how to do that.

My perception of myself is attuned to shame. I had to unlearn the reflex of assuming things were always my fault.

I can avoid blame by being better, right?

If I’m perfect, then no one will yell at me.

If I’m the most likable/helpful/funny/people-pleasing person in every single room I ever walk into then no one will ever get mad at me. (And honestly, I don’t fear the anger, I fear doing something that would cause someone to think that they will feel better in the situation by yelling at me—it all comes back to yelling, because despite my attempts to Not Let My Childhood Define My Future, I’ve had to just consistently acknowledge the deeply fucked up ways my past shaped me, and I had to learn to really feel for my younger self rather than think of her as an embarrassment. (Because 16-year-old me would have been crushed to find out that I think of her poorly. And who’s going to protect me but me?) And it’s also a weird shame trigger to feel like it’s still affecting me, so I’ve just had to acknowledge that shame and thank it for its uselessness when it comes to helping me heal. And it became imperative to Heal the shit and let’s move on because running away from it at full speed with a pair of noise-cancelling headphones that are blaring pop culture podcasts has not been the solution!!) It’s just not a sustainable way to live and I had tried this for long enough that I made myself my project this year.

Learning to hit send on my work was big for me. (It’s okay. I am not a burden, these words are not unwanted. I just had to keep hitting send. I had to build the muscle. It got easier over time. I think the writing probably/hopefully improved too.)

I read Several Short Sentences About Writing and proceeded to freak the fuck out earlier this year so, you know, baby steps into big steps, build endurance, show my work, don’t wait until it’s perfect—done is better than perfect.

Perfectionism is the enemy of creativity and the one thing that I got really really sure about this year is my foundation as a creative person. I’m happy when making things when writing when creating when crafting. I’m going to learn how to crochet and I’m really excited about it. Writing is one of those mediums that can constantly be improved upon. Everyone reads their own work and instantly has new ideas they can’t believe they didn’t include in the first draft. Sometimes the best pair of eyes are the ones we develop months later. Some ideas have to marinate while others are best served clean & fresh so you can appreciate the simplicity of a well-caught thought.

I’m already giving a lot of thought to what the next year of my life is going to be about. I think I kind of created this really cozy temperature-stable bubble of a life this year, and it’s been really great and necessary to spend time alone and get to know (and like and eventually be in love with) myself. It was kind of fun a lot of the time, surprising myself is a delight. The cats are calmer then they’ve ever been, thrilled to crawl all over me. Goob lets me sleep through the night every night, Weem sleeps on me every night. She’s not scared to be picked up anymore. It just took love.

Love is inertia. It’s the medium, it’s the message. I was able to give love, it was so easy to love other people. It’s simple to see the good in them, the efforts, the trials, the way they give to other people, the way their beliefs shape their actions. It was so hard for me to even like myself. I had been told or shown it was wrong, broken, strange, hard to love too many times at too vulnerable an age. I never fit. I just wanted to be normal and I couldn’t attain that. Letting go of that self-hatred was vital because I had to build self-worth one 1x2 lego brick at a time and it’s just not easy to do that when you have someone in your head constantly saying that they think you are unworthy of good things, you haven’t earned them, you aren’t enough as is. Change, improve, then show people.

But healing doesn’t happen in isolation. It happens in community. I did need to spend time alone to get to know myself, but if I’ve controlled my environment to such a degree that there is no chance of disruption, I’ll never learn how to actually balance. Theory is easy. I so value the time I spent with myself, the fact that I treated myself like a friend, but it’s time to get out there in the world and reintroduce myself and be less afraid. Stumble into the wrong people! Go on comically bad dates! Be myself unapologetically and work on having a more open and accessibly loving energy because that’s the essence, that’s my true self.

I am loved. I am love.

