Three Lessons Learned in 2022
The most important thing to learn in our adult lives is the power of introspection.
That’s why I love taking some time at the end of the year to think about what I’ve learned. It’s a ritual where I suspend the nowness of the present and look within to understand myself, and myself-in-the-world better.
That ritual has taken many forms over the years: Wintry island cabin getaways, one large coffee with two refills sessions in coffee shops, and even a late night blue screen crime of opening my notes app to jot down one more insight that had decided to come home late.
In the latest iteration of this exercise, I’ve come up with three lessons to share. I hope they resonate, surprise, or at least make you consider what your lessons were.
#1 Reframe Quitting
Quitting gets a bad reputation.
“You are a quitter.”
How did that last sentence make you feel? Uneasy, I bet.
There is obvious value to it persistence and following through. But it’s created the unintended consequence of thinking of quitting as a weakness instead of a choice.
In her book Quit, Annie Duke writes:
“The problem is, perhaps because of our aversion to quitting, we tend to rationalize away the clues contained in the present that would allow us to see how bad things really are.”
Our aversion to quitting is so strong, that the urge to quit is ignored as information to helps us navigate life. Eventually, we miss a lot of these signs, and end up down a path that we regret.
Recently, I decided to go on a sabbatical. Most of my friends have concluded that this decision was a year in the making and should probably have happened 6 months ago. But I saw taking an extended leave from work as quitting on my career, quitting on financial stability, quitting on all my hard work to get me to where I am.
I’ve come to realize that quitting is a choice. And that instead of dismissing quitting outright because of that uneasy sensation we’ve been wired to feel whenever that word comes up, we should instead listen to why we are thinking about it in the first place.
We need to honor what the idea of quitting is telling us, and realize that in many cases, quitting is the best decision we can make.
#2 Question Binaries & Study Your Tensions
How many times in your life do you struggle with something that feels like an either/or? Do you quit your job and become an artist or stay in your job and double down on your career?
Our brain has a nasty habit framing things as binaries. It’s great at building mental canyons. You can only be on one end or the other. There is no standing ground in the middle.
Yet, if you ask yourself “is there an alternative way to look at this?” or “are there only two choices here?” I can guarantee you at least half the time, there are more than two choices. Whatever you are thinking about is not a canyon but a valley.
Nothing else that I’ve done this year has helped me manage my overthinking nature than questioning my binaries and accepting that life is better lived trading the “either/or” for “both/and.” Life is full of dualities we have to accept, and the only way to accept this duality is by questioning binaries.
Questioning binaries will inevitably lead you to study your tensions. Your tensions are those internal arguments where your chest feels a bit tighter and you forget to breathe. Your brain becomes a hamster ball stuck on a treadmill; the thought revolves but it doesn’t advance.
I used to be an all-star ruminator (now I’m a pro and hope to go amateur soon). The biggest contributor to this intentional downgrade was observing tension with curiosity. Sensing how my body was feeling and asking myself: “What is this trying to tell me?” “Why is this making me so tense?"
Tensions are information. They are information about your true desires, priorities, and boundaries (or lack thereof). These are treasures. Cherish them.
#3 Ask for Help
I’ve wrote about how difficult it is for me to ask for help a few months back. It’s still a work in progress.
The first step is to derive your sense of worth from being instead of doing. From there, you will embrace the idea of taking space in the world. Taking space in this world means asking for help. We are creatures of collaboration. Most of us love helping others. Yet, if you are anything like me, you loved giving more than receiving. Not knowing how to ask for help limits our full experience in this world. It’s missed potential, missed joy.
I believe that our discomfort seeking help comes from our traumas; they force us to wear the uniform of self-reliance. We learn to wear it well, and manage to navigate the world successfully, to the point where we forget how to wade through our world without it; we’d feel naked otherwise.
So my process this year has been to unlearn where I derive my sense of worth, learn that I am worthy of space and asking for things, and unlearning any sense of shame or weakness I generally associate with asking for help.
It’s not an overnight process—it will take years. I’m confident that the more I learn how to ask for help and actually do it, the more joy I’ll find in my life. In turn, I will be able to extend more kindness to others.
May you take the time to reflect about what you’ve learned this year, and I hope my lessons were helpful. Happy Holidays!
Honorable mention to consistency being another lesson this year. I wrote about it in 2021, and that still largely captures how I feel about it, so just go read that instead.
