Self improvement is risky business. Without it, we can remain stagnant and locked in boxes of our own making. But I have had years (decades?) of my life where I was almost obsessively trying to better myself, which also held the implication that there was something inherently defective about me, something that needed to be fixed.
Once upon a time, I made New Year’s resolutions of the usual type – eat better, stick to a cleaning schedule, write a certain number of pages per month, lose the baby weight. I love a goal to strive for. But the end of 2014 found me totally unrecognizable to myself, and I didn’t know how to even begin reaching for something else. I was the saddest I’d ever been, and the only things I could rely on were daily tears and that persistent gnawing in my stomach that never let me eat. The year ahead of me felt daunting, and as much as I wanted to resolve to be better, I didn’t know how to even begin. I’d heard others talk about holding a word of the year instead of a resolution, and I decided to give it a try. Knowing I couldn’t go on the way I was and needed to find the light somehow, I chose happy as my 2015 word. My only commitment to myself, aside from surviving, was to find again what made me happy and do it. Generally speaking, I don’t even like the word “happy.” But that year I was wrapped in a bone-deep sadness, and I just wanted to lean into what lit me up again.
I did that in big ways– a weekend in a mountain cabin with my closest friends, going to concerts, and seeking out experiences that brought me joy. But I think what made the biggest difference that year was the small daily action of what I called my “happiness jar.” I had a huge glass jar at the entryway table in my house, and every night just before I walked up the stairs for bed, I’d ask myself what the happiest moment of my day was and scribble it on scraps of paper to throw in the jar. I kept this small promise to myself and did it nearly every day.
I remember I was alone that year on New Year’s Eve and the kids were away. It was a scene that could be sad by anyone’s standards. But I sat on my couch in my empty house with my dog sleeping beside me, and I poured all my little scraps of paper out on my lap. There they all were, shimmering like diamonds, all of these moments I felt something like happiness. I read each one all over again that night, and eight years later, I still have some of them recorded for safekeeping. Feb 21 Sunny and near 70 after weeks of freezing temperatures, outside on the patio chair, sun on my face, eyes closed, I hear kids laughing and playing. — June 14 Driving the curvy hills on Pisgah Road, gray clouds rolling in for a summer storm. — Aug 23 Clean house, rain against the window, midnight, in bed alone with a new book. — Nov 15 Kids back after a weekend away, soup in the slow cooker, all of us home. This small 90-second practice everyday gradually turned my light back on, and I continued the jar for another year or two. It made me view my days differently, looking for those glimmers and moments. And it allowed me to know myself better and know what makes me happy, which as it turned out, was just paying attention to small things.
It changed me. Not in a self-improvement kind of way, but in a self-discovery kind of way. Since then, I have abandoned traditional resolutions and choose a word instead. I start noticing in the last quarter of the year what I’m craving, what I need more of, and then I let words settle in my head and in my journal until one feels true. It’s interesting to look back at my words and consider how they’ve shaped my experiences. Happy, Write, Intention, Trust, Persist, Flow, Move, Openhearted, Liberation. When I look at them as a trajectory like that, I can see my growth in a way that is very different from a measured resolution– more expansive and more open-ended. As the years have gone by and my muscle for growth has become stronger, I try to lean into words that scare me. I’ll never forget that I almost chose surrender for 2020, but that terrified me, so I chose flow instead. As it turned out, surrender was the foundation of my life that year whether I had the courage to choose the word or not. Sometimes it feels like my words and my experiences co-conspire to find me rather than my finding them.
I begin the year with ideas about how my word will teach me something, but instead it always surprises me. There’s so much I could write here about particular experiences I’ve had and how they illuminated my words each year, but this post is long enough as it is. I could tell you about 2018 when I chose the word trust in hopes of trusting others, but the lesson I learned in the end was that above all I needed to trust myself. I could tell you about 2021 when I chose the word move and learned that seasons of stillness are necessary to facilitate change and movement. I could tell you about 2022 when I chose openhearted and I learned that trust is actually the foundation of opening my heart, whether that’s my trust in one person or my belief that the hand of life will take me where I need to be, and if I want an open heart I can’t remain so walled-up and vigilant on the lookout for disaster. My word always teaches me something, yet it never unfolds the way I think it will.
I’ve mentioned here before that I chose liberation for 2023 when I felt like a slave to my schedule and the demands of teacher-mom life. Again, by surprise, I didn’t liberate myself from my schedule at all, but instead I liberated myself from something much bigger – stories I’d believed about scarcity and timelines and a fear of listening to my own voice and using it. I completed Julia Cameron’s Artist's Way during the summer to clear some writing resistance, and looking back, I can see that process was the key that liberated me even though it wasn’t my intention for it. It woke me up, and most importantly, it allowed me to see when I was making choices only because they were safe and small and gave me the courage to follow my own longings and my own voice and worry less about how things will turn out in the end.
I feel like when I write all of this down, it sounds like the growth facilitated by my words was beautiful and linear and easy. It was anything but. The last decade of my life feels more like unlearning than learning, and my words seem to guide me back to the truest parts of myself rather than a reach for some outside metric. That is sometimes a painful and ugly process. But I let the word guide me where I haven’t been before, and I hold it like a north star all year. I hang it on my closet mirror so I see it each morning when I get dressed. I change my phone wallpaper to an image that reminds me of my word. I write it on a bookmark in my journal so that every time I open it, I’m reminded. I keep it in mind when I’m making choices big or small. I’ve lost count of how many times in 2023 I asked myself What would a liberated person do? And then I did it, even if it scared me.
