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Hello again. It’s been a while…

I hope this letter finds you well. When I stopped writing my newsletter two years ago it wasn’t a choice precisely, it was mostly an exhaustion.

The truth is that writing a newsletter is not an insignificant amount of work. The truth is also that I never really put a lot of attention on how to make this habit of writing to you sustainable, and so my energy for the task slowly dried up. 

And then of course the pandemic hit and life changed and for the past couple of years it has felt like there has only been distraction after distraction, crisis after crisis, and a lot of things fell through the cracks.

But it’s a new year and even though I don’t believe in resolutions, I do believe in reflection and recalibration. I believe in leaning into the things that whisper to us in the quiet moments when no one else is there to hear them, and lately this newsletter has been calling to me.

Exactly what it has been whispering is not entirely clear. I do not know why I feel called back to the page to write to you again now after so many years of silence. When I stopped writing I thought perhaps that I would never write again, and yet here I am. 

What I do know is that this newsletter has in many ways always been a place that I have returned to in order to know my own heart, and space for reflection is something that has been missing in my life for a while now.

So here I am again, writing to know my own heart and hoping that maybe somehow these words will help you to know your heart, too.

The truth is that the last few years have been hard. I am certain this is true for all of us, each in our own unique ways. For me the past two years have been a time of paradox: life has been great and terrible in equal measure.

I have loved working from home, skipping my commute, and have developed new exercise habits that have made me stronger in both body and mind. I learned that when I am not forced into an office environment every day, my body remembers how to sleep. In many ways I feel better than I have in years.

At the same time, my anxiety hasn’t disappeared – it’s just been transmuted. I sleep better at night but during my waking hours I feel worse. My meditation practice has fallen by the wayside since the pandemic started and it shows. Now instead of lurching awake before my alarm clock every morning, I’m restlessly picking up my phone throughout the day and opening six different tabs to check for updates on six different websites. 

In my experience this is how anxiety goes. You gently unwind its grasping fingers from one bad habit and it reaches out and grabs onto something else to replace it. But having danced this dance with anxiety for many years now, I can tell you that the strength of its grip is weakening.

Every time I unwind another anxious pattern it gets a little easier. I get a little better at learning how to let go and move forward. My anxiety settles down a little bit more.

The way I see it, the goal isn’t eradication. I’m not sure that that would even be possible. I think of it more like a meditation – the goal isn’t to cease the anxious habits or thoughts, it’s just to notice them sooner and sooner and to intercede with them more and more skillfully.

My recalibration for 2022 is to do just that. To intercede with these new patterns and hopefully, as a result of that, to have more time to spend on writing and meditation and the things that will actually make me feel better – instead of spending hours anxiously refreshing the latest headlines.

How about you? How are you doing? 

Do you also have pandemic patterns that you are ready to let go of?

I would love to hear from you, so please feel free to let me know in the comments below.

Much love,
Jessica

You’re allowed to be a work in progress

As I sit here on the first day of 2020, amongst the hubbub of an internet that seems to be overflowing with people announcing their goals for the coming year, I find myself wanting to offer a counter-argument. 

Maybe January 1st is not the time to tear down and disavow everything you do not like about yourself. Maybe January 1st is not the time to cast those rejected pieces aside like so much garbage in the hopes that the dump truck will come to haul them away for good.

Maybe that approach was never going to work out the way you wanted it to. Maybe the cast off pieces of yourself were always going to come crawling back just about the time your resolutions started to slip and old habits began to creep back again.

Maybe it’s okay to be a work in progress. 

Maybe you are allowed to be just as messy and imperfect today as you were yesterday. Maybe the only thing that’s changed is that today you are just a little bit braver, just a little bit more prepared to admit to your flaws and to love yourself anyways.

Maybe the only intention you need for the new year is to become every day just a bit more of yourself. Just a little bit braver, just a little bit wiser, just a little bit more willing to speak the words you are afraid to say, and to disagree with the people whose opinions of you matter the most.

Maybe these are the only things you have ever really needed. And maybe casting off the parts of yourself that you could not be proud of only ever served to make you feel more dreadful about yourself, maybe it never helped to dislike those parts of you at all.

In 2019 I did a lot of things I’m proud of:

  • I finished the first draft of my memoir-in-progress. Finally. After literal years of failing.
  • I read 38 books after several years of really not reading much of substance or quality.
  • I walked 96 miles from start to finish of the West Highland Way in Scotland with a great friend.
  • My sister got married and I managed to pull off being her maid of honor despite being far outside of my comfort zone.
  • I nourished connections with old friends and new ones.
  • I navigated difficult conversations and found that sometimes relationships come out stronger on the other side.

The thing about 2019 was that I didn’t set out to do any of these things. Indeed, in 2019, as far as I remember I abdicated goals and intentions entirely because they seemed way of torturing myself for not yet being the person I knew that I could be (and therefore thought I should be), rather than being a healthy and productive way of motivating myself to make beneficial changes.

Because the first thing I know is that when it comes to making changes is this: it’s okay to not be ready yet. 

