Let’s Go Round the Sun Again, One Step at a Time

Like most milestones that humans care about, the new year is pretty arbitrary, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad time to wipe our mental slates clean and look forward with a little extra hope.

A lot of people are probably already finding their new year’s resolutions to be a heavy burden, because we’re usually encouraged to set our sights way too high when crafting goals. If you picked something that’s making you miserable and burning you out, I hope you’ll consider stepping it down to a more reasonable level now rather than just dropping it when you run out of energy entirely. That’s not failure, it’s just good planning.

Restrictive diets don’t tend to work for the vast majority of people, but adding an extra vegetable source to one meal a day is pretty doable for many, and that can help build a long term habit that supports individual health. So can adding five or ten minutes of stretching or meditation at a convenient time of the day rather than committing to spend an hour at the gym five times a week when you haven’t gone in months or years. It doesn’t mean you can’t increase your goals as you go along, but keeping the increments ridiculously tiny means that it’s almost impossible to let yourself down. Small wins make a huge difference in confidence and self-image, while repeated failures are disheartening and typically lead to completely abandoning all effort.

This stuff is even more important to consider if you live with mental illness or are neurodivergent. There’s a huge amount of pressure to use that yearly boost of energy to DO ALL THE THINGS and be… better. And it works, but only for a few days, and then our actual limits come down even harder on us because we burn out all of our reserves. And then all that hope turns into just another thing that we feel bad about failing to live up to, and none of us needs more of that. Not a one. We need a bunch of little successes a hell of a lot more than we need a handful of new regrets.

So, please, give yourself the gift of some really small but consistent wins this year.

Some humble, slightly random suggestions for new moderated goals:

• Go to bed just ten minutes earlier than you have been
• Set your alarm for ten minutes earlier (but only if you went to bed earlier. Sleep is so important.)
• Switch just your afternoon tea or coffee to decaf
• Add a veggie you don’t hate to one meal a day
• Stretch for a couple of minutes every morning
• Walk around your block once a day at a convenient time
• Write 50 words on a project every day, or even less if that’s too much
• Spend fifteen minutes doodling if you’ve been missing your art
• Spend ten minutes gardening and then go inside if it’s cold or raining
• Clean or organize one part of your space for ten minutes and then let yourself stop for the day
• Read a page or two of a book you’re interested in every day
• Catch yourself when you start thinking negative things about yourself and practice redirecting to something more neutral whenever you can. Neutral is a much more achievable starter goal than positivity, and it’s still an improvement.

Adding something small to your day tends to be easier than eliminating something, and in the long run it can have the same effect by slowly edging out whatever it is that you think you should reduce. If you’re interested, the book Mini Habits by Stephen Guise is a pretty helpful guide for setting consistently achievable goals and he also explains why they work so well.

Good Job, 2018 You

I don’t really love the whole resolution thing. A lot of the time, we’re encouraged to be way too all-or-nothing in our goals, and frustration naturally follows. There’s also a whole culture of guilt built up around it that kinda sucks, where we look back at the past year only to find things to fix with our new resolutions, and to feel ashamed of the ones we abandoned last January.

That said, this is still a perfectly good time to look back at the past year and do some self-reflection. I think it’d be nice, though, if we were all encouraged to be proud of the growth we did achieve, instead of looking at our failings. Everyone has probably done at least a few things in the past year that they can be proud of. They might have learned something important about themselves, built a new routine that made them more productive, changed an old pattern of behavior that didn’t work well, or started eating vegetables a little more often. I did all of those things, and I’m making a conscious effort to give myself credit for all of it. It was hard, but I grew a lot.

I also wrote a blog post every single week in 2018. It’s not a perfect record – a number of the posts came out late – but it’s still a big deal for me to be able to be that consistent about anything. I want to thank everyone who has read any of those posts, because knowing that people might notice if I didn’t put them out helped keep me on track.

I really appreciate you all, and I hope you can find things to congratulate yourselves for when you look back at 2018. I hope you can be kind to yourselves in 2019, too. Your specific resolutions may or may not be manageable, but you’re still going to grow and change this year. We all will.

Round moss clumps on bare tree branches on a sunny winter day.

Writing days this past week: 3

I’ve Decided Not to be Afraid Anymore

At least, not of creating things. Heights and ants will probably always freak me out. (Don’t judge me. Ants are so creepy.) I am sick of letting the chorus of negative voices in my head have a say about what I do, though, because I really can’t do anything well enough for them. They are literally never satisfied, and they never will be, because they don’t actually want me to improve. They want me to stop. Doing nothing with my interests and talents is a shitty option, but it’s the only thing that keeps those asshole voices at bay.

This is a process, obviously, because nothing ever happens overnight, especially major changes in self-image and behavior, but I’ve been working on adjusting the way I think about myself. It’s one thing to remind myself that I have a right to mess up, and I do, but it’s another to tell myself that I’m already someone who can handle that. “I think I can” is different in impact from “I’m already there, and need to keep moving.”

It’s okay to be confident. Lots of people know that, and live it, but I haven’t. My experience was that any time I felt confident about any aspect of my life, I got smacked back down by someone, or reminded that I had messed something else up. It hurt, and it made me wary, because learning from the past is part of what makes us the really successful monkeys that we are. But, I don’t want my future to just be more of my past, so I’m telling that adaptable part of me that it needs to adjust its expectations accordingly. It doesn’t work so well with hopes and dreams for the future, but it kinda gets the here and now, and it really lives in the past. So, I’m changing the material it has to work with, slowly, one thought at a time.

