#78 - Rabbit Rabbit, it's the year of the Rabbit!

”Do you think you can journal too much?”

“Of course you can. You can also die from drinking too much water.” Was my immediate response.

Too much of anything, even good things, is too much. Everything is supposed to be okay in moderation because humans are not meant to live by super strict rules and routines all the time. (Just ask every productivity YouTuber who has had a full-on brain break and now makes “slow living” diaries.)

Excess is the problem. Spending too much time immersed in any hobby creates a space where we cannot healthily engage.

I think that self-analysis and our desire to understand ourselves is a noble goal, but when our hobby becomes looking inward it gets hard to properly express ourselves as we move throughout the world. I think it’s easy to get addicted to having realizations and breakthroughs and whooo when you start to understand yourself it can feel extremely heady to let others in on the discoveries. It can feel like you’ve found the key to the universe—even if it’s a galaxy that only exists within ourselves.

I journaled a lot last year. December 29, 2021 I started writing six pages a day, and I did it for a whole year. I have nine moleskins to look back through and enjoy getting a day-by-day glance at what I was thinking/talking about/deeming important. I think it was great to get to know my actual self, the one that I was unafraid to express to myself. In retrospect, it’s fascinating to see the changes in me, but mostly in how I spoke to and about myself and my choices. I don’t regret any of the time I spent doing it.

This year, I don’t plan to journal so much. I think it’s still an important practice for a number of reasons, but I’m paring my daily entry page numbers back and am currently planning to spend that saved time writing other things. Things that I will share with the world (in some way). I want to read more, write more, and keep improving through useful and careful practice. I gotta get better at grammar and syntax, I have to invest the time and stop treating it as something future me will eventually get to. (Future Me’s gonna have other shit to deal with, I can work on this whole comma splice thing now.)

Anyway, doing things in moderation. Living intentionally and understanding the why behind my actions. I want so badly to make sure that my life is being lived in the moment. I don’t want to wait for perfect conditions, I want to live imperfectly in the current ones. It’s fine, life is for living. I don’t want to waste time. It’s the most precious and luxurious resource that we have and I want to renew my commitment to going out and getting the things I want.

And also, figuring out the actual things I want. Continuing the development of a new language around myself, my capabilities, and the impacts that I know I can have if I got over the fear.

This Jenny Holzer piece is going to haunt me forever and I think it’s such a beautiful illustration of the dangers that getting trapped in realizations of the past. The reason to dig in and find out core motivations and foundational roots is to be able to develop the proper tools and strategies to get over them and move on.

I do not want to break myself just so that I can continue to feel broken.

I don’t want to have a familiar pattern of bruises that I refuse to let fade. I’m so excited to live a life outside of the things I felt were missing in the past. The future can be full of whatever I want it to be. Getting clear on who I am, why I’ve felt the way I have, all of the self-work and deep realization of 2022 will only serve me if I use it to inform better decisions in the future, in the now. The purpose of past introspection is not to excuse current actions (or, probably more accurately, inactions) but to help me harness my motivations and point them in a healthier direction.

There’s a tendency towards extreme declarations, constant growth, and massive outsized goals that are meant to “push”. Right now though, my goals for are to apply the lessons I’ve already learned. I don’t want to just continue fine-tuning, time to get this car on the road and see how it drives! Theory is not nearly as impactful as applied science. Talking a big game means nothing if you can’t back it up and actually play.

One of my goals for next year is the exact same one I had this year. 52+ Substacks. I don’t want to double it to 100. That’s not the point of the goal. The self-imposed Friday deadline is for self-discipline and orientation purposes, not as a daunting specter to fixate anxiety & stress around.

I read Seth Godin’s The Practice again over this break and was re-inspired to put art out into the world. I rarely see writing as a service beyond my own self-indulgences, but maybe there’s a lot more to it that I can’t understand. I’ll never be my own audience. But maybe teaching people how to express and feel is my purpose, maybe the words are meant to reflect to others what’s possible, to illustrate the breadth and expansiveness and incredible color scheme of emotions and what they’re trying to tell us when we’ve learned the language enough to decipher what it’s all attempting to say.

I’m not bothering with imposter syndrome this year. I’m not wasting time attempting to put meaning into silence. I’m not living in the past and dwelling on mistakes or cruelties suffered. I’m not waiting for some ultimate version of myself to be created so that I have a new and more efficient armor to walk around the world with.

It’s scary to have to define oneself anew. Not in spite of, not in the absence of, not if circumstances had been different or the right people had shown up in the correct ways at the exact time. The most important occurrence in my journals was the development of a new language, a kindness that I spoke to myself with that had been otherwise absent.

But it’s time to speak it aloud, not just practice reading and writing it. I don’t have to keep pushing for self-improvement, I just have to embody all of the strides that I’ve already made. I have to get comfortable being chill and not allowing everything to feed into this larger narrative that feels so daunting and suffocating when I get bogged down with the overwhelming nature of tying disparate actions together so that they can mean something.

Ultimately, we just have to commit and do the thing. Conditions are never going to be perfect, and flying the plane through the storm probably just makes us better pilots.

(Of course there’s an aviation metaphor in here somewhere!)

New Year’s Day has felt strangely melancholy for me so far. I feel like there’s been a weirdly expectant push that this year will be different and a lot of game planning for how to make it so. I think it’s okay if this year is just another year. I think it’s okay if people just want to hang out and be content with their lives and stop the grind. Rid ourselves of the pressure to push for more, for neverending growth, for unnameable and unknowable futures that are just grass-is-greener projections.

It’s okay to be content. It’s okay to not want to follow the newest trend (or to just be exhausted by the rate of the trend cycle in general). It’s okay to laugh and smile and eat food in a way that allows your face to move because it’s okay to age and get wrinkles and have a body that demonstrates it’s been alive.

(The culture has become alarmingly openly fatphobic again at a rate that is…concerning. So I just want to make it abundantly clear that we’re all suffering under Diet Culture for as long as we all continue to play the game. Pretty Politics and the Meritocracy of Thinness are just two systems I have 0 interest in dabbling with. Everyone is losing. Even and especially the girlies who make it all the way to the top of the pinnacle. We have to liberate ourselves from it. We must be better than it. It’s possibly the largest component of misogyny that has wedged its way so firmly into the culture that most of us fail to recognize just how much generational damage it has done, how much energy it consumes, and how it is used to keep us all subservient. And hungry and tired and cold.)

I’m going to spend less energy on things that don’t make me happy. I’m going to try and stop indulging in outrage culture on the internet because it just ultimately sucks my time and soul and leaves me feeling worse than when I opened up the browser. I’ve always been someone who is extremely online and knows all the news but like, at what cost? And for whose benefit?

I’m going to spend more time outside. I want to walk around the world with fewer shields, I want to be aware of what’s literally going on around me. This mostly means wearing headphones less often, and stopping hiding from the world by going inside my phone. I am committed to developing my own reactions to things without reading what others are thinking first. More books! More media that was made with deep intention! More time doing and less time ruminating!

I hope you had a lovely start to the new year. I hope that there is less pressure and more fun ahead for all of us. And I hope that whatever your goals, intentions, or projections for the year ahead are, you give yourself permission to exist regardless of progress. Welcome to Week One of 2023. Let’s uh, do this!

✌️ 🧡 🤠