There’s a particularly uncomfortable place that we linger in — a liminal space between the moment when we understand that more is possible for us, and some future moment when we are finally brave enough to step through the doorway and to try on that new way of being out in the world where other people might see and hear and judge us.

There is a sacred pause in the process of becoming.

It is a pause that cannot be skipped or avoided. It must be lived fully because only by leaning into the discomfort of becoming will we ever find our way to the other side.

But also: how you navigate this liminal space matters more than anything else. 

Learning to love yourself in the space between knowing who you could be and actually having become that person, will always work better than trying to excise the parts of you that you do not like.

In the end there’s nothing special about the beginning of a new year (or a new decade). 

Which is why in 2020 I’m not planning to make any big changes. Instead, I’m planning to keep leaning into courage as much as I am able to — and to love myself as much as I can in the moments when my courage fails me and I fall short of being as brave as I hoped to be. 

There are of course, more tangible things I would like to do as well: to revise my memoir, to perhaps begin blogging again, to continue to focus on the health of the relationships in my life that matter most to me, and to make sure that life is as rich and fulfilling as possible.

But in the end what I will accomplish in 2020 is less important to me than the choices I will make. Will I choose to act in accordance with my deepest values? Will I be brave enough to use my voice? Will I allow myself to be truly seen by the people who matter to me the most?

What about you — what choices will you make in 2020?

Why I won’t be setting goals for 2016

I want to tell you a story about New Year’s Resolutions and setting goals.

You see, when I was a little girl I used to get so excited at the prospect of New Year’s Resolutions. I would set these wildly impossible goals (my most common one was to write in my journal daily — which never worked for me…).

Every year I would set these lofty goals, these grand ambitions, and then January would turn into February and I would run out of enthusiasm or energy and my ambitions would fall by the wayside.

What I learned from this experience was that I was a disappointment.

I learned that I could expect to disappoint myself. It was a hard lesson to swallow — and it eventually turned me off of goal-setting forever.

Year after year I made my goals smaller and smaller and smaller until it seemed like I would be unable to disappoint myself — and still I always managed it.

Is your history with setting goals a similarly fraught and damaging one?

If so, then I’m happy to inform you that I’ve since discovered I was making two critical goal-setting mistakes.

The first mistake was that I usually set “self-improving” goals for myself.

You know the ones I’m talking about — the resolve that this will be the year you finally lose those 15 lbs, or the year you’ll hit the gym 3 times a week religiously, or the year you’ll write in your journal every single day.

You can tell a goal is of the “self-improving” sort because you’re really sure you should set it but you really don’t want to. If the idea of dragging yourself to the gym three times a week feels heavy and sluggish in your body, then you’ve found yourself a “self-improving” resolution that I’m prepared to bet right now you won’t keep past Valentine’s day.

The second mistake was that I set quantitative goals, not qualitative ones

You could argue that this is kind-of cheating. But if you set your goal to be “write in journal every day” the first day you miss it (for any reason) your brain will inform you that you’ve failed, that you are an awful disappointment, and that you should feel eternally guilty. Or at least that’s what my brain does — your brain may be less fundamentally broken…

HOWEVER.

If your goal is not to “write in journal every day” but is to “journal often” or “journal regularly” or “make time to journal at least one time each week” then this is a much more achievable which you are less likely to fail at (although if your goal is of the self-improving sort, then there’s usually no hope for it…).

But for those of you out there who are as goal-shy as I am these days — here’s what I suggest you actually do.

I suggest you kick goals to the curb and try something new: set intentions for the new year and decide on what you’re no longer willing to tolerate. Because this works so, so much better for me.

So here I go.

In 2016 I am no longer willing to tolerate:

  • Feeling exhausted all the time
  • Having my time pulled in too many directions
  • Trying to squeeze more out of the same number of minutes
  • Letting other people’s needs steamroll my own
  • Feeling guilty for having needs that defy societal expectations

In 2016 I intend to:

  • Live courageously
  • Take bold actions
  • Let myself be seen
  • Trust my body
  • Honor my need for rest
  • Ask for support when I need it
  • Admit when I’m overextended

And, for the overachiever special, my word or theme for 2016 is

DARE

And you might think that those aren’t specific enough and concrete enough and how will I know when I’ve achieved them? (gasp!), but I think that’s actually the beauty of defining your goals for the year ahead in this way.

I’ll know when I’ve achieved them because I will feel bold, I will feel daring, I will feel rested, and I will feel like I’m stepping into the shoes that have been waiting for me all my life.

And yes, I’ll be turning those lists of things I’m not longer willing to tolerate and of intentions into concrete actions — but the trick, you see, is that those actions are not my goals. 

Those actions are just ideas for things I might do to bring my life into better alignment with my goals. And if I fail at some of them or decide in June that I’m not interested in those ideas anymore I haven’t failed at my goals — I’ll still be right on target just as long as I keep checking in and realigning myself with my intentions as I navigate the twists and turns of 2016.

I’d love to hear from you! What’s your relationship to goal-setting? Love them? Hate them? Love-to-hate them? Let me know what you’re doing to prepare for the coming year in the comments below. And if you’ve picked a word or a theme for 2016, I DARE you to share it! 😉