Much like my personality, 2022 looked a lot better on paper than in reality. It turns out that in 2022 I became the repeater of tales. Oh, did I already tell you that story? Three times? I’ve started doing this chuckle that makes me cringe, but seems reflexive and unstoppable. I now officially have a belly, which makes it feel uncomfortably like someone is sitting in my lap every time I sit down. Not prone to being slender, I was always going to end up here, belly chuckling while I tell the same story I just told five minutes ago. This is not to say I’m not making a game effort of caring about my health, my conversational abilities, or whether or not I chortle myself into a heart attack. But I can’t say I’m caring caring. It’s been a rough year or five.
It’s human nature around this time of year to assess where you’ve been or where you’re going. I had to pull out my planner to see what the hell I did with 2022. Apparently, I took a lot of people to doctor appointments. I taught some workshops. Showed up regularly for a writing group. Continued with my grad school courses. I wrote a lot, but it didn’t feel like much. I worked out, which felt like a lot but didn’t look like much. I volunteered, mostly because it gave me a license to complain about the state of the world. No one could answer my griping with “if you don’t like it, do something about it.” Well dammit, I did. Problems solved, right?
We’re constantly exhorted to be present. Now I’m so present, that last year and the next are not real to me. I don’t feel the urge to meticulously plan at the moment. Perhaps, too, I’m firmly in my winter of discontent and not strolling on the sunny side of the street. My ambition needs a lot of vitamin D. But I’m not all self-denigration and snarky-ness. I have a lot that I’m grateful for at this moment. My daughter, a year after stopping chemo, is thriving and preparing to move out into the world. My mother moved from out-of-state and for the first time in 40 years, we live close to each other. I’m feeling the “circle of life” thing acutely these days.
There’s been some grappling with semantics in my head when it comes to the way forward. Goal is such a mismanaged word. Resolution sounds like passing legislation. I’ve settled on intention over the last couple of years. It feels very Gen X of me to use such a squishy, noncommittal word. Goals: Whatever. Resolution: Never set goals again. My intention has crystallized into: Spend my time and energy in ways that support my values. It feels more like a foundation that informs everything above it.
I’m not fond of bumper sticker philosophies and feel unadulterated shame when I utter them aloud. Be present. Breathe. I’m basically reciting the secrets on how not to die. Next: put one foot in front of the other. There is, however, something about having a quick set of reminders or mantras to keep yourself on the path. In a world that wishes nothing more than to have your attention everywhere, all the time, staying on track has become pretty damned important. I’ve been thinking a lot about what my guiding principles need to be for this next year. I’m going to share them here so that friends and family alike can mock me next year.
Do work that is meaningful to me. I started off with do meaningful work, but that is undefined and doesn’t stop me from getting co-opted into someone else’s idea of meaningful work. This isn’t a high-minded concept of altruism. It’s a reminder that I either a) need to make sure my time and energy is spent in ways that serve my values and b) I need to re-frame things that feel like chores in a way that underscores their importance to me. e.g. I want to clean the bathroom, because I value having a clean house versus I have to clean the bathroom. Meaningful work to me involves writing and supporting other writers, learning writing pedagogy and developing curriculum, and promoting writing workshops. My own writing means revision, revision, revision, and finding an agent for my novel. Some things have to fall off the list. My organization volunteerism is the first to take a hit. No more leadership roles that require meetings and administrative work. My role as a full-time parent is downshifting to on-call status. Meaningful, but no longer all-encompassing.
Eat well. This means something different to each person and is part of a bigger picture. For me, it means not eating after 6pm so I can sleep. Eating a home-cooked, nutrient-dense breakfast, because it’s my favorite meal. Beans and greens. Whole foods. Non-heartburn inducing foods. Gradually eliminating meat and caffeine from my regimen. Likely becoming a very farty person which will continue to support my destiny as a suburban hermit. Continuing to hone my skills as a gardener so that I don’t have 265 tomatoes, 45 onions, and 3 carrots (not good at the planning!). I like the phrase eat well because it speaks to a level of self-care I’ve not afforded myself for the last decade. It’s affirming and not loaded with all the garbage language of fad dieting and fat bigotry.
Exercise regularly. I’ve worked out my whole life. I am one of those people who actually likes a good workout. However, it is disconcerting to work out as if I’m an athlete, yet look like a human pumpkin. It’s a combination of aging/hormones/living in the sandwich generation – caregiving for both children and parents. But I’m coming out of that phase and it’s time to turn my attention to my health. My challenge isn’t a lack of training or knowledge, it’s a lack of consistency, combined with that whole thing above, the eating bit. Subject to depressive cycles, workouts are the easiest way to give my brain a needed boost. Catch-22. When I’m on the downswing, the easiest thing to do is nothing. My intention for this next year is to do something, anything on the regular. It means tracking workouts so that a two-day break doesn’t turn into two months.
At my last workshop we discussed setting writing intentions. I asked the question “What do you want to have done by this time next year?” The answers were as varied and delightful as could be. Self-knowledge, starting small, and a positive framing are foundational ways to get where you want to go – and plenty of compassion and forgiveness when you have to hit the restart button. My hope is that next year I won’t have to look at a calendar to see where the time went, because I will be living with intention and not just because someone told me to breathe.
