not disappointing myself

how i will be making decisions in the new year

happy new year! i will be writing at a much more regular cadence this year. in the mean time you can watch out for my youtube where i promise to get personal!

wide awake fueled by the jet lag, i thought about what i wanted this year to be like. my forth year in new york city. i have many things i want to achieve, places to visit, but the main thing i want from this year is simply to not disappoint myself. 

i am an empath by nature. my empathetic nature makes it easy for me to get close to people, for me to understand someone else’s pain. nothing brings me more joy than when i am able to anticipate other people’s needs and make other people happy. what i sometimes forget is that desire to understand others can come at the cost of my own well being and energy.

to put it simply, sometimes i forget saying yes to other people means saying no to myself. the time i spend half-assing my way through dinner is time i could otherwise spend deep in my craft, developing my own joy.

but the idea of not disappointing myself can also very much be an internal conflict. to not disappoint myself is to not disappoint my future self. it is to not have my future self wish i had done things differently. it is as simple as thinking how my future self would feel about the decisions i am making today.

posting videos on youtube is something that feels incredibly uncomfortable to me. the idea of putting hours worth of work only to have tens of views is wildly unpleasant. i know i have always wanted to make content. but that desire is eclipsed by the fear of feeling uncomfortable. though in the moment, i know my future self would wish i had started sooner.

one of the things i learned last year is as humans we don’t always make the most logical decisions, or even decisions that serve our future goals and ourselves. we tend to resort to doing things that make us feel comfortable and safe in the moment. but often times, our goals and selves require us catapulting into discomfort.

that is my goal this year, to catapult myself into discomfort with all of my life.