One Big Thing I Hope I Can Learn In 2023

Up until the past few years, I responded well to lists of goals. That’s probably obvious, if you’ve read any of my previous New Year’s entries, but even though I didn’t always meet my goals (see: aforementioned New Year’s entries), the act of setting them was fun and useful for me. How did I want to be better? What could I try to achieve?

I organized my day-to-day life in the same way. In advance, I’d decide that the purpose of my workout schedule, or my writing time, or my language learning, was X end goal. Then I knew what I had to schedule in every week to make it happen–or, more accurately, to feel like I was making it happen.

This approach encouraged my problems with confusing the quantitative aspects of my practice with its qualitative effects. I’d fret over not going to the gym or missing too many writing days for too long or skipping that one German grammar session. However, the downsides never outweighed the benefits: lists of goals kept me motivated and happy. That’s the sort of person I am, and, generally, I’ve been able to manage it contentedly.

Until recently.

This year, I realized that I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to add to my goals list for 2023. Moreover, I had to admit that choosing my goals for 2022 had been, well, tedious–not exciting the way it had been in the past. I’d stopped caring about most of them somewhere at the start of the summer.* In some ways, I feel like I took the worst features of internet feeds and social media (constant, desperate comparison on arbitrary metrics that can never be met) and built my leisure time on the same model.

So I have just one goal for this year: to ease up on prioritizing future-Sarah and instead try to pay more attention to how present-Sarah feels. Or, put another way, to do the things I want to do when and if I enjoy them, not in torturous service of what was supposed to be a way for me to catalogue my inspiration and dreams but instead ended up as a series of haphazard numbers I forced myself to meet.

I guess I’m still pretty burnt out, physically and emotionally. Although anxiety tells me that I, like all of us, have only limited time in this life, that I need to always be growing, always improving, always aiming to be a better person, this year, I want to focus on getting to a place where those ambitions could be something that bring me joy again.

I think we all deserve some kindness these days, especially from ourselves.

* Don’t worry, though–I’ll still report back soon, if only because I think it’s generally a communal good to post about deciding to stop pursuing goals in public forums. Everyone changes their minds about their intentions for growth sometimes, but we don’t often talk about it. I understand why not, but I still wish more people felt comfortable doing so.