2022 - Year of Self Love

It is already January 11, but I don't feel like 2022 actually began for me until at least January 6. Now that the crunch time for college applications has passed and I've returned to something like the normal daily schedule that I intend to stick to for the foreseeable future, it seems like a good time to lay out my Yearly Theme for 2022.

As a brief introduction, a Yearly Theme is something to do instead of a New Year's Resolution. The idea is, instead of setting a discrete goal that you can definitely fail to reach, you instead set an overall theme that you aspire to have guide your attitude, choices, and results for the year to come.

In 2020, my theme was "Year of Relaxing" which was basically intended to help me overcome my work-related burnout and also manage my mounting anxiety. Astute readers may recall that 2020 was also a year of historic disruptions, which ultimately derailed that theme, although in a way I did achieve something incredible in the form of a rough draft of my novel.

My theme for 2021 was "Year of Career." The idea here was that I thought I would continue building on my writing success from 2020 by polishing my book and getting it published. It turned out that something more important was for me to stop living in my parents' house (which I had done for all of 2020), so writing was placed on the back burner as I found an apartment in a new city and returned to college admissions counseling for another season to pad out my savings and more robustly fund my new independent life.

To be clear, both of these years were successes in terms of moving my life forward, but they did not necessarily adhere to the themes I had set out. In hindsight, the themes I chose were basically resolutions in disguise (Year of Relaxing >> I resolve to work less and get anxiety treatment; Year of Career >> I resolve to publish my first book), and therefore not able to inform and unify multiple areas of my life, which is not really in keeping with the spirit of Yearly Themes. This year, therefore, I have taken a new approach that I hope will be more resilient to unexpected historic events and personal upheavals.

My 2022 theme is: Year of Self Love.

The tl;dr on this is that I am a person who struggles with depression, and while I understand that most depression is not technically "about" anything, I do feel that a substantial bit of my depression takes the form of uncertainty and pain related to my identity. That is, I have felt very confused about who I am and what I'm trying to achieve ever since I quit my full-time job in Shanghai and started working for myself. Since at least 2016 I have known what my long-term plan is:

1) Get financial and schedule independence

2) Write a book

3) Publish the book

4) Change careers to being a full-time author

While I have finished (1) and made enormous headway on (2), I have often felt that—from the outside looking in—my life is at a standstill. I'm not getting promotions or raises, in fact my income has gone down from a few years ago. I haven't found a girlfriend, or gotten engaged, or gotten married, like seemingly half the people I know have in these few years. I don't have a house and don't foresee getting one anytime soon. Millennial bellyaching, etc., etc..

Of course, the reason for this perception is simply comparing myself with other people, which as everyone knows is the death of joy. My life is actually going great in many, many ways. So this brings me to the Year of Self Love theme. Basically, I would like to bring my identity—my self-image—into alignment with the facts, so that I can feel happier, be healthier, and believe in myself at this most critical of moments, the moment when the finish line of my "master plan" is actually in sight.

How will I achieve self love? Mainly by exercising, eating right, and doing copious journaling and self-reflection. I am training every day (I got off to a rocky start two months ago and am now more fully underway) to be happy that, in fact, I am already the person that just a few years ago I dreamed of becoming. Even though I haven't yet achieved all of my wildest dreams, the plain fact is that I've never been this close to doing so. So I aim to practice being happier, feeling more grateful, and acting more in line with that fact.

The beauty of this, as stated above, is that it doesn't depend on achieving any particular goals. It will be awesome if I can finish and sell my book this year—and that is a goal I have. But if I don't, I am not going to let myself be depressed about it. That kind of depression is just self-pity, or learned helplessness, or whatever impotent psychological state you want to call it. My theme for this year, then, is to not inhabit impotent psychological states. Life is too short, and too beautiful, not to love yourself.