Self Improvement

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Being Social

I am feeling stricken with social anxiety, Internet. STRICKEN.

Here’s the thing: At the beginning of the school year, a group of parents from Carla’s school decided to get together semi-regularly. Varying numbers of these parents have met several times already and I have been unable to attend a single event. I have been sad, but also relieved because OMG dealing with people. But I have also been getting more and more anxious because I realize that the more this group meets, the more cohesive it becomes, and the harder it will be to join. I already feel like I am on the fringe of any group, and my inability to attend any of the events so far has already pushed me further to the edges of this group. Does that make sense?

Now, finally, the group is getting together on a night when my husband can watch Carla! So I took a deep breath and responded that I could go. And now: stricken. 

I am Not Good in groups. I mean, I am barely okay in one-on-one situations, but in groups I just flail. I have never mastered a non-awkward way to squeeze into an already-going conversation. I feel like my small talk game is poor. I am not adept at discussing current events. I am not an interesting storyteller. Not that I even have anything interesting to say. I become overly aware of how I talk and my tongue fumbles all over itself. If more than one person looks at me expectantly, my face will burst into flames. You know how it is. (Maybe you do not, in which case can we exchange personalities for a night please?) 

HOW do I do this? My 100% serious plan is to make a (mental) list of topics I can turn to in a pinch, but… what are those topics? I feel like I am pretty good at asking people about themselves, and since I don’t know a lot of these moms very well I can ask them who their kids are and what activities they’re doing and how their holidays were and whether they have anything exciting planned for our upcoming four-day weekend seriously we JUST had two weeks off and what their kids think of their teachers and what books they’ve read and whether they saw any good movies over the break… but I don’t necessarily know how to move from “bombarding a person with questions” to “real conversation.” I have a hard enough time carrying on a conversation with my hairdresser, and she’s just one person, and I am fairly comfortable with her. I have a hard time responding to the emails without feeling like I am dumb and everyone thinks I’m dumb. Going out to dinner with multiple people is like… more than that. Ugh ugh ugh. 

And if it’s a sit-down restaurant, where do I sit? And what do I wear? And and and…? 

There are a couple of parents I do know fairly well who are in the group, and I could probably try to hang near them. But I don’t want to be a GLOMMER-ONNER, you know? Plus, it would be nice to get to know new people. 

I don’t even know what I am asking you. I am just nervous. And determined to go anyway, because it is good to be social and it is good to meet new people and presumably most of us will know each other and each other’s kids for the next eight years at least and it is good to push outside one’s comfort zone now and again… but I’m also really nervous.   

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Some Gentle Aspirations for 2023

As has become my start-of-year habit, I am going to list out some gentle aspirations that Today Me believes are important to pursue in the new year. I recognize that Today Me and End of December 2023 Me may have different priorities, so I am not forcing anything on either of us. This may sound wishy-washy, and it is. I do like to strive to make improvements in my life, where possible. But sometimes, my best guesses at what will make my life seem better or easier or more fulfilling don’t result in improving anything, in which case they were fun experiments. Sometimes, they become real upgrades in my life, a source of happiness or pride or relief. I wonder which of the following will turn out to be which?

I broke these aspirations into categories, and there are quite a lot of them. That doesn’t daunt me; I’m guessing a few of them will naturally drop off as I complete them or forget about them completely. 

