Mid-February 2022 Check-in & Goals

An Internet chat about life & progress.

Lately, I’ve had an existentialist crisis of sorts. Is it period hormones induced by my birth control? Or is it because of the ongoing pandemic and the fact that life seems to blur together? Who knows. I don’t go to therapy anymore, but sitting down and journaling help me best. I thought to write this post as a check-in with my goals and to keep myself grounded. Improvement was made in regards to some goals, but others have been lackluster.

Mental health check-ins have been great for me, especially as I start to realize that I’m getting overwhelmed. In real life, I tend to live a secluded life, as I don’t really have friends in my hometown anymore, and I don’t have a license so I can’t drive and leave the house. So cultivating relationships and having people to talk to isn’t something that is common for me. Sure, I’m not lonely, but this is why I need the check-ins. To make sure that I’m still here.

I’ve said a lot, so let’s dive into this post :)

Checking in with my New Year’s Resolutions.

I had a lot of resolutions, as my goal was originally to write down one hundred resolutions to feel a satisfying check when I complete the small ones. Yeah, well, that didn’t happen. I ended up having roughly fifty-six resolutions written own on my iPad spreadsheet, and while I’ve completed some, there’s definitely a lot more to go. Here are some of the things I need to work on and have completed.

Creative Writing.

My main goal for 2022 was to sit down and write fifty creative pieces. I’ve already written eighteen new poems and a nonfiction essay, so I think I’m gaining some good leeway in that department. I told myself I was going to stop submitting, but here I was writing submitting quotas for myself to fulfill on my weekly agendas. I have indeed submitted to like forty places since the year has started, and I’ve only heard back from a couple, but I’ve gotten paid twice already for poems! That’s exciting.

Besides that, I still don’t really care about publications. I think my anxieties stem from the fact that I check Twitter and see people now posting their acceptances, which, sure, I want to celebrate, but I don’t think seeing that kind of content helps with mental health and the inevitable comparison game that this causes. My general social media strategy is to post, look at some stories or Tweets, and leave as quickly as possible with little interaction with other people. It’s doing me well so far.

I think going forward, I want to switch up styles and go more outside of my comfort zone. I’ve tended to fall into this ultra-feminine type of narrative where I like to erase all aspects of men in women’s lives, but I think it’s critical to acknowledge directly how men have influenced the way that women live. I was thinking at first that by completing erasing them, it’s a utopia of sorts, but then I kept dwelling on these themes of sadness and rage. So it’s time to switch up my content and think about how I can diversify what I’m writing about in order to portray the world through a less filtered lens.

Freelancing career & income.

I ended up having a meeting with my editor at the site I write for, so I got a slight promotion of sorts. There are things I now do that pay me more money, which is nice, so I think I’m finally in a stable place. This gap year I expected very little money and to just sit around writing and watching movies, but now I’m getting paid to do those things, which is always a plus. I’m also learning how to manage time much better than before. Before I wasn’t able to go out and take a walk with my mother, cook dinner, shower, and do all of these things on top of my career, but now I’m actually finding the time to do everything in a day. It helps that I turn my phone off most of the time, which is always nice.

I told myself that I want to diversify my income streams in a way that will make me a passive income throughout college, which will always be a fun time to maintain. This blog is doing really well, so there are opportunities coming my way that have to do with the fact that I’ve managed to create a blog that has sustainable SEO practices and manages to rank for certain keywords very high. As I also hope to diversify my skillset and pivot towards starting my own business, I think I’m feeling really good about the future and what’s in store.

Cooking.

I am cooking a lot more diverse food now—I need to restart my little food diary series. That was cute and something I genuinely enjoyed posting, so perhaps there’ll be more of those down the line. But besides that, I’m really happy with what I’m cooking for my family and me. My nose is consistently shoved down a cookbook, and my library is starting to run dry with resources, but I’ll be happy to go and look more into buying books about food history and traditional cuisines that are inaccessible to me otherwise.

This is on the same note, but I am trying to be healthier about my diet as well. I don’t cook with salt and minimize my use of sugar whenever possible, but lately, I’ve been eating a lot of sweets. American sweets aren’t very good for you, so I need to cut back down on what I’m eating. I also want to eat less rice and more vegetables because our diet is so dependent on carbs, so that’ll be in the works. Oh, I also want to drink a lot more water.

Goals I want to work towards more in the rest of the month and year.

Be less obsessive.

This is a core personality trait of mine. I tend to obsessively check Submittable when I think I deserve something very specific, and nowadays I’ve been checking up on the graduate school forums and Facebook groups on a daily basis. This has been a great source of anxiety for me and I’d like to leave this part of my personality behind in order to improve my mental health overall. I think I started realizing this when I obsessed over the fact I’d gotten offered to be a judge for the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, and while I reached when there was radio silence they let me know they had dropped me “due to lack of submissions.” I was honestly really sad about it because I was genuinely very excited to do this, but, alas, what can you do?

Stop working so hard.

I do way too many things all at once. I volunteer, I do this, I work at this place. It’s too much for one twenty-one-year-old to handle, especially when I’m not getting paid for a lot of the things that I do. One of my new recent goals by the end of summer is to cut back on the number of things that I’m doing, especially the unpaid work, because I find that the emotional, mental, and physical labor isn’t worth it for me at the end of the day. I need a break. I worked very hard in college and thought my gap year was going to be a time of rest, but it isn’t really.

Move my body more.

I used to play competitive soccer and basketball, and when college hit, my body started getting so lazy. Nowadays I tend to just work at my desk or read in bed, and I see that this will probably end up killing me one day (unless we all get nuked first, but that’s a different story). I sometimes go on walks with my mother around the neighborhood, and I want to do that more. When I get my license, I also want to do more things around town: take ceramics classes, join a recreational soccer group, maybe go down to D.C. every so often for handball. No one around here really does handball, so you have to go to Washington to try and find any semblance of a team.

Buy less books.

I download most of my books nowadays, but I’m really trying to rein in my urge to buy books I already have PDFs of just so I can stare at them on my bookshelf. I’ve noticed lately that there is a big trend of people buying all these books just for an aesthetic, and this is not the thing I want to get lured into right now. Borrowing from a library is a much more sustainable option, and while I wish I could support these authors, I A) don’t have the means and B) don’t want to support the publishing houses that are THE big ones. I think I just want to live like Thoreau in the woods, happily gardening until the end of my days, but, unfortunately, I don’t think that’s possible in today’s society.