Putting a bow on 2023 with some wisdom from the famous Dear Sugar advice column
And sharing a bit about what I'm most excited for in 2024
Happy holidays! We’re officially in the home stretch before the new year. I hope that you’ve all had some time to unwind and relax a bit, whether that’s with family or friends or on your own.
This year, we’re back home with my family for the holidays and I’m reminded of the holiday breaks from when I was in college. It feels very similar in that I have (almost) two weeks of time to catch up with all my friends from different stages of life. Every day is filled with coffees and lunches and more coffees, whereas on trips home while working remotely, I’d have to make tradeoffs and cram all these catchups into breakfasts and dinners. It continues to feel like a huge privilege to have not only my evenings and weekends free, but also entire weekdays as well.
In the same way that it felt like life extended ahead of me in a vast expanse of unknowns when I was in college, I feel like life has once again become this glorious open-ended possibility. It’s been refreshing and inspiring to have conversations with friends who are doing all sorts of different things with their lives.
I recently finished reading Tiny Beautiful Things, which is a compilation of excerpts from the famous advice column written by Sugar. When I was younger and skimmed her column, I always dismissed it because it didn’t feel very applicable to me. Having come back to it at 28, I’ve realized that perhaps I was simply too young at the time. I lacked the life experience to appreciate not only her advice but also the trials and tribulations of the letter writers.
This time around, I bookmarked lots of wisdom. Here are some of the most relevant excerpts:
The answer to most problems is more often than not outside of the right/wrong binary that we tend to cling to when we’re angry or scared or in pain. We are complicated people. Our lives do not play out in absolutes.
Don’t surrender all your joy for an idea you used to have about yourself that isn’t true anymore.
The narratives we create in order to justify our actions and choices become in so many ways who we are. They are the things we say back to ourselves to explain our complicated lives.
You will learn a lot about yourself if you stretch in the direction of goodness, of bigness, of kindness, of forgiveness, of emotional bravery.
You are so goddamned young. Which means about eight of the ten things you have decided about yourself will over time prove to be false.
I’ve never been in a humiliating situation when I wasn’t shocked by all the “normal” people who were also in the very same humiliating position.
The healing power of even the most microscopic exchange with someone who knows in a flash precisely what you’re talking about because she experienced that thing too cannot be overestimated.
I had to do something hard so I could know my strength. I had to do something scary so I could find my courage. I had to do something alone so I could see who I was.
Your assumptions about the lives of others are in direct relation to your naïve pomposity.
As I put a bow on 2023, I realize that slowly, I’m getting the opportunity to live through a lot of this advice firsthand. It’s been a scary journey to realize that I am truly empowered to make the change I want in my life. At the end of the day, I’m actually the only person who can make that choice and I am the only person stopping myself.
This year, I’ve made choices that I knew would hurt me and people I care about and many of them were difficult in the near term and required a very conscientious effort to break out of muscle memory. I’ve learned to trust my own judgment more than ever before: if something feels wrong or there’s even an inkling of possibility that an alternative solution could be better, I probably need to investigate that sooner rather than later. I’ve seen firsthand that taking a dive into the deep end is scary but the more you do it, the more you learn to embrace that scary feeling – slowly, it starts to feel exhilarating rather than just horrifying.
I feel incredibly grateful to have the support of my family and friends as I’ve gone through this journey, whether it was as a sounding board, voice of reason, cheerleading squad, or provider of snuggles. It’s made me feel a lot less alone as I’ve made big decisions though I’ve also realized that all decisions come to clarity in the quiet moments alone or the things that are left unsaid in pivotal conversations, which ring loud and clear in my mind.
From that, I’ve learned to really trust myself and know that the right decision for me always comes from within. There’s nothing anyone can say to me as I stand at a fork in the road that would convince me to commit to a given option if I didn’t already believe it myself. So…while leaning on others in my life makes the day-to-day infinitely better (and I have no intention to stop doing this!), I have also learned the importance of leaning on no one but myself when making decisions. Write that down and remember it.
As I look ahead to 2024, I’m looking forward to:
Continuing to figure out what makes me happy and brings me fulfillment. And working on being comfortable with and accepting the answers I find. If it turns out that the answer is that it doesn’t take a big life or big career moves but instead just having small things in life, then working on embracing that!
Appreciating the small moments in life instead of always making it about the poster-worthy big stuff. In the months when I will be home and not working, paring back on what I do in order to see the magic of the negative space.
Having a more structured focus on hobbies. I’ve signed up for a daily drawing class in January and am considering language lessons in February. I’ll be traveling a bit after that but once I’m back, I’m pondering cooking or pastry lessons. I’m open to suggestions and recommendations if anyone has any!
Finally, getting clarity on what I want to do next. I have some inklings now that I’ve had some time to poke around and have many conversations with friends and acquaintances, but continuing to refine my own hypothesis and pressure test different directions I could go in.