Personal / Self Improvement

  • Aspiration: Read 70 books. I read 86 books in 2022 and 74 in 2021, so I think this is doable. I don’t see my reading habits changing a whole lot, although there are of course the unplanned and agonizing reading slumps that happen every now and again. If I only read 50, I will be fine with that. 
  • Aspiration: Get a massage. My mother-in-law got me a massage gift certificate for my birthday in 2020 that I have not yet used for, I hope, obvious reasons. But I love a massage and it would be a fun treat to have one this year.
  • Aspiration: Give my line-a-day journal another go. I started tackling this aspiration early in the morning of January 1, and immediately made a mistake. I wrote a few little lines about the last day of 2022, but I did so – in pen – on the first day of 2023. Also, I wrote “Saturday” (IN PEN) above the date, and then had to cross it out and write Sunday above it. So I have already made a huge, indelible (totally unimportant in the grand scheme, I realize this) mistake and I am going to have to fight so hard against my impulse to never open the journal again. Maybe I should just buy a new one. My husband thinks I am ridiculous, and suggested I just skip a day and then start again as though I hadn’t made the mistake. So I am trying that. But I can feel the mistake, infecting the entire journal. (He also suggested copying the text into the correct day, then using whiteout on the mistake, and starting fresh, which – just so you understand completely my particular brand of irrational – does not erase the mistake. It just buries it there under white goop.) So we’ll see whether I buy a new one or continue with line-a-day journaling at all or somehow resist all my innate tendencies and forge on with the inalterably ruined journal.
  • Aspiration: Read more poetry. I burnt out early on poetry last year, but I still find it holds enormous value in my life. Maybe I just shouldn’t put so much pressure on reading it daily.
  • Aspiration: Master two Chopin songs on the piano. I have been working on relearning the Raindrop Prelude, which I could play flawlessly in high school, and my dad has been learning Waltz in A Minor and I love listening to him play it, so I want to learn that one too.
  • Aspiration: Buy some cute date-night-appropriate shirts. This means not falling into the trap of finding nothing appealing so instead buying yet another long-sleeved T-shirt/sweatshirt/sweater that is fine for hanging out at home but not great for Feeling Cute and Dressy and then feeling like I did buy the shirts I am looking for when really I didn’t.
  • Reach Aspiration: Try to keep a spreadsheet of these goals, for tracking purposes and also purposes of not forgetting them until December 31. 

Health 

  • Aspiration: Do a sweets revamp. This is a family goal. The three of us have developed some very bad habits and I really don’t like how they are affecting Carla. She chooses sweets first, always, and I think this is because we always have cookies and candy lying around. A sweets revamp does not mean No Sweets Ever. We can even set a weekly family goal to go get ice cream or buy a candy bar or whatever. On Valentine’s Day and Easter, I will probably lift the restriction for a day or two of unbridled sweets eating. It just means getting them out of our immediate orbit so that they are available when we could be eating other things. Yesterday I collected all of the sweet things I could find and threw them away or put them in a “to donate” bin. (I did leave three – why do we have three???? – unopened bags of chocolate chips in the pantry, but I could choose to donate them at any time.) So that’s Step 1. Now I just need to complete Step 2, which is to keep sweets out of the house for the rest of the year.
  • Aspiration: Do what is necessary to make my feet feel as good as they can. The combination that has had the best results in terms of limiting pain has been stretching my feet morning and night, religiously, combined with walking. Not-walking seems to result in more pain than walking. I haven’t figured out the ideal amount of walking yet, but getting at least 10,000 steps seems to help. 
  • Aspiration: Spend ten minutes outside every day. This seems outlandish considering I haven’t set foot outside in days, but it’s something I really want to prioritize.
  • Aspiration: Buy some winter boots I can walk in.
  • Aspiration: Eat more vegetables. I am doing this for myself, and by extension influencing my family to eat more vegetables (the benefit of being the family meal planner, grocery shopper, and chef).
  • Aspiration: Figure out a skincare routine that doesn’t make me want to claw my face off. My face is driving me out of my mind. It is simultaneously excruciatingly itchy, to the point that I need to take Benadryl regularly to curb it, and constantly broken out. Every day there is a new pimple or five on my face. At the risk of oversharing (I would never), I am currently on Day 5 of enduring a cystic zit that is so enormous and so painful I feel embarrassed when even my husband looks at me. I DO NOT LIKE THIS. I have an appointment with my dermatologist for early February (sob) and I don’t think I can get anything earlier, and honestly don’t have high hopes that he will help. But I need to figure out some way through this. I am kind of attached to my face.
  • Reach Aspiration: If I am reading/writing blog posts, I am walking on the treadmill. I have gotten pretty adept at this, over the break. I’m not sure if I can keep it up (right now, I am typing this while waiting for my tea to brew, and then I don’t want to drink tea while walking on the treadmill because that seems like a disaster waiting to happen), but if I can pair the two activities in my mind, just think how much more of both I will do! 

