At this time next week, 2023 will be half over. If you also follow the pagan wheel of the year, as I do, we passed the midway point this week already. I’m going to stop a moment to let that sink in…
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I find that the more intentional I am about noting time, the more bittersweet it feels. This year is no different. The year is half gone, a stretch of life I won’t get back. I often find myself comparing this-year-me to last-year-me. Last year me was broken and sick, angry and unraveling. Last year me stood on the sidewalk and yelled how much she hated her life at the person who loves her more than anyone else on this earth. That was probably my nadir.
I don’t know that I’ll ever be done with the healing journey I started 286 days ago - yes, I’m still counting - but while this-year-me may appear to be the same as last-year-me, she’s an entirely different creature now. This-year-me is looking back at the last six months and feeling extraordinarily proud of the strides she’s made so far. As a perfectionist, this a statement I may never have said before. I’m renowned for setting ridiculous standards for myself followed by crashing, burning and giving up entirely, then beating myself up for being such a loser who can’t follow through. Later. Rinse. Repeat.
It’s been a few years since I was actively in therapy but one of the things we worked on was the mantra/intention “I keep my promises to myself.” My therapist was one of the voices who began telling me that EVERYTHING COUNTS when it comes to these promises. Do you want to practice yoga? Do ONE yoga pose a day, and -BOOM-you’re a yogi. Want to be a journaler? Write one sentence a day and -BOOM- you’re a journaler. It counts. And it STILL counts if you miss a day. OVERALL consistency matters more than perfect, flawless days crossed off on a calendar. Incidentally, this is a concept James Clear expounds on at length in his book Atomic Habits which I deeply enjoyed.
It’s been a slow journey absorbing this truth. I started with daily journaling, moved to yoga, to letter writing and finally to walking, which for whatever reason tipped the balance, unlocking my ability to fully embrace that everything truly does count. I started daily walking in December, and what has happened since has been a cascade of deciding who I want to be, and taking whatever small steps I determine will move me in the right direction, day after day, inch by inch, because every inch counts.
Then March came, and I didn’t have the language to communicate my experience, but somehow there was a giant internal shift. My little daily practices evolved and grew and as they did so they gained value exponentially. I was a writer, a book reviewer, an artist, a yogi, a wanderer, a gardener, an amateur horticulturalist, an epistoler, a knitter, a student. I am becoming so many things that have interested me for so long. I’m claiming every single one, not because I can monetize them, but because I’m building an identity that is more about who I am and what I enjoy than how I support myself professionally. One of the most important things I’ve realized recently is that, even discounting sleep hours, there are more hours in my day in which I am not working, than there are hours I am working. It’s not a wide margin, but it counts. This means I have just as much opportunity to be whatever else I want to be as I do to be a good little worker bee. A hard day at work, can stay at work, because there are things I want to be and do outside of work that bring me a great deal of pleasure, and which make up a greater part of me than my professional identity.
I don’t know about you, but when it comes to non-fiction, I’m a rabbit trail reader. I read one things and it sparks an interest, so I read 2-3 more books about the thing which brings me to something else I need to explore and so on. Recently, I’ve been reading The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control by Katherine Shafler which has turned out to be a profoundly personal and impactful read for me. While reading this book, I learned about Barbara Fredrickson and her Broaden and Build theory of positive emotions (I’m reading her book Positivity next, and don’t let the word trigger you, we’re not talking don’t-worry-be-happy bullshit here). Anyway, all that to say these two books are like a giant, bellowing A-HA moment in my life.
Frederickson’s theory of broaden and build is exactly what I’ve been doing since my therapist made me explore mantras like ‘I keep my promises to myself’ in order to rebuild my self talk, but it took me getting to this point, two years later to see how that was the spark that has been slowly growing (dare I say, broadening and building) ever since. Even before I hit my nadir, I was strengthening the very skills that would break me out of my burnout spiral. Everything counts even when we don’t see it yet.
What Frederickson has learned, and Shafler expounds on in her own book is that positive actions build on themselves exponentially, and eventually, a person reaches a tipping point from negative mental energy to positive mental energy. This is what happened to me in March. Each time I practiced a thing that supported a positive part of my identity, I added a little weight to the scales I use to measure myself. Inch by inch, sometimes by the skin of my teeth, sometimes singing and laughing, I added positive experiences from my daily practices and suddenly, shockingly, found myself in a very good mental/ emotional place.
I love the serendipity that brought me these books so I have the tools and language to express my own experience. I honestly don’t know that I would have believed it had I not lived it first, but here we are. Basically the first half of 2023 was me being a living breathing science experiment and being completely blown away by the results. No one is more surprised than I am to look back and see how far I’ve traveled this year, and no one is more excited than I am to imagine what will happen next. Anticipating good things? Who am I?
Perhaps this all sounds very la-la, warm fuzzy, feel-good. Let me assure you that my professional career is no less stressful than it was last year. The details of life that stress and sadden me are still very much present. Superficially, very little has changed in my larger life circumstances from last year to this. But years ago I started a journey, and at some nebulous point this year it became a grand adventure, and that is a shift worth noting, here at the turn of the year.