22 Lessons in ‘22

22 lessons learned in '22

1. Growth really does happen in the imbalances and while being uncomfortable.

I found this past year that pushing myself to that uncomfortable place right outside my comfort zone gave me some of the best tools. Whether it was deciding to work and balance university or do more video for social media. Pushing myself to send my writing to magazines and working with a team. The uncomfortable times, the rejection and just dealing with new emotions and balancing sensory overload. The biggest growth has happened in those places.

2. If I dont create boundaries my students and work can take over my life.

When I started my teaching job in August I knew to some extent that teaching can really take over your life and I tried to set some soft boundaries. But I’ve learned that the boundaries weren’t strong enough. I still struggle with spending too much unscheduled time doing different work for school. It is something that I want to work on in the next year.

3. Creating boundaries and removing toxicity from your life creates so much space for creating.

Removing yourself and creating stronger boundaries between you and situations that take you on an emotional roller coaster leaves you space to feel other emotions and create from them.

4. Rerouting life goals and drives after healing some deep trauma is hard. Healthy but hard.

This year I think I fully let go of having any real desire to compete in rowing at an advanced level think world championships and Paralympics. Mind you this goal has evolved over the years but to some extent, I always felt that I needed to prove that I survived and I was worth it and to some extent worthy of love and respect. And the goal I had set in order to receive that from people in my life was competing and winning at the grandest stage of them all (according to society). Starting to process and evolve within some deep-seated trauma in a few different aspects I realized I really didn’t have the desire to do something to prove my worthiness and reasons to be loved by others. I still love the peace and silence rowing on a boat gives me, but the imprint I want to leave on the world no longer has anything to do with the Paralympics and the world’s eyes on me.

5. Giving yourself grace is hard, but grace works a lot better than shame.

Oh, I wish I learned this lesson earlier and was better at it already, but this lesson has been one that has drastically made my life better. Between learning to give my inner child grace and feel their emotions and desires. To giving my adult self grace when I mess up and life gets messy and I fail on goals and things I wanted to get done for myself. I used to yell and speak and treat myself in such a nasty manner and things never got done better. Learning to breathe and give myself grace for whatever I have gone through and in this state now actually leaves me so much space to end up doing or redoing whatever needs or I even want to get done.

6. You will learn more and different lessons than the ones you think you are going to learn with each experience.

I noticed this the most with my boudoir experience this past year. I went into it wanting to heal my body and mind connection from specific childhood trauma and it started that process but also did so much more. It healed and created connections I didn’t know were broken and ones I didn’t really think possible to heal.

7. Learning to fight for yourself with love rather than hate anger and shame will get you farther.

“I hate the way I am, I need to be different.” “I love myself and I am worthy of bettering myself for myself.” This year I learned to switch the way I talk to myself and how I motivate myself. Not always, and it is definitely sometimes not the first thought that comes to mind. But I am able to sit with those shaming and angry thoughts and find the places I need to nurture myself, my inner child, with love. It’s in those places where I am able to lift myself and actually create the change and actions I am searching to achieve. Leading myself with love has also made interacting with others with love easier and has helped my relationships with others.

8. You dont always see the small changes all the time but there are moments you will feel them.

Self-growth is often sold as work that you will see giant results and changes, the more work you do. I think this sells the idea that we have to make huge changes in order to see the big internal changes and external changes. I have seen that the changes in growth are in the small moments. It’s in keeping a job and uni for six months with semi-regulated mental breaks. It’s in having new interactions with others or fewer interactions. It’s in realizing which boundaries you have implemented that change your time the most. It’s in seeing that small habits have the biggest impact. It’s in learning you can come back to the habits even when you fall off them for a while and steer yourself back to the center.

