One of the great things about writing articles weekly is that it’s pretty easy to go back to them and see how life panned out in 2023.
These last few days I’ve been resharing some of the most meaningful articles that I’ve written this year. It’s a good way of being able to reconnect with the ebbs and flows of the last 364 days.
So in my 52nd and final article of 2023, let’s first look back to help me look forward.
Before logging off work, I wrote a recap email of all the things our team had achieved this year.
It was meant to be a short thank you email with a summary. But I realised that this would not really be doing the task justice. So instead, I spent some time properly trawling through our achievements.
I’m not sure I totally did it justice, but I’m glad I wrote it out rather than just saying ‘we wrote 3 reports and did 5 events this year’.
We can really downplay the accumulative effect of what we have achieved. So I thought I would also do a similar exercise for myself, blending in the personal and the professional.
We’re nine days from Christmas, and I’m feeling pretty exhausted. Usually, I would start feeling reminiscent about what I had achieved around this time of year. But right now, I honestly don’t really feel like it. It just doesn’t seem very fun to reflect right now. I’ve had an ample share of emotional intensity for the last few months, so adding more doesn’t feel like a fun thing to do
The last few weeks I’ve kept my days clearer and my evenings quieter.
Some call this ‘slowing down’, though I find that term a bit confusing – because whilst I am doing less activities, my mental space doesn’t feel particularly less active. If anything, it feels like I think more, rather than less.
It’s been an interesting experience for sure. Having freer evenings has allowed me to lounge around and enjoy spending time alone. When I tried ‘doing less’ in the summer, I ended up getting fidgety and felt quite miserable because I didn’t know what to do with myself. I think I’m having a better crack at it now though.
It’s nice to be liked – We want our family, peers and friends to like us. But what if we are spending so much time on wanting to be liked that we’re not listening to what we truly want?
Our behaviour becomes focused around how we can make other people like us. This is to the detriment of what we believe, or want to do. Nearly everyone has some experience around wanting to make friends at school. The idea of being solitary was labelled as being a ‘loser’, and the idea of sitting alone at the lunch table was filled with inconceivable dread.
I’ve been on my own personal rollercoaster this month. I’ve just finished moving countries during a pandemic, where I returned to my flat in London that I haven’t been in for over a year.
In total, I’ve taken 6 PCR tests (all negative!), completed two separate quarantines, moved out of a flat and signed my contract for my new job after having finished my final day in the last one.
I wanted to write a little bit about how I prepared for this pretty grueling few weeks. Ahead of time, I wasn’t particularly looking forward to my month of July due to these reasons. I’ve made life-changing decisions in an intense time pressure, all the while worrying that one positive COVID test would through all my moving-out plans out of the window. Such decisions aren’t easy at the best of times, but they are even more complicated during a worldwide pandemic.