I Resolve to Keep Changing
Happy New Year, creative friends! I wasn’t sure if I should write a post about New Year’s resolutions—because what else is there really to say, and everyone writes about New Year’s resolutions, and maybe everyone is tired of thinking about New Year’s resolutions one week into January and going into year three of a pandemic. But they’ve been on my mind, as I am one of Those People who are very into fresh starts and setting goals. As a teacher who still lives within the September-to-June calendar of life, I appreciate that there is a “New Year’s Day” in the fall as well, because usually by September I’ve completely lost the thread of whatever it was I was trying to do back in January. Twelve months is a long time; I need at least a couple of stop-and-check-in points.
Whether or not you “believe” in resolutions or the blank slate of the New Year (it’s true, unfortunately, that there is no blank slate—we are still our whole, messy selves after midnight), the concept is rooted in the idea of stepping back and taking stock of ourselves, which is important because it’s a useful reflection we might otherwise skip. The dictionary says that to “resolve” is to “decide firmly on a course of action.” It’s really just about a little active planning: Who do you want to be? How will you do it?
People have been making New Year’s resolutions for 4,000 years. As an ancient Babylonian, if you didn’t keep your promises for the year you’d fall out of the gods’ favor. If you were an early Christian, you’d spend New Year’s Day focusing on your past mistakes and figuring out how to do better going forward. Today, resolutions are not really about keeping a supreme being happy with us, but more about keeping us happy with ourselves. Which is also important.
Fellow perfectionists, you are probably familiar with the feeling that there is a way to become The Perfect Version of yourself and that achieving or not achieving this feels black and white. If this is the belief system you’re trapped in, resolutions can easily become an all-or-nothing approach: if you don’t end up doing just one thing the way you intended to do it, the whole strategy is null. I’m getting better at being flexible with myself, and understanding that what works or doesn’t work for me is not static and permanent, but is constantly changing.
This year, I’m thinking of my New Year’s resolutions as an adaptation of my creative strategies to respond to these changes. I’m trying to practice noticing how things are going, how I’m doing, what’s missing, and what I need and don’t need in my life before making a giant list of things to accomplish and habits to form (I can’t help it, I love a giant list no matter what). To make meaningful resolutions, the answers to these questions (the “how are things going,” “what do I need” questions) need to be the real answers—not the answers you think they’re “supposed” to be or want them to be.
For example, I might think that what I need in my life is to exercise for one hour every single day, but I don’t actually feel that need internally (an hour is a lot! every day is a lot!) so that’s not a real need I have. But if people on social media and in TV shows are making me feel like the best kinds of people are the people who exercise at least one hour every day, it can be hard to distinguish my actual need from my fake-need to be the person I think I’m supposed to be.
Does that make sense? Creating ourselves into the people we already are is a pretty convoluted pursuit.
I recently participated in a goal-setting workshop in which we were asked to imagine ourselves in a place that we wanted to be. The point of the exercise was to focus on how we were feeling in this visualization. It should be the feeling that we’re after with our goals—not the tangible accomplishments. I.e., it’s not literally the statue of the Oscar that you want to have, it’s (likely) the sense of accomplishment and happiness and validation that you believe will come with it. (Although, I don’t know, those statues are pretty cool.) What’s fun is that you can cultivate a sense of accomplishment and happiness and validation right now, because you don’t need a hyper-specific statue to unlock it. Isn’t that mind-blowing? That you don’t have to wait until unlocking some new level of success to feel fulfilled?
These are a few things I’ve noticed about how my creative process has been feeling lately, and the resolutions I’ve made in response to those observations:
Words on Page
Last year, once I got into December I felt that I was not writing enough. I was still writing a lot (I just finished two new scripts—huzzah!), but it was not as much as I wanted to be writing or could be writing. Basically, an entire week could go by where I wasn’t actually writing anything (but doing so much writing-career-related work and feeling burnt out by it), and then there would be a day or two of stressed-out blizzard-writing where everything had to get pushed out of me to meet a deadline. This wasn’t really a process that was working for me. I felt empty and disconnected on the days I didn’t write, and compulsive and exhausted on the days I wrote a lot. I didn’t feel like myself on either type of day.
So, I decided to make it my biggest priority to write three pages every single day. I have a loose definition of what those three pages are. A “page” can be a screenplay page or a prose page, even though one of these has drastically more words than the other. It can also be a journal page, which provides a fallback option for the days I run out of time or energy to write anything more officially creative. The three pages can be a combination of those or all for the same project. This goal is simple enough that it’s doable. I’m two weeks into it, and not only have I gotten lots more writing done than I usually do, but—and more importantly—I feel like myself: whole, balanced, grounded, calm. It’s also forcing me to put words to the page no matter what those words are, which is a good tool to be sharpening for my struggling-perfectionist’s toolkit.
Another fun thing? Almost every day of this commitment, I’ve ended up writing more than three pages.
Don’t Wait
Last year, one of my New Year’s resolutions was to commit more seriously to learning Czech, a language I’ve been on-and-off spending flaky time with since my teens. I can’t fully explain my interest in learning Czech other than having a great-grandmother who was Czech and generally thinking the language looks and sounds super cool. I did a decent job of upping my commitment at the start of 2021: I took a real class, I learned from a real textbook and a real teacher. But when the class ended, I didn’t do a great job of keeping it up. Can you blame me? Nobody in my life speaks Czech, I have no upcoming travel plans to Prague, and it really doesn’t matter to anyone whether or not I have any level of a grasp of this language. Compared to my piano teaching life, my writing career, my creative goals, learning Czech is definitely a low-priority activity. This means that it’s the first thing to let go of on a busy day.