I think my big woo-woo spirit believes in love above all else. I really think we can heal the world with a lot of intense love and care. We’re all so lacking in it nowadays, we don’t have leisure, we don’t have things that are unmarred by corruption (and yes FIFA has always been corrupt but this world cup is legit unwatchable for me and soccer is the worlds favorite sport and I’m mad that I don’t get to enjoy it this time around because the human rights violations are real and egregious and we need to stop building olympic stadiums as well!!! What these events used to represent was strip mined by rich men for status and wealth beyond measure, money they couldn’t possibly spend on material goods in a lifetime. And for what??? Instead of once again displacing vulnerable populations we should just give them housing!!!), we compete in the oppression olympics online and demand that every tweet encapsulate our experience as if individualism is not one of the most important things to really deeply understand in order to be a more empathetic human.

Anyway, I wrote 52 ‘stacks this year. And I’m really proud of myself for that.

Healing is a process and I needed to commit to at least trying this year, and I think I achieved that. No matter how long the road has left to go, I can still be really happy with how far I’ve come. It’s not time to give up, it’s time to expand. It’s time to let my heart grow three more sizes and welcome people back into it. I can lower the shields, I can know that I’m going to be there for myself no matter what happens.

It was intentional. I owed it to myself. I deserve good things and to live my life with a lot of self-respect, admiration, and love.

The original title of Love, Actually was Love Actually Is All Around (you can still hear it in the Hugh Grant airport monologue at the beginning of the movie/title sequence) and while the decision to shorted it has definitely been the right choice (wouldn’t be a Christmas classic without it and it’s December now so get ready for the “Love, Actually is Problematic, Actually” discourse. We get it, the Natalie being called fat storyline is ridiculous (is it just easier to notice the fatphobia for folks because the actress is clearly thin to midsize? Did they intend to cast a fatter actor and then think audiences wouldn’t get on board? Is it satire??), Kiera Knightley being simped/stalked by her husband’s best friend is bad, and Laura Linney deserves better sex! Guess what? The movie is not that good, actually! But it’s got a great setting, the vibe is so Christmassy, and it ends with a rousing and excellent rendition of All I Want For Christmas Is You! A good musical number can redeem even the shittiest of movies. See: Pitch Perfect.) and while that title is hokey, it’s true. Love has been made cringe because it’s vulnerable, and it’s hard to keep our hearts open when we have to so often sacrifice ourselves to survive.

Little choices every day that make the bigger sacrifices seem okay. There’s a rail strike over sick days, the government can admit that the conditions are inhumane but they draw the line at doing anything about it. The workers are essential, a strike at this time would be devastating. Which is why we have to give them basic human workers rights like sick days!!! If we don’t they’ll all burn out and it will tank regardless. We didn’t respect teachers for years and the catastrophe of how poorly the pandemic response was handled has left the entire field in crisis. And teachers are already people who are admittedly pretty selfless, teaching is a thankless job that is one of the single most import careers a person can have. But keeping the population under control is easier when they’re not good at critical thinking. Psyops works a lot more efficiently when you convince people it was their idea. We like, need to be teaching people about Watergate and Iran Contra. Curriculums need to be updated. I don’t need to know who Paul Revere is, I need to know the lineage of just how many corrupt administrations Dick Cheney managed to be part of! Bill Barr isn’t a new figure in politics he’s been ruining shit for decades! Don’t even get me started on Roger Stone.

(It came out that “no kink at pride discourse was stared on 8chan as a way of dividing the gay community and like…of course it was! But we need to be better and smarter than falling for things that divide marginalized community. Humans are always stronger when we’re fighting for ALL of our liberations rather than fighting over who’s liberation matters more. When we liberate each other, we’re all liberated. It really is that simple! And difficult.)

Anyway, happy December! 2023 still doesn’t sound like a real year! I’m sure it’ll look entirely different than this year and that’s really fun and exciting and the future could be hopeful because I think being robbed of hope is just a way to keep us nihilistic and despondent and unmotivated! We gotta have hope, even and especially when it hurts. We repaired the ozone layer! We can do anything!!!

Have a great month babes! Do things that make you proud of yourself Let’s gooooo!