Recently I published a piece on how having a good morning has very little to do with your morning routine and way more to do with setting yourself up for success. Morning routines and daily or weekly schedules are very similar. In order to ace them, you need to pay attention to your unique needs instead of trying to fit yourself into a one-size-fits-all approach.

As more of us continue to work solely from home, especially as COVID variants become more prevalent, there are a couple of shifts that you can start making today, if finding the right schedule for you has felt impossible.

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in my twenties is that we abandon ourselves often. It’s human condition to do things like say “yes” when you meant “no” or ignore our gut when it’s screaming inside of us. I say “human condition” in order to take some of the weight off your shoulders — you aren’t the only one.

In fact, as early as last week, I had abandoned myself out of fear of rejection. Instead of expressing my needs explicitly I wordsmithed them so that the other party never even knew I was making a direct request. I made it seem like a suggestion, but I still internalized their rejection as a personal reaction to my ask.

Last time I wrote a post like this, I was in Portland with a desk in the corner of our living room. Now, I’m in Connecticut, still in a corner, but this time I’m in our office.

My life and my work have upgraded. That’s the heart of this post and what I want to tell you about.

I struggled on what to title this blog post because “how to love yourself” or “self-love is possible” feels thin. Anyone would argue that simply “believing” you’re going to like yourself more tomorrow doesn’t actually move the needle on how much (or how little) you like yourself. Particularly if your starting point is in the negatives, which if we’re honest is most of us.

Our society cultivates humans who thrive on self-mutilation as a means to building power or a “backbone” or thick skin. We grow up believing the only way we’re going to be better humans is if we punish ourselves for the times we’re not. It’s addition by subtraction. As someone who’s lived with disordered eating most of her life, I can attest to the connection between “doing something bad or being bad” and “deprivation as a punishment” can be slippery and traumatizing.

I signed up for a writing habits class back in December. My top goal when I signed up was that I wanted to have a more consistent, sustainable relationship with my writing practice. I wanted to rebuild my habit from scratch mostly because by the end of 2020 I felt like I had very little of it to hold onto anyway. While I didn’t talk about this publicly, I spent a better half of last year working on a book proposal that didn’t end up selling.

From a marketing and business perspective, I completely understood the why and the how. On a personal level, I was gutted. The book was memoir personal essays and not selling it felt like the world reflecting back to me that I wasn’t a good writer, that my story had no value, and that I couldn’t write the kind of stories I wanted to spend my time on.

I have to be honest - the title is clickbait, mostly because I don’t actually think you can “fail” at journaling, but I do think that most of us think that we do. I have stopped and started journaling so many times over the last few years. Each time I started for a different reason and stopped for a different reason.

The most harmful perspective we can own when trying to journal is that there’s only one way or one reason to do it. Each of us are navigating so many different lived realities at any given moment, if journaling is a tool we’re using to navigate those times then it’s bound to be as unique as our circumstances are. It can feel like because there’s a label for it “journaling” that it should be as structured as “eating” in that you do it at a specific time and for a specific amount of time.

January was a rough month. Apparently I’m not alone because we’re all seemingly hitting the same COVID wall, at the same exact time. In an effort to try to bring myself some joy and comfort, I’ve been working to list out the better habits that have come from a whole year mostly at home. I wrote about my list making habit earlier this week.

At the top of that list is that I’ve been making more and more time to read. I spent so much of the beginning of my career hustling to be as productive as possible and traveling a ton that if I got through one book a month it would be a miracle. Now I’m getting through so many and they’re bringing me joy in different ways.

I am drowning in the dark gloomy days of Portland. At the top of my list of things that are currently hurting my mental health, creativity, and overall quality of life are gloomy days I cannot control. On the right side of a column is a long list dedicated to all that is helping me in this exact moment.

One of the ways we trip up when assessing our quality of life is to measure it up against the ruler of what used to make us happy or to only notice the things that used to make our days harder. While those details are amazing to have in our back pocket as context, the only way we’re going to address our right now is to notice our right now.

In an ode to 28, I’ve published two posts that I think pick up where I am right now in my life. The one below is the lighter one. If it feels like I wrote it while listening to Taylor Swift’s “Long Story Short”, well, it’s because I did. It gives you a snapshot of where and how I’m trying to build most of my days.

