Welcome to a new and hopefully less terrible year!
It's time for our annual review of resolutions and to update goals for the coming year. In the grand tradition of choosing a theme for posts like these, I've decided that this year I will feature yet another one of the world's wonderful animals and one of my personal favorites: the octopus.
I've loved octopi for many years now, beginning with an encounter with a little octopus while on vacation with my family in Mexico when I was a child. They're beautiful, weird, and incredibly intelligent creatures, as evidenced by this particularly delightful footage of octopi using coconut shells for protection:
So now, escorted by our octopus chaperones: Shall we?
We shall.
My goals for 2017 were:
1. Regularly smash the patriarchy.
As operationalized by:
--Participate in regular direct advocacy with my elected officials.
As I noted in my midyear resolutions update, these two apps have been a major game-changer in increasing the feasibility and regularity of my outreach to elected officials. I could absolutely stand to communicate more, but the extent to which I've been able to engage in regular advocacy with my elected officials is almost exclusively due to these innovative tools.
--Set up recurring donations to advocacy organizations that will protect causes that are important to me, including civil rights and preservation of other democratic values like freedom of speech, assembly, and press.
I continue to be so glad Husband and I are finally in a position to do this and that we have. I'm planning for this to be something we continue. Our monthly donations are small, which means they are feasible for us but also hopefully that they make a cumulative positive impact for causes we care about.
--Ongoing self-education through self-directed reading and, ideally, participation in courses to learn about dismantling systemic discrimination.
Thanks to a local anti-racism collaborative, I got to participate in a really enriching six week seminar dedicated to dismantling systemic racism. The seminar included fruitful discussions about the manifestations of racism in American society and made space for practical discussions of strategies for directly addressing racism when it is expressed in interactions with others. I'm really grateful resources like these are available in my community and highly recommend participating in trainings and seminars like this to anyone who is interested in being a force for good by advocating more effectively against racism.
Outside of this seminar, I could be much better about dedicating more time to self-directed learning in this domain. I do this periodically through watching documentaries and reading books and articles, but I would like to do this more regularly.
--Advocacy, conversation, and education with colleagues to ensure they feel empowered to stand up for the vulnerable communities we serve as expert, ethical practitioners.
Due to the recent changes I've made at work, I haven't had as many opportunities to do this with colleagues. However, my hope is to attempt multicultural seminar 2.0 in the new year--I just need to take the initiative to make it happen. Seminar 1.0 gave me a small taste of the challenges of launching these conversations in a professional sphere, and I think it'll be important for me to work through those differently the second time around.
I've had the occasional conversation with friends and family about the anti-racism training I did and my overall interest in anti-racism, though that's something I could surely expand on.
--Practicing my right to peacefully assemble and demonstrate.
As I noted in my last post, this is something I un/happily had many occasions to act on: unhappily because so very many protestable things have happened in the last year, happily because
a) we still have the right to peacefully demonstrate, and
b) it's extremely heartening to see so many other people show up, too.
--Regularly consume news media again.
Still working on this one. I was keeping up with NPR's 5-minute morning news bulletin for a while, but I've decided to forgo that for reasons I'll elaborate on below. I still feel committed to this goal, but I have to figure out how to make it happen.
2. Learn all the stuff and things.
There are several ways in which I've been lucky to be able to do this. One is through a book club I joined after moving to New City, which has kept extra pressure on me to read often and has prompted me to read work I've really enjoyed. I've also learned a ton of practical professional knowledge since moving into a new role at work, which I'm really grateful for. I have some thoughts on how to continue this goal in the new year, which I'll expand on below.
I was, albeit temporarily, successful in practicing Swedish regularly in anticipation of the really incredible trip abroad Husband and I took a few months ago. I then didn't really have the occasion to use anything I learned because it appears all Swedish people speak impeccable English. Experiencing the opposite of my unnecessary pre-trip urgency upon our return, I promptly stopped practicing. I'd still like to keep poking along with that learning, though, so I'm hoping to recommence it in the New Year.
3. Find ways to meaningfully and consistently set limits with work.
It took a lot of time, struggle, and ironically ever more work before it could happen, but I did the thing.
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| Me in the midst of the STRUGGLE to actually do the limit-setting thing. |
4. Write more.
I just barely squeaked by with one more post than the previous two years, and (to the immense satisfaction of my minor perfectionist streak) wrote at least one post for every month of the year!
I've continued to write in a journal, too, although the fact that I'm still using the same one as I was at the beginning of the last New Year demonstrates that my pace has slowed somewhat. Writing every day is probably not sustainable, but I'm very glad to have even a semi-regular practice of writing and reflection back in my life not least because it was yet another driver behind making the changes required at work this year.
5. Watch at least 52 movies.
Yusssssssss!! I DID THE THING. Much to my joy and pleasure, I watched 5 movies in excess of my goal this year--yet another accomplishment linked to limit-setting with work (because when you set limits with work, you have free time to watch movies!)!