In the fall of 2023, I started paying attention to what I craved, what was paving the way for my new word. I considered maybe resonance or presence because I wanted to start paying attention to what feels right and true for me beneath the noise of life. I was busier than I’ve ever been– teaching, taxi driving kids around town, trying to keep a household afloat, maintaining the relationships that are important to me, and finally writing again. My weekly hour in the yoga studio felt like the only time I was fully grounded and present. It was a whirlwind of a semester, and then I ended up with a case of shingles the first week of October in the midst of midterm madness.
I felt a stabbing pain in my right thigh off and on for a couple of days and thought it was a little weird but didn’t dwell on it. Then by Friday it felt like a terrible sunburn that was sore all the time and not just when I touched it, a constant twinge of pain. When a tiny rash began to form, I realized I likely had shingles, but I figured I’d wait it out. This was a Sunday morning, and aside from my mom and one close friend, I didn’t even mention it to anyone because it felt dumb to complain about it and honestly a little weird and embarrassing that a 42-year-old ends up with shingles anyway. I thought of it as an “old person problem” or a problem for someone under intense emotional stress. I went to work anyway. By Tuesday, the pain was waking me at night stretching from the top of my thigh to below my knee, and I see now in hindsight how sick I was, but when my day began and my brain turned on, I just plowed through it. It’s amazing what our brains can do and the ways it can override the body.
I ended up at urgent care the next night after work, and the physician asked me if I’d had any major life stressors lately– a death in the family, a move, something big. I told him I hadn’t because there was nothing happening beyond my norm. One would think it was a chance to pause and ask myself what I considered “normal” levels of stress or if there was some emotional component happening in my heart that needed my attention, but instead of pausing or reflecting, I just worked the rest of the week with the help of steroids and lidocaine cream and loose maxi dresses that didn’t touch my leg. I wasn’t out to prove anything about my own toughness, but I felt like between my kids’ schedules and my workload in the classroom, I couldn’t easily slow down and needed to power through it. And I think in a way I was scared to slow down because I knew it would bring truths about the ways my current capacity was unaligned with my commitments. I just put my teacher role on like a mask every morning and got on with the business of my everyday life.
Soon after that experience, I read an article by a therapist about how to ease stress and anxiety, and she said to stay grounded in seasons of overwhelm, ask yourself every day, “What does my body want right now?” That’s a really simple concept that shouldn’t have shaken me as it did, but it stopped me in my tracks. It’s a question I never think to ask myself because what if I don’t have time for what the answer is? What if answering that question changes decisions I make and what I can give to other people?
I craved resonance or presence or that hum that tells me what’s true beneath the noise, but it’s my body that always knows what’s true. I know this because I can look back on my own experiences to see so many times when my body told me something I wasn’t ready to know yet. I’m such an overthinker sometimes, but the answers never lie in my brain. What would happen if I treated my body like the oracle it is? If I actually lived in this body like I belonged to it instead of simply dragging it around with me to do the things asked of me?
The word embodiment scares me a little bit because it feels so much like recognition of that animal self that lives in each of us. But I crave embodiment in the same way that I craved happiness nine years ago. Because it feels foreign to me in this season of my life. Because the older I get, the less I can take my body for granted. And honestly because I know my current method of ignoring its messages isn’t sustainable anyway. I’m always listening for that deeper yes inside to lead me onward, and I’m realizing the yes is communicated through the body, never through the mind.
Small shifts bring big changes. That glass jar nine years ago and the scraps of paper inside of it changed something inside of me like a shift along fault lines, tectonic plates rumbling underneath to take a new shape. Looking back, I can see how it birthed a whole new self for me. This year, embodiment is my north star to guide me home, and all I promise to myself is to take a minute everyday to ask 3 questions: What does my body want right now? What is she telling me? What would an embodied person do?
I trust that with this tiny opening, those fault lines can shift again. In hindsight, I see how my yearly words never grow me outward in that linear way of reaching up for what is just beyond my grasp. Instead they spiral down and inward to some place I haven’t been before.
In the final days of the year, I’ve been looking back at what I’ve written in 2023. So much of it lies in almost-but-not-quite-finished drafts on my computer. But ironically the one publication I had in 2023 (written nearly two years prior) was about embodiment. At the time, I thought the essay was about desire and consent and the volumes of bad cultural advice I’ve received about that all of my life. But now I see that what I was really writing about was the embodiment I crave— that tangible self-possession and that alignment between my outer self and my innermost guide. When I read the conclusion of that essay now, I realize I’m saying the thing I’ve been scared to say here, the thing it just took me an hour of writing to arrive at again, as though for the first time.
There is some whisper deep inside my own body, but often when I am searching to find it, I cannot hear a thing. I have spent a lifetime learning how to ignore it. I have said yes when I meant no. I have said no when I desperately wanted to say yes. And sometimes I have said nothing at all when I tried to reach into the well of my body to feel what she wanted and the echo felt so far away that I could not get to the bottom of it. I have felt my body’s presence as a power and a burden, as an apology and a manifesto. I am still learning. I am unlearning. I’m feeling for a light switch, looking for rooms no one has entered before, not even myself, searching for affirmative, certainly, without a doubt, undoubtedly, unquestioningly.
Writing is magic sometimes. Like some all-knowing something hidden inside of me reaches beyond time to illuminate what I need to hear. It makes me realize that traditional self-improvement isn’t as successful as I think it is because it feels like past selves, current selves, and future selves are all here at once circling around the same thing. Much like the body, writing feels like that animal self, a vessel for instinct, a way of seeing that I know a thing viscerally without consciously knowing it. Truthfully, maybe we all have an oracle like that inside of us if we get quiet enough to feel the answers and to notice that they almost always lie in the body instead of the head. All I promise myself this year is that I will pause to feel it, that I’ll stop taking it for granted, and that I’ll listen when it speaks to me.