Monthly Reflections: January
New year, new month, new me.
⛷ Doing
After ski trips this month and nine days on the slopes this season, it’s become pretty clear that I’ve got a thing for skiing. That hasn’t always been the case though: I remember my first ski weekend back in December, sitting in the lodge on my second consecutive day, toes freezing, limbs aching, and wondering if I’d imagined all the fun I had on the slopes last season. I cycle through my love-hate relationship with skiing over the course of any given day on the mountain too: positively giddy on my first lift up at the prospect of getting started, the trough of exhaustion mid-day when I dread the thought of slogging it out for a few more hours, the inevitable sadness when I get to my last few runs, disappointment at the thought of the day drawing to a close.
Few random thoughts from these past ski trips:
- Tahoe weekends away have proven to be such a solid first trip choice for my groups of friends that haven’t traveled together before: it’s time bound, easily accessible, with a few obvious choices for activities and things to do. It’s also given me a chance to see how my friends behave in a travel setting, both individually and in a group. Are they organized or chill? Do they help out or just laze around? What do they like to do and what do they not? Are they extremely particular and need to have their way, or do they go with the flow? Do they like to cook, or are they the going out type? Are they blasé about money or are they cost-conscious? Does they like to rage or are they fairly tame? I’ve been fascinated by how the travel dynamics of different groups can vary so much across the board.
- Despite my current infatuation for it, I can’t seem to quite articulate why I enjoy skiing so much — I’m not sure if it’s the way I’m still seeing a lot of rapid improvement and how there’re very clear markers that help you demarcate progress and progression in skill; the variety of skills to work on and the way you can go both broad and deep, from tackling steepness to weaving through trees to working through ungroomed snow to finding my way around moguls to mastering technique; the rush and sense of accomplishment that comes from conquering something that previously terrified you; the sheer athleticism that’s necessary to hack it on the slopes; or if there’s something more elemental and primal in the thrill of flying down these mountains, but regardless, I’m completely enamored.
On an internal note, after spending last year focused inward, I’ve decided to focus this year on broadening my horizons and looking to the external. I want to learn about lifestyles and perspectives that differ from my own and try to break out of the homogenous tech bubble that can surround us so completely in the Bay Area, and also expand my range of experiences, resetting the limits of my comfort zone further and further out.
I decided to start in a small way by adding weight training to my workout routine in January. I’ve done Pilates, basic training, barre, yoga for awhile now, but have recently started to feel like I was reaching a plateau as far as what those could do for my body. Despite my initial apprehension and lack of familiarity with the weight room and squat racks, it’s been fun trying out something new, breaching an area that previously felt off-limits to me and a space that didn’t feel my own. With the collection of all the random activities I’ve picked up at the gym (e.g. handstand practice, monkey bars, pull up readiness, full-range sit-ups, box jumps) and my old standbys, spending time at the gym these days has started to feel like play time, where I get to let loose and go with the flow, chasing after whatever it is that I feel like that day.
And as if that weren’t enough, I also decided to tack on a conversational Spanish class on top of it all. (January is the month of over-ambition and aspiration, after all.) Trevor Noah’s comment from Born a Crime about the power of shared language in connecting disparate people and Damon and Jo’s multi-lingual YouTube channel have both collectively motivated me to take my language learning more seriously. To be fair, I’ve already questioned my commitment to this several times in this past month, wrestling with my inability to differentiate between foreign sounds, my inability to twist my tongue in strange ways, and my inability to tolerate being bad at things, but I’m hanging in there (or trying to, anyway).
🥰 Feeling
Coming out of the holidays, I felt extremely buoyant, filled with this sense of warmth, love, and community. Even despite the lack of holiday spirit and cheer, it was still an incredibly heartwarming time as it typically is for me, with my family’s holiday rituals and routines, life catch-ups with family I haven’t seen since summer, and in-person time with close out of town friends.
That feeling carried over well into January — I recall reflecting mid-month that I finally felt a sense of belonging for one of the first times in my adult life, a sense of security in my relationships and social circles. These days, I largely feel content, sated, happy, even despite a brief period of self-doubt recently.