In looking back at these goals and reflecting on how each of them went, I'm happy that I managed to set goals that were realistic yet still reaches. I didn't perfectly accomplish these goals, but I'm glad to see the opportunities for growth those imperfections illuminate. So without further ado, let's look ahead to this year's goals!
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| I just can't get enough of this coconut action. |
1. Regularly smash the patriarchy.
To maintain rigorous adherence to this goal but also condense things a bit, I'll update what I mean by this by narrowing it to the things I still need to work on and setting clearer expectations for myself:
--Participate in at least once weekly advocacy with my elected officials.
--Ongoing self-education through self-directed reading, participation in at least one course to learn about dismantling systemic discrimination, and joining an ongoing anti-racist action group.
--Lead a second round of the multicultural seminar at work.
--Practice my right to peacefully assemble and demonstrate at least 3 times this year.
--Regularly consume news media again.
It's really only this last one that'll be a challenge, largely because the window I had in my routine for regularly doing this has now be re-allocated in the service of another goal. Maybe I could listen to a news summary after I get home from work? Surely I can find five minutes for this. I'll just have to decide when to make it happen.
2. Learn all the stuff and things.
I'm often annoyed with how much time I spend idling around on my phone, and I would like to do a better job of more regularly either a) putting my phone down and reading a book instead, or b) using phone time to read the gigantic backlog of articles I've bookmarked to read later. I'm also aware of the ways in which phone idling can be a genuine form of self-regulation and self-soothing for me, so I'm not looking to get overzealous with this--sometimes it's okay to need to just tune out and/or be diverted. But let's be real, I could have easily read more and cut back a bit on my Insta time.
3. Write more: keep journaling and 15 posts!
I absolutely want to keep up with journaling at least 3 times a month (ideally more), and I'd love to top last year's total number of posts by *just* one, if not a few more.
4. Actively prepare and take steps to build the life I want.
One of the very best benefits of setting limits with work has been that it has created the mental, emotional, and physical space required for me to be able to think about the big picture of my life and what I want my next steps to be. I could not be more grateful for the clarity this space has afforded me, and I'm really excited about the plans Husband and I are concocting.
I'm not meaning to be overly cryptic, as I'll be very glad to share more specifically what I mean when the time is right. In the meantime, there's a lot more work to be done and I'm excited to do that work.
5. Cultivate compassion.
As I perhaps unclearly alluded to in my last post, I'm wanting to practice taking a more balanced perspective. What I really mean by that is that is that I want to be more patient and less irritable with people in general.
One of the debates that emerged after the presidential election was the debate over whether we needed to have compassion for those who made the catastrophic decision to support our current president. My attitude, perhaps unsurprisingly, has been that I am WAY more concerned with dedicating my brain space and energy to supporting the people who are legitimately under threat because of this presidency than the people who made that threat a reality. Frankly, I have concerns that worrying about the feelings of the president's supporters continues to center the feelings of members of the cultural majority (white Christian-identified straight people--of course not all of whom supported the president) over the feelings of every other ethnic, racial, religious, sexual, and gender minority, despite the clear fact that the members of those latter groups are the people most likely to be victimized by the president's policies and behaviors. In short, it's yet another manifestation of white supremacy.
I still maintain this stance. That being said, in the immediate aftermath of the white supremacist terror and violence in Charlottesville, I went to an amazing training for anti-racist demonstrators before a major anti-racist demonstration in New City. The leader of this training was an incredible, brave, principled, and talented photojournalist who had been in Charlottesville with faith leaders heading the counter-demonstrations. She told us that threats had been made against the faith leaders by white supremacists, and that they and she had genuinely feared for their lives to the point of writing farewell letters to their loved ones the night before the violence turned fatal, leading to the death of a counter-demonstrator. Hearing her story filled me with grief and rage at the state of our nation and the ugly audacity of bigots so deluded they would threaten men and women of faith.
However: the intention behind this training was to support us in finding our center so we could advocate against oppression from solid ground. Not from a place of anger, sadness, and fear. Instead, from a place of deep abiding love.
This doesn't have to mean having love for practitioners of hate, although it can mean having love for the broken, miserable ember of humanity that may still someday redeem them. More easily, it can mean having love for the precious, hateless future for which you demonstrate and it can mean having love for the people you wish to uplift.
So, to be a better person, psychologist, advocate, and ally, I want to cultivate within myself more deep, abiding love. The best way I know how to do that is through loving-kindness meditation. For those of you unfamiliar with this practice, it's a meditative practice centered around building compassion, warmth, and love for yourself and others, usually through contemplating four mantras like those listed below:
I've started practicing this for a few minutes each day and choosing different living things to send this energy to, and I'm hoping that over time this practice will help me stay in better contact with the deep, abiding love I have to offer.
6. Watch at least 52 movies.
Finally, our oldie but goodie. A toast to another year of great movies!
And!
{Heart}
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