What are your intentions for 2023?
A cumulative song is one that starts out with a simple verse and then each verse is longer than the verse before. A classic example of this is “There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly” that begins with There was an old lady who swallowed a fly; I don’t know why she swallowed a fly – perhaps she’ll die! The song builds progressively until the final, much longer verse: 
Cut to a year later and I’m a seething ball of resentment who seems to find less joy as each day goes by. What happens? I learned the phrase scope creep from my husband, a computer programmer who has, in the course of his career, worked on corporate projects in an ever-changing environment where there are too many meetings, too many bosses, and too many shiny objects to distract people. The simplest project can be turned into 45 PowerPoints on various aspects requiring more people, resources, and unending bagel-laden confabs (he just told me that they don’t eat bagels anymore – it’s mini-cupcakes). And accountability nowhere to be found.
you, how do you ensure that you’re spending your time in meaningful ways? Like writing an incoherent sentence that demonstrates the difference between you’re and your.
Nearly 30 years later, I meet a woman in the course of my writing life. She’s energetic, intent on learning, a good listener, and positive about her life and interactions. My first reaction was irritation. My second was envy. My third – curiosity. What motivates her? How does she operate from such a place of positivity? How does she make others feel welcome and heard? I knew that it was a far distance from where I was currently residing. One of her secrets? That old manual of hair gel, firm handshakes, and relentless optimism – the porn of personal success, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
I just finished reading Daniel Goleman’s 
After reading Brene Brown’s 
I wrote up my work plan for 2019 yesterday, but I’ve been churning things over in my brain for the last month. I rearranged my study, got a new rug to spruce things up. Cleaned up my computer and did back ups. I now have a work calendar separate from my duties as mom, spouse, and household maintainer. For weeks, I’ve been listening to motivational books, thinking through my daily routines, writing lists, and basically getting my shit together.
That isn’t to say that I won’t have to make some adjustments to my grand plan. Some things will still be untenable, no matter how good it looks on paper. My schedule and work plan are written in pencil for a reason. I think it’s going to be a slog, to shift into a writing work schedule from just “writing when I feel like it”. Moods tend to be a bad barometer for productivity, so my goal is to work anyway. Hello Excuse. I see you. Now go sit in the corner while I work.
Some days it seems like too many ethically-challenged, bad people are gaining power and steam. I was lucky enough to come across the feed of writer, A.R. Moxon, who also has a 
I was contacted by 
One book that I didn’t get gratis, was by a blogger who I have been following for a couple of years. Dave Astor blogs at 
Dirty dishes sat on the counter, my daughter ran out of jeans, my family foraged for their own meals, and the cats scratched their own bellies. I was writing. I wrote and wrote and wrote, consequences be damned. I submitted a short story to a lit mag and didn’t throw up from anxiety. I came up with a plan for November’s National Novel Writing Month. This time I’m writing a big sociopolitical novel that I’m very excited about. The world did not stop spinning on its axis because I ignored my chores. My child did not need bail money. My husband was able to find things. Nothing happened except for one thing.
close in on this blog’s seventh anniversary, I marvel at how much the online world has changed since I began, but that I still enjoy writing here. With so many things grabbing our attention, it becomes harder to find community and connections. Anything we do to improve that, from connecting with bloggers on the other side of the planet to giving each other an encouraging Like or Hell, Yeah in the comments – these things do make a difference.
Last year, I went to a lecture where journalist and novelist Anna Quindlen spoke about her writing practices and career. One of the things she said was that while she was working on a project, she limited how much time she spent answering emails and engaging others. “I only have so many words.” I’ve thought a lot about that phrase, wondering if there really is a limit to my creative reservoir.
I used to believe that I was a creative person, but I’ve spent too much energy trying to look put together. I’ve spent a lot of time being responsible, keeping myself controlled, and rational. I’m living in a world where I’m not allowing room for my own messiness, surrounded by a culture that will look at sheer lunacy and say well, that’s different.
It has hit me that art requires messiness and rawness and vulnerability, because art requires an elemental sort of truth and you can’t land on it by keeping your shit together all the time. As I said to a friend yesterday, I feel like a complete and utter fraud. She’d read somewhere that feeling like a fraud means you’re getting somewhere, because you are operating outside of your comfort zone. And that means growth.
I’ve been stuck for a long time, but things are uncoiling. My emotions have told my mind that it can just fuck right off. It’s “Feeling Time”. If you’re relatively smart, your rationalizing skills are likely top-notch. You can intellectualize the hell out of any morass of emotion, produce a white paper and a TED talk, and not feel a damned thing. It’s the feeling part that’s messy, that makes you feel like an unhinged nutter. It’s not comfortable, but it’s necessary.
Personally, I am dissolving into a bit of a mess. I’ve begun to disintegrate mid-conversation with friends and feelings are rising in me that no amount of editing can rearrange. I know it’s a good thing in theory, but for now, it feels like absolute shit. It’s not “normal” for me when normal was keeping things squared away. It’s not normal for me to keep manically humming Moby songs like some deranged hipster. I don’t want to talk out loud about it. I don’t want to repackage it for the consumption of others.
The Green Study 