It feels like there’s a part of me that’s more at peace than ever, shedding the FOMO of my early-twenties to embrace the life I’ve chosen to lead, complete with 5:30am alarms ‘n all. Even after making a decision in the past, there used to be a part of me that would continue to feel a twinge of regret, that would mentally explore that other path not taken and wonder if I made the right choice (oh hello, maximizer Steph!). Maybe it’s that I understand myself better now, maybe it’s that I’ve chosen the other path enough times in the past and have confirmed that they’re not for me, but present-day Steph has become so much more okay with the trade-offs that she’s making. I feel so much more confident and assured with not only the activities I’m actively deciding to invest in, but also the activities I’m deliberately turning away from.
A common theme that’s permeated throughout my January has also been this sense of abundance and fullness. I tend to prefer operating at full capacity as much as I can; slack tends to result in a twitchy and restless Steph. When I’m full to the brim with ideas and inspiration and things to read and things to research and trips to plan and activities to do, it makes me feel like life’s full of possibilities, mine for the taking and mine to shape however I want.
🎬 Consuming
I finally got the chance to watch The Dawn Wall early in the month, which served as a fascinating contrast to Free Solo, which I caught late last year. Although they’re both climbing documentaries, Free Solo centers on Alex Honnold’s individual, death-defying journey up El Capitan without protective gear of any kind, while The Dawn Wall focuses on Tommy Caldwell’s multi-year quest with Kevin Jorgeson to find a route up the notoriously unconquerable wall. On my way to see the movie, I happened to catch a podcast that discussed how the strength of your social connections is one of your largest indicators for success, and how we can accomplish more together than we can in our own. While both achievements are impressive in their own right, there was something undeniably sweeter in Tommy and Kevin’s joint triumph (especially in light of their challenges surpassed) that didn’t feel quite the same with Alex’s individual success. It felt like a bit of cosmic karma and serendipity to hear that principle and see it reinforced so soon after.
While on a ski trip, we also caught the Netflix Fyre documentary, a fascinating contrast relative to Bad Blood, the Theranos tell-all, which I finished in the last days of 2018. I was struck by the similarities between the founders and the patterns that emerged in the way they pulled off their deception: their maniacal control over the flow of information throughout their companies, their undeniable penchant for sales and ability to craft, sell a grandiose visionary future (even when it didn’t exist), their wildly blasé attitudes towards the negative consequences they were knowingly inflicting on their customers, their complete lack of desire to understand and dig into the details, and the support they enjoyed by powerful, influential people.
Another article that stuck with me this month and opened my eyes was the Huffington Post Cable Guy piece that viscerally detailed the day in the life of blue collar work, including the struggles, pressures, and hardships faced. Not only did it discuss the unique challenges of being female in this line of work, but it also covered the way in which this type of backbreaking labor drives people to substance abuse in an effort to just cope and survive, and the myriad of ways in which the system is stacked up against them. We joke and complain about our first world problems, but this perspective really hammered home how truly cushy we have it, with the state of our work environments, working conditions, company cultures, sense of autonomy, and compensation.
💡 Realizing
I’ve come to the realization this month that I’m way more metrics-driven than I originally thought myself to be. Exhibit A: Spontaneously getting a body fat percentage measurement and understanding my physical fitness on a more concrete level. Exhibit B: Getting visibility into my screen time stats and how that’s done wonders in redefining my relationship to my phone and how I interact with it.
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In both cases, the visibility and awareness have helped greatly in pushing me to be more conscious about my otherwise instinctual habits. There’s something about putting something concrete and quantifiable to something you mostly have an anecdotal, qualitative sense of that can be extremely powerful in adjusting your perspective.
I also took the Enneagram personality test on the suggestion of a friend (thanks Irene) and discovered that Type 1 and Type 3 match me the most closely. The framing of these personality types have helped me realize just how much being driven, ambitious, and self-improvement obsessed are fundamentally part of my wiring as a person, which have helped me understand the way I look at life decisions and why I think the way that I do.