9. Spending spoons from future days leaves you at a deficit. Physical and emotional spoons dont rejuvenate on their own.

I mean this one is very straightforward for my spoonie friends. But I’ve learned this the hard way when I have put too much on one or two days in a row. Sometimes I do this unintentionally and sometimes I intentionally have said yea I’m borrowing spoons from Thursday. Well, fine but I still don’t have a great list of activities that rejuvenate my spoons on top of physical rest so that has led to full-on weekends of inactivity. This is something I want to focus on in the next year finding a list of tools that works for me to rest and rejuvenate myself fully. Replenishing my spoons in a smart way so that I have more to start with.

10. You learn new layers of yourself when you stand in front of a classroom and teach.

I learned on the first day that I deeply love teaching. That was just the first layer of things I learned about myself. I have learned that I feel a deep need to create a safe environment and create a place of growth and evolution I didn’t have in school. It has taught me or rather reminded me I will always deeply fight for the ones who can’t yet fight for themselves and don’t know they need to.

11. Good friends and friendships evolve and look different over time.

I wanted to create new friendships over this past year and widen my circle. I did this somewhat with new work friends at work, but less so out of work. Some of my friends are going through different things and have less time to build deeper relationships and keep that going, and some are still good friends but we check in rarely. The evolution of friendships feels hard and is something I struggle with, but at the end of the day, people are in your orbit when and for how long the universe thinks its a good thing. Here’s to fostering good friendships of all levels in the coming year.

12. Imperfectly done is always better than the idea of perfect execution. 

I have yet to master this, but this is a lesson I am learning slowly in university life and quickly in teaching. I need to make 3 lessons a week. Each one won’t be perfect, honestly, most of them won’t be perfect, my students don’t need perfect. They need me to show up and teach and give my best every time whatever that looks like. This has helped me try and submit imperfect work, especially when my brain comes at me saying “well if you just edited it one more time….'“. This has led to me trying to find a balance of editing my work but not getting stuck in finding the perfect words, yes make things better than they started, but also imperfections are fine and the only way you move forward.

13. Stating your needs and boundaries in a healthy way, doesn’t hurt others. If it does those people dont need to be in your life.

Surprisingly this lesson has been somewhat easier for me to keep at work and with the idea of taking lots of work home. In actuality, I still struggle with spending way too much time at home lesson planning, but I still have taken on fewer things when possible at work and my coworkers have noticed and mentioned that I have good boundaries with work and communication with others. I have taken this to personal relationships and put certain relationships in different communication spaces in order to keep better control of my emotions. The people who have understood have built our communication and those who haven’t understood the boundaries have been phased out even more. Creating the boundaries I need to be the best I can be for myself and others has let me create more relationships and deeper relationships with the right people.

14. Working in a team and team building is hard. But learning to listen and give grace to others gives you space to shine as well.

I realized this I think a month into my new teaching job. I have worked a few small jobs on teams but it was for short periods of time and there were fewer clear-cut jobs of what people were supposed to do. The past 6 months at this new job has taught me a lot of when to stand up and when to back down. How some people work in very different ways and how to adapt to those. I have learned to enjoy the aspects of working together on a team that makes things easier and more enjoyable and letting the things that grate on me go to a better extent.

15. Unblocking your feelings lets you feel happiness, sadness, and more. And the emotions flow, and you feel freer.

I felt hurt and emotional pain more this year than I have in many years. And it’s because I let down the walls I had built up ( I have a whole poem of the fortress I used to lock myself in trying not to feel). It was far from easy but allowing myself to feel the pain and let it wash over me also gave me the courage to put myself in more places where I could get hurt or feel joy. More times than not this year I felt the pain of rejection in different forms,but the fear of the pain lessens and creates more desire to find the right space for joy to come in through.

16. All parts of your body are worthy of love and care even if you dont love them yet.

This definitely ties into #18. I have struggled with my body in many ways over the years. Over the past five years, it has mostly been related to my weight and self-harm in different ways. After coming out as a Lesbian and then Non-Binary I have understood more, I think to some extent some of my struggles with the female parts of my body. This is something that I also worked on and connected with during my photoshoot as well as my lesson about changing more with love. I have been trying to show my body more love and care to the parts I struggle with between trying to put cream on my arm sores and a sternum tattoo I got right at the end of the year,I am trying to give my body love and create the home I love to be in as its the only home I have.