But guess what: every day is a busy day! I found myself thinking that I would get to Czech sometime later—maybe after becoming rich when Netflix buys my show (har har), or after I’ve won an Academy Award and magically have all the freedom to do what I want (because people who win Academy Awards are not busy at all), or at least once I get to a summer break, or a two-day fall break, or to another year…
It became obvious that if I really do want to learn Czech, I have to make the space for it right now. So, I made the same resolution I made with writing pages: every single day, I have to spend at least some time learning or studying Czech. And again, the goal is super flexible. My daily Czech time can be an hour with my textbook and audio guide or two minutes on Duolingo over lunch. Most days I opt for Duolingo, but I usually find myself spending at least 15-20 minutes on it instead of my required bare minimum. This makes me feel good because, at the end of the day, if I have spent some time learning Czech, this indicates that I’m in control of my time and where I’m choosing to put my energy, instead of letting an out-of-control To Do list or one particular project take over my life.
Reading Matters
This one is similar to my Czech learning endeavors. Even though I read a lot, I still obtain books at a rate that is embarrassingly faster than the rate at which I read them. Not only is reading important to me and fun for its own sake, reading is also really important to the craft of writing—not to mention that I have some real work-related deadlines when I’m moderating discussions for Feminist Book Club or reviewing books for EcoLit Books. I’ve typically viewed reading as an extracurricular activity—something relaxing that I can look forward to doing at the end of a long day. But I’m learning that viewing it like this means it doesn’t really happen. My generally doable ideas—like a goal to read 25 pages a day—dwindle to nothing because the activity is not actually prioritized, and then I end up having to read 100+ pages in one day to finish a book on time, which sort of defeats the whole idea that reading is supposed to be relaxing.
I typically set aside a few hours at the beginning of each day—when my mind is most alert—to focus on writing. Since reading is so important to writing, maybe it deserves to be something I do in those morning hours when I have the most energy and am in more of a literary mood, right? So, I’m trying to commit to some reading time in the morning hours instead of waiting until I’m exhausted at the end of the day and want nothing more than to sleep. This has been a difficult one for me to follow through on so far. I can’t shake the feeling that whenever I’m reading a book I am somehow evading my work, not being productive, or enjoying myself too much (what?!). I will continue to work on this. Reading is important to me and to my creative process, so it deserves to be prioritized—also, it should be totally okay to enjoy an activity during the “work day,” right?
Patience
You can probably feel the activities stacking up: every single day I have to do some serious reading, write at least three pages, learn Czech, work a full-time job—what?! So, here’s another thing! I need to work on being okay with doing little bits of things each day. The reason the above-discussed priorities have not always happened most days is that I easily slip into obsession with my projects. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but I tend to get totally wrapped up in one project and everything else falls to the side while I obsessively work to complete that one Thing. If I begin my morning working on a script, I often get so into “finishing” some version of that endeavor (perhaps reaching a certain page of it, or feeling like the pages I have are the best they can possibly be before I send them to someone), that it’s all I’ll focus on until I absolutely have to step away from my desk to begin piano teaching in the afternoon. When I’m done teaching at the end of the day, my mind compulsively races right back to that unfinished project.
I am trying to be okay with the slowness of progress, which means spending some time with various projects each day but also letting them breathe and allowing space into the process so that I can do the things I want (and need) to do for myself. And, anyway, as I tell my piano students, the fastest way to mastering a piece is slow practice.
Planning
Finally, I’ve made a few minor adjustments to create more space in my week, because lord knows I need it. These include:
Meal-prepping: I’m not sure why I’ve never tried this before, but I was inspired by my incredible-chef boyfriend to start making my dinners on Sundays so that all I have to do on weeknights is heat them up—an amazing time-and-energy-saver when I work until 8:30—and it’s truly rocking my world.
An exercise schedule: Instead of arguing with myself in the mornings about not wanting to get out of bed and do any sort of movement—let alone run outside in zero-degree air—I’m trying to stick to a very doable breaks-inclusive schedule so that there is simply a plan and nothing to argue with.
Naptime: Having a little time in the middle of the day to power down with my cat by my side has become something on the level of sacred to me.
Weekly planning: This one’s for the planner nerds. Last year I had a daily planner that was starting to overwhelm me; now I have a weekly planner so that I can look at the week in a more big-picture sense and see that everything is under control even if there are tasks I can’t get to for a few days. Instead of taking time every single day to list all of my tasks and goals (and feeling frantic when I fail to do this), I am just making this a weekly thing, and it’s so much simpler.
These are all things that I’m working on doing for myself, but the point is, none of these are “correct” things that are how everyone should be living their life (in case you were worried I am demanding that you learn Czech). And who knows if all of this will continue to be what works for me in two months? I say this because I know we look to each other so frequently and think, “Oh, they’re doing that? Shoot, I’m not doing that, I need to do that.” I think it would behoove* us all to look a little more internally to figure out what it is we need and realize when those needs are changing—rather than succumbing to external expectations, which is an all-too-real struggle in the age of social media.
How can your daily life be more sustainable to support you and your creativity? What parts of your day do you have control over? How do you want to feel at any given moment? I would love to learn about your own what-works and what-doesn’t-work strategies—and if you have any vegan meal-prepping advice, I’m all ears.
*I just made another resolution to use the word “behoove” more.
A recent piece in The Atlantic suggests letting go of frantic self-improvement. “See, the problem isn’t just with how we define or pursue our goals; it’s with the very idea of prioritizing tangible outcomes.”
We lost a few incredible people over the holidays. Spend some time with Joan Didion in her 1978 Paris Review interview: “The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.”
And in case you haven’t had a proper cry about Betty White yet (or even if you have), I highly recommend taking 15 to watch this.
Read more Wild Minds posts here.