Connection

  • Aspiration: Get a pedicure with Carla. She’s at the age where I think this would feel like a fun treat. Although I’m guessing she’ll enjoy the foot-sanding portion of the pedicure as much as I do. (Carla, however wants to do a mani-pedi, mainly, I think, because she likes the term “mani-pedi.” She is working on not biting her nails this year, so I am hopeful that she will succeed and we will get a mani-pedi together. Or a pedicure and then a mani-pedi some other time!) 
  • Aspiration: Put my phone away when Carla and I are together. Why it is so hard to choose chatting with my lovely, fascinating daughter over knowing exactly what’s happening on Twitter/Instagram/Wordle right that second is beyond my powers of comprehension. But the days when she wants me to pay attention to her are surely numbered, and also I want her to remember me as an engaged mother not as someone addicted irrepressibly to her phone, so this is something I really, really want to work on. 
  • Aspiration: Find a way to see my grad school friend in-person. We have A Plan, we just need to implement it. 
  • Aspiration: Go on ten dates with my husband. During the early days of the pandemic, we got out of the habit. But now we have two great babysitter options and both feel more comfortable about being in restaurants, so there’s nothing stopping us from going out more often.
  • Aspiration: Get together with two friends a month. This one makes me nervous, because I have a tendency to feel lonely and isolated and then overschedule myself and then get overwhelmed and become a hermit for several weeks and then feel lonely and isolated etc. etc. etc. But maybe if I plan, in advance, to get together with two friends a month, it will feel more intentional? Also, a couple of friends like to go for walks together so that’s a good way to meet two goals at once. Efficiency in action. 
  • Reach Aspiration: Invite neighbors over for coffee/wine/snacks. We have the sweetest, kindest, most generous-with-their-time-and-dogs neighbors. I would love to get know them better, and I think I can (maybe) invite them over, one household at a time, for a few minutes of connection. Maybe. I hope. (I can already feel my socially anxious soul straining away from this idea. And also how do I convey that I would like them to come over without their dogs?)

Work/Finance

  • Aspiration: Finish my in-progress manuscripts (and don’t start another one!!!!). I can do this if I put my mind to it. I am good at writing lots of words. I can do this. 
  • Aspiration: Revise my completed manuscript. I am so very tired of my completed manuscript. But it needs some revision and A LOT of trimming, so I need to tackle it again. 
  • Aspiration: Query 100 agents. This sounds like a ton, but it is fewer than two agents a week. This is doable. 
  • Aspiration: Make good use of the writing accountability team a friend and I set up last fall. We met twice, and only once did we write, but the intention is to meet every week and spend a short time walking together in nature and then devote two hours to writing or writing-related projects. If I complete this goal, it will mean I am making good progress toward my other writing goals. 
  • Reach Aspiration: Take a class in short story writing. This is a Big Scary Goal, but one I would really like to attempt. Maybe when my writing partner returns from his six months abroad, so we could do it together?

Home/Property

  • Aspiration: Repot my plants. A new very cute plant store opened up just down the street and they will repot your plants FOR YOU for FIVE AMERICAN DOLLARS apiece. I have resisted repotting my plants, even though they are all on death’s door, because I am so sure I will kill them. Now I can pay to have someone else do it! Someone who knows what they’re doing! This should be an easy goal to accomplish.
  • Aspiration: Fix the freaking closet door. We have the materials necessary for fixing the door, because we bought them more than a year ago with the idea that we would use them to fix the door, we just need to FIX THE DOOR.
  • Aspiration: Try, again, to find someone to repaint the trim. Why is it so infernally difficult to find a person to do a thing when that person’s job is to do the very thing you want to pay them to do?
  • Reach Aspiration: Gallery wall. My eternal dream, always just out of reach.

Well, there you have it. Some gentle aspirations for the year. Looking at these aspirations, all together, I am wondering if my word of the year should be “consistent.” It’s a word I resist, because consistency is not my strong point; perhaps that is an even stronger reason for allowing it to exert whatever influence meditating on one theme for the year will exert.

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Thursday Randomosity: Lazy Holiday Week, Loose Thoughts of the Future Edition

Oh, hello there. I didn’t mean to just disappear for nine days. But sometimes you have lots of things to post about and sometimes you don’t.

Let’s see. I am feeling chatty, but don’t feel like I have a whole lot to chat about. The massive scary storm that affected so much of the country didn’t do a whole lot around here. We were very fortunate. It was cold and quite windy – though not windy enough to knock out our power – and we got plenty of snow to admire from our warm and cozy house. How did the storm affect you and your family? I hope you and your loved ones are all warm and safe.

Hannukah was lovely. Carla got Monopoly which we all played together. After an epic multi-day game, I crushed my husband and daughter into bankruptcy and we were finally able to clear off the kitchen table. 

Our Christmas was lovely and quiet and perfect. We all, I think, got everything we wanted and more. Santa brought the cotton candy machine and we made several batches of cotton candy. It is a beast to clean, but other than that it is quite fun. I also think that perhaps we have now exhausted our collective desire to make cotton candy. 

My husband is off this week, so we have been puttering around the house. He and Carla have been building robots and Pokemon block figures and playing video games, and I have been writing and reading and writing about reading. It’s been very relaxing and delightful.

