Somewhat a bit late of an entry but I completely forgot about writing this, to be honest. If you were to say it’s because I forgot I had a blog and I have not really updated it in the last four months, with lots of silence in between, you’d be right. There’s also because I fell into deep hobby holes, life changes and just overall… I forgot.
But I’m here now, and for those who will probably read this entry, well, here’s what I’ve been up to in the last 12 months since I spoke about the year’s end.
Moved!
For the first time in my life, I am not living long-term with any sort of parental unit. This means I am not living with either my parents, parents in law, or even grandparents. In Q1 2021, my husband and I moved to our very own place, so for the first time in my life, I am not living with any blood family members. It has been amazing, despite the journey to get here.
We actually started the process of buying this place late 2019, but only completed the purchase late 2020. The pandemic slowed down a lot of the paperwork, but in retrospect, it was a good thing as well – it allowed us to build enough of a nest egg that when the time came to furnish the house, we were not as financially pressed as we might have been before.
We’ve had a lot of adjustments to make, both as a couple and as homeowners, but I think so far we’ve done well. Honestly, I have never really appreciated how wonderful good bedsheets are, and I’ve never really enjoyed the freedom of being able to adjust and arrange things according to my liking and needs as much as I have now.
The biggest danger for me, I think, is the temptation to fall back into old habits. I am a hoarder (though I am trying to break that) and when I was clearing things out in preparation for the move, I realised hoarding created a physical, mental and emotional wall for me. It was the marker of a safe space in a physical location that I did not feel was truly mine.
The space designated as “mine” now is still part of a shared location, but at least here, it’s set up the way I want to, in a way that I find helps me do the things I want to do, when I want to do them, especially my hobbies, work, or just to zone out. I also don’t have to worry about my mother going through my things and throwing them out because they’re useless to her – why yes the scars I felt as a teenager carry through to adulthood, why do you ask?
Hobbies
I went in really hard on a lot of my hobbies. Or rather, I went in hard on two hobbies.
I fell deep(er) into the mechanical keyboard hole, purchasing two keyboards in the space of three months, buying keycaps that I found out six months later physically hurt my hands to type with, and then also buying switches to swap out on one of the earlier mentioned two keyboards I bought.
Has it been expensive? Yes. Was it worth it? Completely.
I now enjoy the sound my keyboard makes and how it feels under my fingers. It also made me confront my own biases and stick in the mud tendencies – I’ve come to admit grudgingly that I am no longer a clicky person and more a tactile person.
If you didn’t understand any of that, don’t worry. It’s just me trying to be pretentious and saying that this hobby forced me to confront myself and made me admit out loud that my adherence to identity markers that no longer serve me was actually constricting me, rather than allowing me to grow.
Which leads me to my next hobby. I went in hard on journaling as well. After one year of working from home and having access to my full arsenal of pens and notebooks, I started finding a system that works for me. Or rather, adjusting a system that works for me.
Journaling is supposed to be about taking note of the day-to-day, though in our current madness for productivity and capitalism worship it has become less about recording the day and more of keeping track of tasks and things to do for the business of living; aka journaling and planning are now synonymous with each other when you ask around, and to be honest, it is not hard to see how it came about (hello bullet journaling).
I started journaling because I didn’t want to lose track of my days, and then I started planning because I was getting really bad at keeping track of things I needed to do at work, and somehow in the last 18 months I have finally developed a system that works for me right now. It is a mix of having multiple journals, for very specific purposes and with very specific triggers – building these triggers and allowing myself to take the time to plan and journal has been the hardest part of the journey.
This was also an excuse to buy lots of things and to say that my pen collection is large is… not an understatement (I should do a photoshoot of them someday, but today is not that day).
Because I have been tracking things through paper and analog means, I’ve not been blogging so much. And in between finally getting over the “writing for self” slump and finding a system that works for me, blogging has fallen by the wayside. I am delighted though, to have found the small courage to actually post things online again.
Building habits
Habit building remains one of my favourite non-work and personal things to explore, if only because the way I build my habits and realising how my thinking, environment and personal identity/personality influence how I approach this makes it a treat for me.
One of the things I’ve been trying to come to terms with is that habits take time to build, and that the results I seek are not something that can be achieved within a few hours, days or even weeks. That it takes time for even the small longer term results to show. The other thing is that habits are not a one-time formula that needs to be followed through exactly every time. There’s no such thing as “the perfect state.” What works for me right now, may not work in the future, or will require significant tweaks when things change.
That said, I would like to think that I have created, maintained, and updated several different habit systems over the last 12 months that serve me well now. A large majority of these only came into play when I moved into my apartment, and unlearning bad habits has been a major theme.
One habit I’ve tried to cultivate, which I updated a few weeks ago, is the habit of keeping my Sunday mornings to myself. No matter what time I wake up at home on Sunday morning, that first two hours belong to me. Specifically, it belongs to me sitting down to journal and reflect. I say update because it used to be the time when I reflected on what happened in my job and the kind of career direction it was taking.
I had to update this habit a few weeks ago because we were on break and there was really nothing much happening on the dayjob front, so I switched it instead to attempting to do Year Compass. Though they recommend doing it in one go and it would take a few hours at most, I found that splitting it up into 2 hour chunks and completing it over two weeks worked best for me.
The simple reason was that there was a lot happening in the last one year, and if I didn’t start my journaling hobby I think I would have missed a lot of it. It also gave me the opportunity to sit back and reflect and think about my journey, something I don’t allow myself to do very often. I’d like to think that I had a pretty ok year, all things considered, in 2021.
Now, I need to figure out the system of habits that would encourage me to exercise more frequently.
What about 2022?
I’ve procrastinated on this entry enough that it’s not just very pictureless, it’s also very long, but I hope you enjoyed reading so far. Right now, I’m not sure what 2022 holds for me, but I hope wherever you are, you are safe, warm and feeling secure.