This essay on Medium is the same but different. It speaks more to all the work I need to put in to get to a place where I can even write things like the below.

I thrive off of people watching. It’s one of the top reasons I love to travel. It’s why working for myself has always worked for me.

The ability to jump from one coffee shop to another has never felt rootless, quite the opposite. For me, my lifestyle has grounded me in what’s important — my ability to notice the world. The last time I sat at a coffeeshop to work without any worry of COVID was in February when we spent most of it in London.

The last few days I’ve been extremely melancholic and just very aware that not only did I miss people watching and the freedom of working from anywhere, but I was suffering as a result of it.

Recently I realized that I tend to read books in pairs. The habit is helpful in making sure that I don’t get bored halfway through and abandon a book. It also helps lighten the mood if the book I am reading is heavier or more dense.

In the case of my latest pairing I was pretty intentional. Going in to starting The Gifts of Imperfection by Brene Brown, I knew that Brown’s writing style would be story-led but also have a layer of research in it that could feel dense to me if I was only reading that. Enter: The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho.

Last week I was sitting on the floor with papers and pictures spread out around me. In my mind I could see the playpen my mom used to park in front of the TV just a few feet away from where I was sitting.

As a toddler, I’d bounce along to Barney. Outside of the playpen, I used the floor as my training ground for crawling and learning to walk.

As a kid, I learned about real estate and the importance of Park Place while playing Monopoly with my cousin and aunt on that floor.

Building piles and pushing memories around on this floor to make room for more has always felt normal and like home. Even though last week didn’t look much different, it was. I was trying to find my birth certificate and social security card because coming home here was no longer going to be an easy, viable option. I couldn’t keep splitting myself between two homes because in a few weeks, my boyfriend, my puppy, and I would be hopping on a plane and moving across the country.

My head was wrapped around writing something else to share today. It’s a list I’ll share tomorrow about all the financial resources I’m turning to in order to better understand my finances and my own money story. With that post it’s like I wanted to skip to the good stuff without giving you context of how I got there in the first place. I wanted to jump to the part where I tell you about all the ways I’m solving the reality without telling you first about the reality. This is a personal blog though and it warrants personal stories.

My stomach is turning because vulnerability on the internet is still hard no matter how many times you jump into the deep end.

I grew up surrounded by scarcity mindset and consistently being encouraged to embrace risk aversion because in my family’s eyes there was no reward at the end of risk, there was just pain and loss of what we did have, which as an immigrant family was always barely just enough.

My boyfriend and I both run our own businesses as content creators. We’ve always been close thought partners as creatives and bouncing ideas off of each other has always been fun but during quarantine we took our brainstorming partnership to the next level. Before February 2020, we would typically come to each other with ideas that were already half-baked, but now we start with empty post-it notes, sharpies, and a blank wall.

Whether you’re at the beginning of your journey with brainstorming or a seasoned expert, I hope this breakdown helps spark some new ideas or ways to approach ideas.

I’m reading this book right now that’s taking me to church every time I open it. I’m being asked to look (and I mean really look) at my life and how I grew up. I’m being challenged to relive bad days and respond to them differently than I did when I was a kid. Instead of avoidance as a way of survival, it’s like this book is screaming to me — “you can survive actually feeling now, don’t avoid it.”

I keep wanting to scream back, “Are you sure?” A world where surviving and feeling go hand-in-hand is foreign to me. The idea of feeling the range of feelings that both hard and good days bring to my door is more than I’ve ever asked myself to do. I was so scared to pick up this book because I wasn’t even sure I could survive reading it.

I grew up never being asked if I was happy. I didn’t realize this was strange until I got older. I took it as fact that since my family didn’t do feelings, no one else did. They didn’t talk about the hard or the good, so I never thought to even have those conversations with myself let alone someone else.

In retrospect I understand that my family mostly just strived for survival and any extra time in the day was spent sleeping, eating, or going down different spirals that would become intergenerational trauma.

I say this with little judgement because from my family I’ve learned we’re all just trying our best, even when someone else’s best isn’t necessarily how you would do it or live it or heal it.