I’m someone who can handle making mistakes. That’s true. I’ll probably still remember them sometimes when I’m trying to sleep, and cringe, but I really believe that anything worth doing is worth doing badly. I want to do things with my life that are worth embarrassing myself over. I’ve only got the one life to work with, and I’ll be damned if I’m willing to waste it for the sake of people who haven’t got my best interests at heart, trying to reach standards that were only ever designed to be impossible.

“Done” is so much better than “perfect.” “Perfect” is a fantasy, but “done” is right there, waiting for us to get around to it.

Dogs have it all figured out. Be as goofy as possible. Lie around in the sun. Cuddle with the people you like. Bark at the ones you don’t until they go away.

Writing days this past week: 3

Almost a New Year

The stretch between Christmas and New Year’s Eve is odd. It’s too short to settle back into normalcy and too long for the holiday feelings to stay fresh. I’m writing this post on a break as I drive home from Christmas with my family, and it’s been a nice quiet trip. I love road tripping by myself (well, myself and the pups) because I can take the time to really enjoy the scenery and go for little walks in new places. I especially like having that alone time around this time of year, because it’s a convenient pausing point to consider where I am now, where I was last year, and where I’m trying to get.

I’ve decided that I’m going to start posting the days I’ve worked each week at the bottom of my blog posts. Knowing that people actually might notice if I skip a blog post has helped me stay on track, and I feel like I have a handle on regular posting now. It’s not big deal, but the little boost of self awareness will hopefully help me keep from letting too many non-working days slip by when I get sad, hazy, and generally frazzled. Blog posts won’t count toward the number of writing days, just work on my fiction. I’m aiming for five days a week, since I do still have to write posts and do other types of work. I’m not gonna get down on myself if I fall behind, but I need to develop my self-discipline, and that seems like a solid goal for this year. 

That’s as close as I’m coming to a New Year’s resolution this time around. 2017 has been a thing. I’d say I’m glad to see it go, but who knows what the next year is going to bring. It’s daunting, but new life always springs up from destruction and decay.

Writing days this past week: 0 (A bit of an embarrassing start, but I’m glad to have spent this time focusing on my family and friends.)

Balance and Tough Self-Care

As I’ve mentioned previously, balance is not something that comes easily to me, and I’m not just talking about my tendency to tip right over whenever I’m distracted from important stuff like where my feet are and how gravity works. It sometimes feels like I’m either ignoring all my other responsibilities to focus on work, doing all the things except work, or taking a mental and/or physical health day that stretches into a week of feeling guilty and frustrated. If it were possible to make a three way see-saw, that’s what it’d be like in my head.

Still, I think I’m in a better place than I was a few months ago. I’m sleeping consistently, instead of every other night, and running a little closer to normal person time in terms of appointments and deadlines. Work is happening. 

I’m getting better at being kind to myself instead of breaking down when I feel like I’ve failed, but I still need to learn how to be tough on myself without the breakdown. When I’ve been hard on myself in the past, it was pretty much just self-bullying. It had no purpose, it certainly didn’t motivate me, and it was absurdly out of proportion to anything I had actually done or not done. That was no good, but without any internal structure I tend to lose track of important things and miss out on opportunities to move toward my goals. 

Self care has been discussed to death lately, but what I really appreciate are the posts that remind me that self care isn’t just bubble baths and scented candles and wine with breakfast. (Or whatever you do with wine. I don’t really know.) 

Practical self care is taking care of yourself the way you’d care for a friend or a child. Or, as one person put it, like a demon taking care of its host body so that it won’t fall apart. Whatever works. There’s being your own personal bully, which absolutely sucks, and there’s being your own coach, which seems pretty valuable to me.

Till I get better at this, Toci has been appointed my temporary coach. So far, she has ordered me to sit in multiple uncomfortable positions so she can use me as a throne. I assume this is some sort of wax-on wax-off, hidden wisdom type shit. Probably to teach me endurance or something. 

Somnolence Update and what I’m Grateful for

Rainy morning vibes. Weather is nicer when I’m safely inside with my sweetie and a delicious breakfast.

Book update: Obviously, my goal to have Somnolence published this year was impractical, but I’m glad that I gave it my best try. It will be published in 2018, and is going back to the editor in January. It was supposed to have been line edited by now, but I choked and couldn’t get it together.

I’m really looking forward to getting cover art made, and my plan is to use Damonza for that. They were recommended by Kristen Martin, and I loved her covers. So, hopefully, I’ll have some pretty and professional art to share soon.

Personal update: I’m writing this on my way home from a yummy dinner at my mother in law’s while listening to the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend soundtrack, which is endlessly brilliant. I’m now, after almost two years in Seattle, starting to feel kinda almost normal about driving home to this city. Still, I’m super excited about the fact that I’m going to see my family in California for christmas.

I have recently achieved new levels of sleep deprivation, even for me, but I’ve also been hitting my writing goals much more consistently, which is exciting. It’s pretty self-defeating to try to improve all the different areas of life that need work at once, so I’m resigning myself to the fact that really improving my writing and discipline means neglecting other things. Priorities are a pain.

What I’m thankful for: My awesome partners, my family and friends, puppies in general, and the fact that abusive men in various creative fields are being sort-of held accountable by the public, at least enough to shame them for their appalling behavior instead of ignoring the issue completely. Hooray! That’s a clear improvement, so I’ll take it. Maybe someday, instead of terrible men, we’ll have artists and actors of all genders and races who actually deserve their success and didn’t earn it by destroying those with more talent and less leverage. I’d say that’s the american dream, but the american dream was more about taking land, enslaving people, enforcing freedom of exactly one religion, and claiming that god said you could do all that ’cause you’re his favorite. We should probably just let that phrase die. It’s a mess.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Insert vaguely festive sentiment here