This is my annual review of my goals for this year. I’m glad to say that I did pretty well overall by accomplishing one of them in full and making great progress with another. Without further ado, let’s see how I did.
- Stretch every day. This was a goal I set for this year but it didn’t last longer than a few months. I benefited greatly from doing it, especially when I started stretching my wrists as part of my preventative self-care and recovery for juggling. Next year, I plan to do at least some stretching each day.
I managed to do some stretching each day this year! Some days it was just brief wrist stretches, although I usually managed to do a lot of lower body stretches. All that stretching has allowed me to recover faster from long juggling sessions, reduced my physical pain, increased my flexibility, and made me feel overall better. I’m glad I finally nailed this as it was a goal for a few years. I plan to keep stretching every day so that all of the benefits it has provided stay with me. - Get my book ready for editing. After losing my dog Sawyer, I lost a huge amount of will to do almost anything, including work on my book. The emotional pain I’ve felt since then along with the remaining cruelty in the world has also made me question what value a book on communication could have. As a result, I still have a lot of work to do before it’s ready to publish. If I write a little bit every day throughout 2023, I think it will be ready for the final edits before that year ends. That seems like a much more attainable goal for me at this point than trying to get it published sometime in the next twelve months. I hope I can stick to it and make it happen.
I didn’t get the book ready to publish. What’s more, I’ve given up on the book. No matter how often I talk about effective communication and emotional intelligence, both online and in person, it hasn’t produced any visible changes in anybody I know. That plus the stress of attempting to even finish writing the book (a huge undertaking given how many random ideas I have typed out on almost one hundred pages across several documents) while healing from my dog Sawyer’s death and all the other pain I’ve experienced in life made me decide to quit this particular project. I’ll keep talking about what I find meaningful through this blog and with the small handful of humans I know who get it, in addition to pointing those who are interested toward the best books I’ve found for emotional and communication work. I’ll probably write and publish at least one book about something close to my heart at some point in my life, but, at this stage, it looks like the communication book will never see the light of day. - Heal my deep-seated trauma. I’ve worked through a lot of pain over the past few years. Clearing out the stuff that’s closer to the surface has vastly improved my mental health but I still have a lot of deep issues to address. This year, I started digging real deep. Difficult as that was, it’s been hugely beneficial. I realized more than ever before how much that deep pain has been holding me back and making me do things I’d rather not as well as preventing me from things I’d rather do. It’s time for me to heal all the deep-seated trauma that has been festering my whole life and making everything worse for me. If I can’t get through it all in the remains of 2022, I’ll do what it takes to clear it in 2023.
I healed most of the pain of losing Sawyer this year, thank goodness. That alone has made me feel so much lighter and better. Unfortunately, healing that pain took so much time and effort that I haven’t been able to make much of a dent in the deeper pain that has plagued me for as long as I can remember. One of the books I got to help me heal called It Didn’t Start with You has brought to the surface a huge amount of resistance within me. I suspect that my emotional freedom is just on the other side of that resistance. If not this year, then next year I’ll revisit that book and see if I can break through to the other side.