We have been completing some tasks, like making plane reservations for upcoming trips. I am excited about the trips but very unexcited about the plane rides. My plan is to continue to wear masks on the plane from now until forever more, but I am still feeling pre-anxious about any or all of us getting sick, and then carrying the germs to and from our destinations. Well, there are still a few months left to fret about it.

Even though you haven’t seen any blog posts, I have been writing them and thinking about them. I dredged up Carla’s birth story, which I wrote on the eve of her third birthday. I’d like to post it at some point, even though it is growing a little stale, nine and a half years post-actual birth. But it was so stressful for me, even though it obviously all turned out okay, and I can’t seem to approach it with the clinical distance that time and Everything Turning Out Okay should afford. Oh well. Maybe I just need to post it as it is. 

I have also been considering very gently and glancingly things like goals and New Year’s plans. I haven’t yet given a single look at my aspirations from last year, not even when I collected that link, and have only in the most general terms considered aspirations for the year ahead. This is, in part, because I really only take a very loose approach to setting any sort of goal-adjacent objectives. Also because my biggest aspiration for 2022 (find an agent) remains unmet, and is so lofty a goal I feel like there’s no way I can achieve it. (Not with that attitude, missy.) Also because I keep feeling this strident, tears-hovering-under-the-surface desire to make goals around friendship, when honestly there is only so much I can control in that sphere. And in final part, it is because I feel like so much of my feelings about change for the year to come evolve around my body and my relationship to it and with food. Sounds like a real downer, honestly. So I keep playing delay and avoid. 

One thing I have been doing, with perhaps slightly more intention, is thinking about a word of the year. I love reading about people’s word of the year and how (and why) they choose a word to guide them. It’s something I’ve done for myself the past two years and I find it fits really well with my more laissez faire approach to “goal setting.” Having a word as a guidepost is something I really like, and it doesn’t feel super aggressive or overly intense. In 2021, I chose the word “forward” and in 2022 my word was “light” and I liked how both sort of cast a warm glow over the year without being scoldy or insistent. So I’ve been mulling over what I might choose for 2023. Allow me to get a little woo-woo for a moment please: The words really come to me unbidden, so I feel almost that they choose me rather than the other way around. Some of the candidates, so far, are “nurture,” “joy,” “gratitude,” and “cultivate.” We’ll see which one of these – or of options yet to make themselves known – rises to the top. Do you choose a word of the year?

Since we have all been home together for a very long time, the house has degenerated into chaos. My family refuses to consider putting the tree away until January 1, so I have resigned myself to living with the detritus of Christmas for a few more days. But I am now at the point where the urge to tidy and clean is no longer suppressible, although I have yet to erupt into the nagging that is still bubbling under the surface. I have made piles of gifts and books and treats that need to be tidied away. I have piles of laundry that need to be whisked into the washing machine. And that’s where I’ve stopped and have escaped to the treadmill where I am writing this post. 

As far as exercise goes, in the New Year, I want it to include time on the treadmill but also time outdoors. And I have loose ideas about maybe trying a Pilates regimen. If you do any online Pilates courses, especially if they are beginner friendly, please let me know. 

I realize that I completely skipped my Dinners This Week post. We have so much food in the house that I haven’t had to set foot in a grocery store since last week. (Fortunately, because my last two trips made my husband squeak with concern about how much I spent. THINGS ARE PRICEY, MY DEAR.) (He wasn’t mad, he just literally has no idea that most things are twice what they used to cost. Did I pay $20 for six chicken breasts? Yes, because that’s what it cost.) (That will get us four meals, though. Sounds better when you say $5 of chicken per meal. STILL OUTRAGEOUS.) 

New bullet, same topic: We had chicken paprikas for dinner one night, and leftover steak one night, and leftover egg and potato casserole one night. This casserole – our make-ahead Christmas morning breakfast – was delicious. This from a person who really avoids eggs if possible. Even better, it was SO EASY and didn’t involve peeling a single potato, AND it heated up the next day to be just as delicious. My husband and I going on a double date with friends one night, so dinner is sorted for that. I am not sure what we will eat for New Year’s Eve. We have some leftover crab cakes in the freezer, so maybe those? My husband wants to make these Swedish kanelbullar one day, but that’s not exactly dinner food. Well. I am sure we will figure it out. What are you eating for New Year’s Eve / New Year’s Day? My mom used to make a ham for New Year’s Day, but I’m not a big ham fan so haven’t continued the tradition. 

That’s all I have for today, Internet.