17. You cannot control your healing and what is going to heal which aspect of yourself.

Ah, therapy lessons, and lessons from things I did as therapy. I felt this when I started dating this year and going on a date with a girl. I learned this lesson in my boudoir photography session. I saw this in therapy sessions when I came in with what I thought to be one struggle and when I could unpack the emotions and physical feelings it was actually hiding a different trauma that needed processing. Trying to control the outcome or the wound that needs healing never worked. It is an ongoing process but the things you are most uncomfortable delving into can be the most healing in a safe space.

18. Gender evolution is valid and finding yourself will help you change the world.

Oh, this one is hard. I have felt very comfortable in the non-binary space that I have been living in for the past couple of years. But there have been quite a few symptoms, feelings, and emotions as of late that my gender journey that lead me to understand I haven’t finished my journey. I’m not fully comfortable talking about it these days but I am taking steps to feel more at home in my body. To round out the year, the universe connected me with a great tattoo artist right before she moved and we created this powerful sternum tattoo. I wanted to do a tattoo on this place in my body to find some centering and connection to my breasts and upper body in a different way. This journey is super raw and definitely one I’m still struggling with, which is ok regardless of what society tries to tell you. Your journey is valid, be it sexuality, gender or something else.

19. Finding peace in silence and not always feeling like it is choking you is a sign of inner silence.

I used to not be able to handle any silence when I was alone I was either listening to podcasts, books,or music. I still love all three and still listen to plenty of each, but sometimes I have three days backed up on my favorite sports podcasts because I’ve been busy and then craving silence rather than noise to fill it up. I have been searching for fewer things to fill the silence and sometimes even searching for a moment to sit and enjoy the silence.

20. You are a human being not a human doing. If all you can do today is be that is enough.

My friend has told me this for years but I have consistently kept up with the internalized shame of not being productive,or not being productive enough in what I assume and have internalized in todays society. What I have learned and implemented to some extent is the ability to sit. To relax and read and embrace the fact that my weekends don’t have to be a marathon of getting stuff done. I do not exist just to do and achieve being and existing on this planet is of value. The universe decided it needed me on the planet way before I had any value of achievement, and sometimes it’s important to tap into that and realize that just being is plenty.

21. Adapting and trying things you thought to be too hard or complicated sometimes become the simplest ones.

A big example of this is that I assumed making videos for social media. Is it my favorite thing, no. Do I do it perfectly or even particularly well, no but the more I do it the less it feels like the biggest thing. But the biggest example and reason I thought of this lesson was taking the bus to work. I had been taking taxis everywhere for years. Literally years.I have taken trains and I used to take them in high school and whatnot but since I’ve been living on campus and been in university I had mostly been taking taxis. But when it came to my new job this year I really didn’t want to use my paychecks on taxis to and from work. I decided I wanted to try and take the bus to work. I found a bus route that took me from school to work on one bus and a 15-minute push afterward. Once I tried it and got comfortable with it,I started taking buses to many more places and actually got way more comfortable with buses than with taxis. My bank account has thanked me of course but also mentally the lack of having any control over when the bus arrives and if there is traffic when I am on the bus has been somehow very freeing. I’m not thinking of better routes, rather I am reading or writing or just being and it has been very freeing.

22. Live your truth. Your truth will evolve and flow with it to the next chapter of your life.

This lesson wraps up all these lessons. Listen to the north star inside yourself. My truths and goals have evolved over this past year, and more. Listening to the changes and embracing my new truths has led to achievements and new goals. Those changes and plenty uncomfortable but the changes have brought more good than bad.

What did you learn this year about yourself?

I wanted to challenge myself to think of 22 lessons "big" or "small" if you could quantify lessons to remind myself that growth isn’t only in PRs in sports, grades, or checks.  It’s in the peace, the in-betweens, the moments I would forget if I didn’t pay attention.