Year of doing the damn thing

on riding the new year energy

Contemplating the damn thing in Mendocino, CA — Dec 2023

Happy 2024! Welcome to the Year of Doing the Damn Thing.

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New year energy is electric. The air is filled with optimism, hope, and agency. This is the year.

We’re collectively granted a fresh start, welcoming new intentions and bidding farewell to things that no longer serve us. We power back up from the holiday season, reemerging well-rested and fueled by thoughts of possibility after stepping away from the day to day. We run into January with every intention to ride the momentum towards the person we strive to become.

Then as the days pass, we slowly slide back into old routines and old habits. We hit up against one too many roadblocks and are pulled back into reality. Our intentions seem far less sustainable several weeks into January than they did that first day. Back to our ordinary world we go.

What if we redefine what the start of the year means to us? Rather than view January 1st as a stop we must get on or miss the train altogether, what if we choose to ride this start of the year momentum through every season of 2024? This is a call to harness new year energy for our future selves, acknowledging that January 1st is no different than every first of the month and every Monday to come.

This notion is the central reason why I co-lead a cold plunge into the Bay every month — to celebrate the dawn of the past month, to reset intentions for the month ahead, and to seal our intentions with a run into the chilly bay water at sunrise.

For our group, there’s no need to wait for January 1st to summon new identities we’re calling in (although new year’s day is a particularly fun day to scream our intentions as we run into the ocean).

Did the damn thing yesterday (1/1/24) and will continue to every first of the month

the magic of our collective agreement

The beauty of the new year is that there’s a collective agreement that it’s time to do the damn thing. If we’re lucky, we’re surrounded by people who support us in our quests, hitting the gym with us, opting to grab lunch at the salad bar, ditching alcohol, or collaborating on projects we’ve long dreamed of.

There’s no shame. It’s not cringe. It’s simply in the spirit of the new year. Hard things are more palatable done in community after all.

The trouble is when the enthusiasm fades and our doubts get the best of us. We find ourselves questioning whether our intentions are realistic or sustainable. Is the fear of being cringe and the risk of failing worth the pursuit? Perhaps it’s safer to retreat, put our dreams on the back burner for now, and be realistic.

the damn thing

What has called to you, only to be silenced as unrealistic? What intuitive pings have you received and continuously ignored?

I’m not talking about the things you think you should do. I’m talking about the calls that feel embarrassing to even admit because they feel so unfeasible to manifest into reality. The calls that you don’t dare utter aloud for fear of breathing life into the idea.

One of my deepest calls has been to write with the intent to publish. As a child, I was a prolific writer who loved English Language Arts (ELA). I spent recesses scrawling short stories into my notebook, creating new worlds as my classmates played around me. Back then, it felt natural to answer the call to write. What else would I possibly do with my time, but the thing I felt most drawn to? I had nothing to prove, no ego to quell.

As I got older, the call to write persisted, but in an effort to prove myself and become a well-respected adult, I traded pen and paper for spreadsheets and powerpoints. I ditched writing altogether to self actualize in a career that I thought would bring me fulfillment. While I’m grateful to 20s me for pursuing work that enabled me to build a financial safety net, that single-minded pursuit is also what led me to bury my desires to create, silencing them until they would no longer be silenced.

it’s all vapor

There’s a song, Vapor (A Meditation), by The Liturgists that paints the fragility of our existence in reference to Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot. It goes:

So here we are: on this pale blue dot. Tiny specs of dust coming into existence for a moment. Hurling through space and time, only to flicker back out after a few moments. These moments, these are all we have in this life. We work, we laugh, we cry, we make love, we write books, we build empires, we wage wars. We often try to ignore the fact that these moments are temporary. That all our empires and the gross national product, our art and our literature, our $300 designer jeans, all of our knowledge and technology, creativity and legacy is erased. It's all going to flicker out at some point with everything else.

This sobering thought can be depressing or it can be absolutely freeing. We can either go the way of many around us and ignore this fact, medicating and numbing ourselves in avoidance of the truth of our humanity. Or maybe there's another way: we can embrace it. We can recognize our humble place in this universe. We can recognize the silliness of human arrogance and empire…We can learn to appreciate and fully experience the moments that we have as the gifts that they are.

