Yesterday I organized a group to go ice skating, made progress on my career/work plans, found out about, got a ticket to and become Lost & Found Lead and a Ranger for burnhalla and went to a comedy show in the evening. Now, I was just reading this EA Forum article on a quarterly review and despite having mixed up the numbers mentioned (7h in 3 steps, rather than 3h in 7 steps) I still felt positive about it and excited to do it.
This is such a drastic departure from the energy levels I had a year ago (the start of the recovery from depression).
That’s why one of my foci for the year is to pay attention to and increase the amount of motivation-energy-time units (METs) I have available to me, as all three at high levels seem to allow for enormous progress.
My main goal, my arc for 12,026 HE is Exploration & Discovery.
I feel like most of my life so far I’ve been mostly in my room and only occasionally dragged along to things. My ambition seized opportunities, but I feel like a true sense-of-self, of who I am and want to be has never really emerged. I feel like I’ve lived a half-life so far. Almost always alright, but not happy. Maybe happy about things going according to plan, but not about life or myself. I always felt quite disconnected from those, from others, from life, from myself and my emotions. Apart from an undirected ambition to “have done more actual good than incidental bad, to have been a worthwhile investment of resources to humanity” I rarely had or followed drives I really liked.
I don’t really know who I am, but now I want to find out. To explore and discover more about the outside world, about people, about myself. To explore and discover drives and let them propel me forward.
And I want to overcome inner constraints. To release the hold my Fear of Judgment and Rejection has over me, to limit social anxiety, to heal old wounds. To have new experiences and relationships. To learn what I actually like and want. To try and fail.
For that, I came up with 5 areas that I want to focus on this year.
Exploration & Discovery is the overarching one and encourages me to try more new activities and to lower the bar for saying “yes”, to pay more attention to my needs and see where they lead me, to journal, write, and reflect.
One way I want to do this is through large strides in my Transition. To explore aesthetics, archetypes, how I want to be perceived but also to feel more free to be perceived and do and express things I enjoy.
Another aspect of Exploration & Discovery are my Social Goals: to meet new people and to make more connections. My time in Paris was great; so many cool and fun people to be around and I want to make sure I have more of that. I want to find out what types of people I deeply enjoy being around, to make more friends, to get new perspectives and widen the array of types of people I’ve gotten to know. Ideally, this also reduces social anxiety and makes me comfortable in more situations. I want a social circle around me that is in line with and supports my goals and growth and where I support them in theirs. To propel each other forward.
This might also help me in my Career & Impact: income is to some extend a necessity, but I want to do it well and have a large, positive impact with my METs. I think that operations work is something I’m good at because it’s the work I tend towards, that I ended up doing in the things I was involved in and therefore have experience in, and because it’s work I like – keeping things running, optimizing and making sure that everyone else’s impact is as high as it can be sounds great to me and I like generalist roles where I have various things to learn and try and to liaise with various people. Primarily, I want to test whether this idea is actually true, how good I really am at this and how rewarding I find this work. And to acquire more skills to do a better job.
Besides the ambition to discover, grow, and have impact I also need to take care of myself and avoid (more) burnout. For that, Health, Self, and Wellbeing are here to have a life that is well in balance mentally, emotionally, and physically, but also to change the equilibria by working on myself, by adding weights to some things or reducing the weight social anxiety, fear of rejection, and fear of losing have. It includes self-work on self-expression and being more in touch with those close to me, but also myself, my emotions and feelings, wants and needs, desires, and my body and its sensations. And to have intentionality in the things I do, to ensure time to think and reflect and let my brain be in diffused mode, rather than providing input for the sake of distraction and boredom-avoidance.
Two guiding principles I want to take into this year are:
You can just do things.
You can just not do things.
To try and dare more things, to just make the things I want there to be come about and to feel less bound by expectations that I have to do certain things in certain ways, to reflect whether I do them because it is good or because I feel negative pressure.