Dream Big and Show Up

Annual Review 2022

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Caveat

When you start writing on the internet and then keep writing on the internet, you develop two audiences:

1. The audience who stumbles upon a single essay or story and loves it

2. The audience who follows everything you do and is also interested or invested in your journey as a creator. 

This annual review is definitely for that second group, the people who really want to hear what I am getting into. This is much less a story or essay than it is an update on me, my writing life, and the things that inspire that life. 

If you are a member of the first audience and this is one of your first few emails from me, I recommend checking out some thing below in the list of the five most popular essays and stories I wrote in 2022: 

• A Requiem for Sean in D Minor: This is an essay about friendship, shame, addiction, helping the ones we love, and living with complex regrets. (TW: addiction, suicide)

• A Dirge for Eastern Redwoods: A meditation on family and how who came before us shapes who we are, told through the lens of an homage to the extinct tree that built America.

• The Masculine Urge to Visit a Psychic Giraffe in Khartoum: An original short story in the magical realism genre inspired by a Twitter bot.

• Making, Not Finding, Your Way: Review of The Pathless Path by Paul Millerd: Are we our jobs? Paul Millerd thinks not and I'm inclined to agree--but where does this leave us in how we define ourselves, successes, failures, worth, and all?

• What Becoming a Father Taught Me About Self Care: A reflection on how learning to love a child made me re-cast my own role in my life as someone who needs to "take care of himself."

Lessons from 2022

Becoming a parent changed my life. 

I will never forget bringing my daughter home from the hospital. The highlight of my day is often the smile she gives me from the car seat after I have parked but not opened the back door. 2022 was the year I became a father. All the cliches are true. You never sleep. You’re always tired. It’s like your heart is living outside your body. I was there and supportive but my wife did all the work.

It was both my biggest achievement of the year and, in another way, not really an achievement at all. Becoming a father isn’t an achievement in the same way as winning a race or reading a certain number of books or reaching an income threshold. It is more like there is a new layer that pervades every aspect of my life and changes the way I think.

It’s not just that her birth happened, but rather her birth is the separating line, cutting off what happened before, and adding a new layer of meaning to everything that comes after. Every time I introduce myself, I wonder if I should throw “father,” in there. Every time I make a decision or form a memory it’s now put through a new filter of ‘what about her?’ because I’m a Dad and that’s what my daughter means to me.

When in a creative slump, create more stuff.

Being creative–a writer in my case–is a give-and-take between quality and quantity. I realized this year that when I start writing something, I vastly overestimate how much people will care when I finally publish it. I expect that people are sitting around waiting for me to put out my work, bored looking at their phone, waiting on the next “Thought Bananas” email. But the opposite is true: it is hard to get people to care about your creative work. And I only occasionally can accurately predict whether people will like something I wrote or not. 

Since I started writing, I meticulously planned and wrote a few essays I thought people would really like. But on those, I got very few replies or very little interest. And then on a few essays, I didn’t know what I’d write about until I had typed a paragraph or two, and when it was done it turned out to be my most popular stuff. Seeing this play out over and over disabused me of the idea that I could “put it all” into “my best stuff.” I’m still in that part of my journey where I need to be trying things and consistently writing.

Consistency trumps intensity, and regularly putting out stuff makes it much more likely that I will put out stuff that resonates with people, rather than sitting and trying to plan to write something I predict people will like. I’m not sure why this is, but I imagine it is because when I plan to make “something great,” it is usually not as good as I think it is. Creating more consistently gives me practice creating, so I am becoming a better creator in addition to creating a higher volume of work and giving people more chances to find something they like. I have also come to learn that during the times when I have “writer’s block,” if I just start physically writing, what I eventually write turns out to be some of my best stuff. This is how I came to the conclusion when in a creative slump, create more stuff. 

Sometimes goal setting is pathological.

For a long time, I set a lot of goals. After I set those goals, I would make plans in excruciating detail. I read all the goal-setting books, listened to the podcasts, and watched the instructionals, then used all the different formats and techniques for goal setting they espoused. As a result, I accomplished a lot. However, I never accomplished a fraction of the goals I set. 