Allow the gravity of this reality to touch you. We’re all going to flicker out. We’re all going to become vapor.

So, what are you afraid of? What are you waiting for?

Is there anything more important in life than giving yourself the permission to finally answer the call and do the damn thing?

answering the call

For most of my adult life, I’ve considered myself to be a relatively self-aware and reflective person. Self-aware in the sense I was acutely aware of my “deficits” and obsessed with self-improvement. Reflective in the sense I moved through life lost in thought. I believed introspection to be acts of meditation, reflection, and journaling. I spent much of my 20s thinking about change and dancing with bouts of existential dread.

What I didn’t realize then was that it wasn’t enough to think my way to my highest self. The real work happens in answering the call. There came a point when I had a baseline understanding of who I was and who I wanted to become — I needed to bridge my reality and my vision by embarking on a series of micro experiments to test my assumptions.

I was deeply afraid of failure and what it would say about me if I pursued an unvalidated aspiration, just to fall short of it materializing into anything. I’d write pages on pages of brainstorm docs, opting to carefully plan out every move over making a move.

Rather than answering the call, I’d let the phone ring on and on, waiting for the perfect time. I wish now that I could have turned to younger me and told her: Answer the call. Trust that the phone is ringing for a reason.

In hindsight, my energy was so wrapped up in trying to generate all the momentum upfront that it didn’t occur to me that momentum can only happen when a thing is in motion. Thinking about answering the call wasn’t enough. I had to pick up the phone and trust that I’d find momentum on the other end of the line.

with minimal fanfare

When I finally decided to answer the call to write a year ago, More Myself emerged spontaneously into the world. As I page through my journal and scan through my emails, there is no evidence of overanalyzing the name of this publication or cadence I’d publish. I’m amazed now to see the minimal preparation that went into launching this newsletter. I was done waiting for perfect conditions. I was ready to pick up the damn phone.

After a number of false starts of writing publicly over the years, I became unattached to starting this newsletter to make myself legible to others. More Myself was born out of my desire to commit to actually becoming more myself and share my process along the way, starting with my favorite annual ritual, the Annual Recalibration. It seemed like a natural way to invite friends, old and new, to reflect on their year alongside me.

I had an inkling this was a call worth answering and picked up the phone to minimal fanfare. After that first essay, I continued to write, giving this newsletter space to blossom and trusting it would all make sense eventually. After a year, it’s evolved towards a vision I couldn’t have imagined or planned for last December. Had I resisted the call, I may still be thinking about what to call this newsletter today.

surrender to the cringe

Take a moment to consider why you’ve heeded the call. What’s stopped you from doing the damn thing? A fear of being cringe? A fear of not being good enough?

It's all going to flicker out at some point with everything else.

When you first start out, life will be exactly how it was before you started doing the thing except now there’s an added risk of appearing “cringe.” The most important thing during this early phase is to not turn on yourself.

The reality is that when I first started all my most meaningful pursuits, there was an element of cringe. Barely anyone read my essays. Few people showed up to my events. I couldn’t find anyone who seemed interested in human flourishing and psychological wellness. Sure, some of the stuff I put out was cringe, but the beauty of being early in the process was it gave me the freedom to scream into the void and see if anything echoed back. And every so often, a glimmer of resonance in the form of a new friend or a meaningful comment shone through.

To be in self-expression is to be cringe. To be cringe is to be free. Giving ourselves the permission to self express is to free ourselves from the fear of being cringe. The key was leaning into my flavor of cringe. By getting clear on who I was and who I wanted to become, I was able to see beyond the short-term insecurity and towards a new, longer term reality.

This year, I’m doing the damn thing by redefining modern day human flourishing, writing my first book, and spinning up several other projects. I hope you’ll join me in stepping into your self-expression, being cringe, and doing. the. damn. thing. I’m rooting for you.

Here’s to bottling up this new year energy and riding the wave to every first, every Monday, every day. Can’t wait to hear what damn things you’re tackling this year — let me know in the comments or say hi on Twitter :)

Thanks to Ryan for reviewing drafts of this essay and supporting me & my cringe as I do the damn things.