Reflections & Goals

Each year I do a little reflection and planning around the new year. It’s been harder to sit down and actually do that this year, but with my holiday ending tomorrow, I had to give in and just do it.

This has been a rough year. I’m not sure I’ve really come to terms with being divorced. It’s been hard adapting to living alone. With eveything going on with Covid and the shift to working from home, it has been easy to just keep putting one foot in front of the other and just not think too much about it. Still, we’ve been apart for more than a year and I still try to avoid thinking about it. While I think there have been positives that have come from it for both of us, I will probably always wish it hadn’t played out this way. I guess my first goal for 2021 is to let go of the regret and look forward instead of back.

I’ve managed a great streak of Duolingo this year, but the sad truth of it is that I don’t really think I’ve learned that much from it. I intend to do better with this next year. I’m hopeful I can make some time to converse with others locally with the Twin Cities Japanese Conversation Meetup on a regular basis throughout the year, as well as continue to connect with people through Tandem. I’ve also discovered some other great resources to help, my favorite of which is Tadoku where even I can read some little books in Japanese!!! I’ve read 2 already this year. Woot!

I really want to plan a trip to Japan, but until Covid settles down I’m not sure that is possible for this year. If not this year, then next year. Outside of traveling, I really want to continue working from home, so that’s got me considering other options for work. I’m sure that Prime will want to get back on campus as soon as it is safe to do that, and I’m not excited about starting to commute an hour each direction to work again. Short term that means getting my resume updated and doing a bit of work for GitHub. That’s probably an end of month goal, but I’m not looking to do anything until my cohort graduates in February, and I’d do another cohort remote if that works out.

My biggest area of reflection as well as looking ahead though is more personal. I’ve been working with friends over the last year on trying to be kinder to myself and finding more peace and happiness in the day to day. I’ve had some successes here, especially in paying more attention to gratitude and the little things that bring joy and happiness. This is something that is important to me that I want to continue into the new year.

However I also want to double down on this and try to bring this more deeply into who I am. It’s easy to celebrate these things in passing, but I’m not doing a very good job of making them part of who I am and remembering them fondly week, months, and years later. It’s the less happy moments I focus on in rough times, and that leads to a spiral of despair that becomes hard to escape. I need to learn to make these more joyful memories a bigger part of who I am.

Embracing the idea of minimalism, and unloading a lot of my older physical baggage has been helpful over this last year too. I feel less burdened by things, have less laundry to do, and more space with less clutter. I feel much more comfortable with the idea that I could move into a smaller space or even pick up and move to another place entirely now. I still have some work left to do here and I want to finish that up before spring comes - no more boxes of things in the basement.

I’ve been learning a lot about myself over the last year, but one thing that has become clear is that I’ve gotten much worse at taking care of myself. I was initially thinking that I had just gotten used to someone else doing that for me, but that’s so not fair. It’s the little things that I’ve always had to do for myself that are falling apart over this year. I think some of that has to do with losing a partner for some accountability, but I think more of it is a loss of value for it.

I’ve lost my personal sense of worth and find it hard to see the value in me. If a thing has no value, why take care of it. I think I’ve always found value in myself through connections to others, which as this last year of mine exeplifies, is fragile. My world falls apart when those are gone. Right now I find a lot of my value in my job, which makes it hard to let it go. I need to stop look to others to give me value, and instead learn to value me for just being myself.

I don’t have to be anything because I’m perfect when I’m myself. I don’t wanna be somebody, just wanna be me.