I became a father this year. With an infant, I am much more pressed for time and have to be much more deliberate about my decisions. With less time and more scrutiny on my every move, I realized how many goals I set came from a place of fear: fear of missing out, or fear I wasn’t good enough. Furthermore, I realized that most of those excruciatingly detailed plans I hatched to achieve my goals also came from a place of fear. This time it was the fear that I wouldn’t have the self-discipline or motivation to accomplish my goals in the future. 

This year, I’m trying something different. I am going to work on being more mindful in the present, to deal with my (sometimes unknown) fears. And I am going to work on trusting future versions of myself, instead of over-engineering plans I probably won’t follow. In practice, this means I am committing to two things: to cultivate a mindfulness practice and to develop a bedtime routine that happens at a reasonable hour. If I am rested and prepared for the day, all the other things I worry about (exercising, getting work done, writing, etc.) almost always happen on their own. Plus, I open myself up to serendipity and opportunities I can’t even imagine yet.

Every fit man I know is neurotic.

I turned 35 this year. I’ve been accused before of being “intense” and doing things in an “all or nothing” kind of way. Conscious of this, I had been trying for years to find a diet and exercise regimen that stuck, without being too crazy. It seemed like I should be able to casually exercise and diet, building up my fitness and therefore my health, without being too “intense” or “all or nothing.” 

I realized this year that–with very few exceptions–every fit man I know my age or older is rather “intense” about their diet and exercise regimen. They pretty much all live as if they have a marathon or powerlifting meet coming up. The average American diet sucks and the average American barely ever walks, let alone exercises. So a fit person who eats well and exercises regularly is going to look a little neurotic to the average American.

Realizing this was freeing. It took a lot of the social pressure away and made me realize that if I want a healthy diet and exercise regimen in a society that makes that kind of thing hard–then I’m going to have to do some things that seem a little crazy. Since this realization, I’ve been eating very healthily and exercising a lot. And in a strange way, it’s not as hard because it’s not something I have to force myself to do, but something I had to give myself permission to do. I’m OK with telling people, “I’m not eating lunch,” or “I don’t eat carbs,” or “let’s make this a walking meeting” and getting side eyes because I want to be fit–not fit in. And when the average diet is terrible and the average exercise regimen is nonexistent, that can mean looking a little crazy.

I had not really been “participating” in the internet.

My first experience using the internet was when my cousin and I pretended we were older than we were in adult chatrooms on AOL in the mid-90s. We’d be quiet for a long time and then type, “poop,” and laugh maniacally. I was 8 or 9. A few years later, I would become addicted to AOL Instant Messenger and rushed home to chat with friends–mostly other kids who sat behind a computer all day. In high school Myspace became popular–then at the end of high school, it was Facebook. I was always a consumer, although I used the internet for a long time without it being harmful to me.

Then, somewhere along the Facebook road, I became a “Facebook argument guy.” I didn’t like who I was online, and I got so sick of always getting into arguments that I deactivated my Facebook in 2020, swearing off the internet–and social media in particular–forever. I was certain that there was only room left for hucksters, grandmas, and the dumbest people you knew in high school. Through a series of coincidences, I joined two communities in 2022 which completely changed my mind. “I get it now.” We are still so much closer to the beginning of the internet than to where we are going.

One community I joined is built around the online writing course, Write of Passage. I had always wanted to be a writer, but never wrote (which I chronicled here). It has been eight months since I finished Write of Passage and I have been opened up to a whole new world. I have written and published over forty things, have met countless cool, interesting people, and am more excited about writing than ever. 

The other community I joined is the Soaring Twenties Social Club, an online community (hosted on Discord) for writers and artists. Everyone there is focused on craft, the uniqueness of their voice, (rejecting modernity,) and being a little counterculture. I joined this just before I took Write of Passage. The two of them complement one another very well (although as far as I can tell I am the only one in both communities), plus I have been blessed to gain readers from the weekly omnibus.

Participating in these communities fundamentally altered my relationship with the internet. It has turned me into a creator and given me a rich new social life. 

Where I’m Showing Up in 2023

My theme for 2023 is Dream Big and Show Up. Dreaming big means thinking outside the box, and being creative about what I can make out of my life.  Showing up means being where I say I’m going to be, putting in the work, and being thoughtful about it. 

Dream Big and Show Up encapsulates the new way that I plan to approach productivity and goal-setting. In the past, I approached goals like building a house. I would have an enormous, compelling vision and then meticulously work backward with detailed plans for how to do every little part.

