Hi team,
As time grows (very) short between the now-times and the after-Second-Child-is-here-times, I'm feeling increasingly eager and anxious to write. Driven by that energy, let's check in with how I did with last year's annual resolutions and set some goals for 2023.
Last year's resolutions were:
And here's how I did with fulfilling each of them:
1. Practice and maintain healthy boundaries.
I'm generally feeling really proud of my progress on this goal, which I've had to put into practice on a couple of key occasions as well as plenty of small ones. Some guiding principles and questions that have really helped me accomplish that are:
--I don't have to respond on someone else's timeline.
It's better if I take the time I need to regain calm and formulate my response than if I respond impulsively just to assuage someone else's dysregulation. It's my job to manage myself, and theirs to manage themselves.
--"Is there a different way to solve this problem?"
Asking myself this question with genuine curiosity, especially when I feel myself dragged into old and intense emotions and thoughts about something upsetting or difficult, has been really helpful in discovering new and more skillful ways to handle things.
--"Am I people-pleasing?"
This question is the product of my somewhat wild discovery this year that I absolutely have a people-pleasing streak. I've long thought of myself as willful, opinionated, and willing and able to address things directly instead of avoiding conflict. Those things are definitely still true, but not in every circumstance. I've discovered there are plenty of times, unfortunately, when people do things that make me feel angry, upset, hurt, or disrespected and I go into this very frustrating autopilot-y polite and minimizing mode without even realizing that's what I'm doing... except then I ruminate intensely over such incidents for hours, which makes me absolutely miserable. Not only am I sick of doing that to myself, I'm also annoyed at this pattern as a behaviorist; it's evidence that I'm choosing to be consequenced for someone else's behavior and reinforcing behavior that hurt me by not addressing it.
The moment when I truly realized this was relatively small. A student sent me a stunningly rude email about an assignment in a class I teach. I registered right away that I was affronted and angry that they felt comfortable addressing me the way they did, but bafflingly, before I realized it I had responded in a way that didn't remotely address that--instead, I noticed that my response actually made it seem like their attitude was totally acceptable because I didn't address it and bizarrely instead proceeded as if their behavior was perfectly fine.
The difference this time was that I realized what I'd done basically the second I hit "send" on my response. I felt my old potential habitual rumination gearing up, felt annoyed with myself for doing that to myself (and unwittingly protecting this student from the consequences of their behavior), and decided I needed to take a different approach. I quickly drafted and sent a follow-up email that simply said, "If you're interested in understanding the rationale for the assignment, I'd be happy to share that with you. Just let me know."
This second response worked so much better for me. It communicated clearly that, despite what the student had suggested, there was a thorough thought process behind the assignment they were griping about and it was on them to be curious about that instead of assuming I had just blithely assigned their class busywork. It also communicated that I also wasn't going to do the emotional labor of explaining myself unless they took the accountability measure of actually asking. And they did! Which gave me an opportunity to concisely lay out how every aspect of the assignment was actually constructed to make a future, bigger assignment easier to complete. In other words: I think what you meant to say was"Thank you," friend!
--"Is there a way to say this kindly?"
If the answer to that question is not "yes," then I'm doing it wrong and I clearly need more time to figure out how to address a problem.
--"Is there a way to solve this problem collaboratively?"
This is about both practicing more humility, but also having, again, genuine curiosity about and respect for the fact that other people are going to have ideas and perspectives I don't and which are valuable. It's also a lot easier to solve a problem if the other person feels included in solving it rather than like they're just being told what to do by a pissed off/upset and bossy person.
--"If this behavior continues, will that diminish my wellbeing?"
To the immense benefit of my emotional health, I have responded to behavior that depletes me like what it is: unacceptable. By feeling empowered to respond to behaviors that harm me by setting and enforcing increasingly uncrossable lines, I've felt so much more emotional peace and stability. It's hard to imagine going back to betraying myself by willingly making space for other people's harmful stuff in my life.
It's not like I'm using all of these principles perfectly, but the ways in which I've used them well so far have granted me so much relief from unnecessary suffering. I'm really grateful for those benefits and eager to nurture them further.
2. Meditate most days.
Lol. Nope. Not even remotely, not even close. Very sadly, I can probably count the total number of times I meditated last year on both hands. I'd love to be able to reinstate this practice, but it just didn't happen in 2022.
3. Write at least twice a month.
I'm excited that I did a pretty good job with this one! It felt really good writing more regularly for much of the year. I'm disappointed that my pace of writing tapered off by the end of the year, but it's also very clear why that is, and those reasons are partially informing my resolutions for this year.
One thing that I have ambivalence about is my lack of consistency with antiracist accountability posts, and the ways that my goal to write at least one of those a month impacted the overall pace of my writing. This was absolutely not a major factor in my declining writing output over the course of the year, but it nevertheless played an observable role: In an important way, my commitment to writing those posts diverted me from the original purpose of the blog, which is to write about movies. This, of course, includes writing about movies through an antiracist lens and writing about movies that are about and made by people of color in general. Broadening the scope of my accountability posts beyond movies just didn't really work as well as I thought it would--it started to feel a bit homework-y and a bit performative, neither of which is ideal for sustainable antiracism. While I absolutely plan to maintain an emphasis on broader antiracism in my overall life, I think I need to return to a specific focus on movies here.
4. Watch 52 movies.
As you may be aware, I was thankfully successful on this one, albeit a little bit by the skin of my teeth. That acknowledged, I'm still feeling really happy that the overall caliber of movies I watched was a significant improvement compared to 2021. I'm glad I got to enjoy a lot of really solid films in the past year as I met my evergreen movie-watching goal.
And now, we can move on to the goals I'm setting for 2023.
This year's resolutions are:
1. Practice and maintain overall emotional health.
2. Watch 52 movies.
As always, my treasured evergreen goal. <3 Excitingly, I've already watched 9 movies this month alone, with several 5-rated films already in the film inventory 2023.
Here's hoping this year is even better than our hopes for it. Thank you for being a part of that!
{Heart}
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