2024: A Year That (Mostly) Happened To Me
Another chaotic year in the books. I changed jobs, with an unexpected three-month interlude. I dealt with a lot of unexpected twists and turns, especially with family health problems, which are still ongoing. I accomplished quite a bit this year, including some longstanding goals, and (though I'm not good at being proud of myself) I'm proud of that.
As I set out to do last year, and mostly failed at doing for the first part of this year, I finally took some time to step back and try to figure out what I wanted to do rather than felt I should. I didn't set specific goals for myself or do goal tracking this year, out of that same desire to stop doing things solely because I felt I should. Since August or so I've kept my commitments relatively small-scale and finished up work on my last long-term side project, and since I had most of the summer without a job on top of my other commitments, I think I ended up with about four months where I wasn't constantly overextending myself (family stuff aside).
I wish I could say this has given me some sort of grand insight, but it's mostly left me itchy. I am not terribly good at having nothing to do: my mind tends to go to dark, self-critical places when I'm not "producing". Learning to be more comfortable with this was the intent of this period, and while I don't think I've exactly succeeded, I'm working on it. I've been cooking more, reading more, and generally trying to take better care of myself and my loved ones - habits I'd like to maintain in the new year.
After 2 years of doing 2 "100 days" projects a year, I did a low-key one early in 2024 (100 days of "healthy habits", where I just tried to write, go for a walk, cook, or exercise). Over the summer I attempted to do 100 days of writing but, for the first time, quit on a hundred days project.
That, in itself, is something of a success. I've been trying to be less of an all-or-nothing person, trying to overcommit less, and about 20 days into my writing project I realized I just didn't want to do it. So I quit. Quitting things when I need to, and not subsequently spending months guilt-tripping myself over the act of quitting, is something I've needed to be able to do for a long time. Sometimes the bravest thing you can do is walk away.
But, of course, I want to throw myself back into something. I think I've met the goals I set for myself last year: being healthier, taking some time, all that good stuff. And, though I'm a bit more skeptical of the power of positive thinking than she was, Octavia Butler's belief in speaking things into existence is one I share. So, I'll set some specific goals for myself here. I'm getting married this year, and I am learning not to be quite so obsessive about things, so I've just got two:
1) Do at least one public-facing creative hundred days project.
2) Rebuild this website (ideally finally switching over to an SSG) and finally find a way to combine my public, private, and intermediate personal digital presence. I'm aiming, in the long run, for something like Simon Willison's weblog, where links, short notes, and full blog posts can live together rather than being spread across Ghost, TiddlyWiki, are.na, and various other apps and services as they are now.
- As a sub-part of this goal, I'd like to write more this year than I did last - not setting a number for myself, but at least an update a month would be nice.
To belatedly explain the title of this post: for most of the past few years I have felt like life was something happening to me, rather than something I had any particular amount of control over. Most of this year has been no exception. But over the past few months I have taken some steps to assert control, even if a lot of the time that looks like doing less. I'm more aware of my own agency now, uncomfortable though it may make me. I'm not sure what this will mean. Initially this was the part where I was going to talk about how these lessons would make me produce something new, or ensure I stick to my goals, but again, I think a lot of what I'm trying to fix is the ways I drive myself into the ground because of the general sense that I should be doing so. So, maybe I'll end up not doing these things, or maybe I will. Mostly, I just hope I can keep up the trend of taking better care of myself and the people around me, try to be kinder, and see what follows from there.
So, looking forward to 2025, here's my year in bullet points:
STATS
- Books read: 28
- Games played: 23
- TV shows watched: 9
- Movies watched: 34
THINGS OF NOTE THAT I DID THIS YEAR
- Quit a job as Programs and Technology Manager at Eyebeam.
- Started a job as a web developer at CUNY Hunter.
- Gave my first talk at WordHack, a goal I've had for a long time.
- Released the alpha of my first non-solo game project - learned and re-learned just how much damn work goes into a video game, even a short one.
- Got really into pickleball - appropriate for my 30s, I guess.
- Became a maintainer at Hex House.
BEST NOUNS I VERBED IN 2024
- Book, read: Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
- Movie, watched (in theaters): Kinds of Kindness, Yorgos Lanthimos
- Game, played: Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, From Software
- Place, visited: Asheville, NC (I'd been before, but this time I went fly fishing, and went from having successfully caught 0 fish while fly fishing to having caught, if memory serves, 21 over the course of three days)