This year, I am going to think about it more as cooking something delicious.   I have an idea of what I want to finish with, and I may have a loose recipe, but there is no replacement for iteratively tasting the food after each change I make. 

All of the things I’m working on below are things I’ve wanted to work on before. But this year, I’m going to do “what I know I should do,” but also aspire to be better, and try to tackle these problems from new angles. 

Cultivating mindfulness. 

This is the biggest thing I’m working on because I believe it is the thread that connects everything else I am doing. I am going to do what I’ve always done and “try to meditate more.” However, I am going to improve upon that by trying to cultivate mindfulness from different angles. As much as taking cold showers is made fun of as some kind of “fake spirituality” thing that only bros do, I actually really enjoyed the benefits to my mindfulness practice that came from taking them. So I will go back to taking a cold shower every day when I wake up.

I am also going to try approaching mindfulness from new, different angles. Two that I am working on now is reading Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, which is a book about how creativity is a spiritual practice. It promotes a practice called morning pages–where you write three pages longhand every single morning. I have only been doing it for a week and found it transformative. Last week I enrolled in an Alexander Technique course as well, the title of which is “Expanding Awareness,” which seems to be very much related to mindfulness. 

Improving my sleep.

I do not sleep enough. This is a new problem, not because I’m sleeping less, but because there is more in my day, and a tremendous amount of coffee does not have the energizing power for me that it used to have. Anecdotally, I have found that the problem is my “bedtime” routine. I spend too much time on my phone, don’t do enough preparing for the next day, or get distracted by work. The result is I stay up too late. 

I’m going to make a straightforward attempt to put together all the “basic” sleep hygiene advice I know. More importantly, I think that this is downstream of cultivating mindfulness. It seems that my ability to get good sleep will be improved dramatically by having the presence of mind to not get distracted before bed. 

Writing on a schedule. 

I do not have a problem generating a high volume of written words. So far, my writing process has been like this: daydream, sketch out some ideas, turn a few into short essays, get feedback on one or two, turn the most appealing one into an essay, get formal editing, and publish it. What this means is that some days I don’t write, and some days I write thousands of words. 

I want to become more “professional” in my approach to writing. I don’t know what this will evolve into, but for the next twelve weeks it will be simple: write 1,000 words per day, publish one newsletter per week, and publish one (good) long essay per month. The publishing goals are what’s important here–whether and how much I write every day will evolve depending on how much they serve those goals.

Being neurotic about fitness. 

If I had to sketch out the “macro” routine of most fit men I know, it would basically be the following three elements: a large fitness goal, a social fitness practice, and some supplemental individual workout routine that either moves them toward their goal or make them better at their social fitness practice. It is only three things, but to someone (like me) who hasn’t made fitness a cornerstone of their life, it makes them seem neurotic—like fitness is all they do. 

Along those lines, my goal is to run a decent-sized race at the end of the year. How long depends on how I develop over the year, but I have signed up for a 5K in March. My social fitness practice is BJJ (Brazilian Jiu Jitsu). And the supplemental workout for both of those will be lifting weights at home. 

This area is downstream of my ability to get better sleep, but I have built in other reinforcements. I have a couple of friends who have committed to signing up for the running events with me, and many friends who do BJJ. Weightlifting is not hard to motivate myself to do because it feels great and I have a full rack in my garage. 

Working on in-person relationships. 

Every personality test I have ever taken that measured extraversion gave me 95%+ on extraversion, with the majority being 100%. Fresh out of the craziness of the pandemic, my wife and I had our first baby. It has been three years since I had a normal social schedule in a world that didn’t have intense (if inconsistent) rules for social get-togethers. 

I know that I do better around people. I am going to make big effort to spend more time around more people, and “show up” more when I am around people. This means trying new things, meeting new people, reconnecting with people I don’t spend as much time around, and being more “present” around the people I already do see: taking more of an interest in them and spending less time on my phone. 

Behind the Scenes

I wrote a “behind the scenes” essay I did on this Annual Review. In it, I share my favorite annual reviews from other people and a one-act play I wrote on accident when trying to sort out my thoughts about this.

Anything you read today make you think? Do you do an annual review or have any annual rituals? I’d love to hear about them.