Fulfillment
Familiarity with the discomfort of my own thoughts
I always find January 1 something of a strange and arbitrary time marker to delineate as a threshold.
It feels to me as though there are more intuitive ones: the closest new moon after the winter solstice, during the spring equinox, or even the lunisolar new year. I’ve spent the past few years trying to be more mindful of the passage of time in embodied ways; as someone with ADHD, my relationship to time is tenuous at best, so I try to keep connected to cycles and seasons—ways to measure that have nothing to do with numbers.
I am bad with numbers. I have always been bad with numbers.
Yet here I am once again at the end of December 20241 and the beginning of January 2025, looking both behind and ahead like the Roman god of transitions for whom the first month of the Gregorian calendar was named. I don’t like routines, but I do like rituals, and as this new yearly newsletter has become something of a ritual for the past four years, I might as well keep it.
looking back 🪞
My word of 2024 was presence. As far as words of the year go, it’s something of a nothingburger. What on earth did I mean by that? I think I meant being present wholly and completely as myself, which is an admirable intention, but I had no idea of its execution. It’s hard to judge something that was so vague, but I’m inclined to think this was something of a wash. I have been present as myself in some areas of my life—taekwondo, health, Castor & Pollux—but completely absent in others, namely as an Author.™ I do feel somewhat ambivalent about my gradual disappearance as an Author,™ but that is neither here nor there.
My other intention was to seek and cultivate pleasure and delight in all things. I feel as though I have better grasp on what I meant by that, and I have to say that that, too, was something of a wash. I felt as though I started 2024 and ended 2024 fairly strong, but the middle was terrible. No, not terrible. A disappointment. And I think I know the reason why.
It’s because I did a terrible job with some of my intentions and affirmations from 2023, which were to allow myself to get bored and get rid of all social media (except in controlled increments).
Lol.
As we approach the end of the Year of Our Lord 2024, I realize that social media is something like a chronic illness for me, an ailment to be managed rather than cured. And I did very little management of my consumption. Did I participate much in social media in 2024? No. But did I sit there and passively consume it? Absolutely. And I have to be honest with myself that while passive consumption may not be as destructive to my mental health as active participation, it still has a numbing affect on my brain. It’s hard to seek and cultivate pleasure when I’m constantly flooding myself with microdoses of dopamine.
Brain rot. It was the Oxford word of the year for a reason, I suppose.
I could even feel my brain rotting as I mindlessly scrolled through my phone. I would get bored of social media, even as my first impulse was to open an app—any app—in order to stave off the tedium of existence. Wasting time felt better than putting effort into anything else. I was chronically online and lying to myself about my addiction. Sure I might not have posted much, but my god was I frying my eyeballs first thing in the morning and last thing at night. It didn’t even feel good at that point.
But now I have clarity on my relationship to social media. It’s not a flattering look, but it is refreshing to see things for what they are. And because of that, I think I know my way forward.
looking ahead 🪟
As I was journaling on my flight from NYC to LA to see my parents, I thought about what I wanted to focus on for 2025. And the word I kept returning to was fulfillment. I felt as though I wasted vast swathes of time to brain rot everyday and I wanted to reclaim that for myself, but I also wanted to stay away from the word productive. In this hyper-capitalistic society, productive is loaded with connotations that I find toxic. No, I don’t want to be productive; I want to be fulfilled.
At the end of the day, I want to look back on what I’ve done (or not done) and feel fulfilled. Not entertained, not productive, not satisfied. Fulfilled. And the first step toward fulfillment is allowing myself to become familiar with the discomfort of my own thoughts.
I spend a lot of time running from boredom. Social media gives me an easy, low-effort way to keep it at bay. But now that I look back, I don’t think it was boredom I was fleeing; it was my own thoughts.
I don’t like thinking about thinking, and I have so many thoughts that sometimes I have to think about them. In the old days of the social internet, I used to be able to share them with friends (ah, there’s that connection I’m forever seeking online), but in today’s social media landscape, there’s no place for my thoughts to go.
Except on paper.
For Christmas, my little brother gifted me The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen, which has me considering my relationship to my thoughts. My journaling for 2024 has been sporadic at best, especially compared to other years where I was a regular correspondent with myself. And I definitely feel the effects, or rather, I feel keenly the lack of benefits from a regular journaling practice. Instead of siphoning off my thoughts onto the page for me to look at later, I merely pushed them down. I felt rather creatively constipated in 2024, and I think I can connect that feeling to my lack of ritual writing.
And not all writing must be made in service of my career. Sometimes I think I am a miser with my words, that I subconsciously believe I have a finite amount I will ever use in my entire lifetime and must parcel them out for each project judiciously. Of course this is not true. And I would know this to be untrue if I were in better touch with my own thoughts.
intentions and affirmations for 2025 🔮
I will reconnect with my thoughts through tactile, tangible means—pen and paper, pencil to sketchbook, eyeball to camera viewfinder.
I will be more cognizant of the brain rot to which I am subjecting myself.
I will look for joy in creativity instead of focusing on the tedium of labor.
I will acknowledge that perfection is not the same thing as progress.
I will strive for fulfillment everyday.
I have smaller, more concrete actions I can take to help me follow through with my intentions.
And it starts with putting down my phone.
As of this writing.