A month ago, I turned 29 years old.
Older, wrinklier people have told me that at this age, people begin to feel secure about their roles in the world, settle down, relax into place to prove and expand, and unfurl their roots into the ground. It’s not clear to me why older, wrinklier people like analogies to plants and making bread, but I think they were wrong. First, I don’t really aspire to be a tree or a baguette. Second, I don’t feel whatever level of security about myself or the world that is necessary to seriously think about settling down into a place, career, and a family. It might be the [Rina, insert coronavirus cliche here] or the fact that I have a few more years left of graduate school, but being 29 does not feel at all what I was told.
But I can’t complain. This was a good year. Thanks to the vaccine creators and distributors, I finally got to meet my friends and family safely. I am grateful that my favorite people have been blessed with good health this year. I had many warm meals, quiet moments of commiseration, and laughs with them. Thank you to everyone for being part of my 29th year.
Below is a review of my learning and personal development.
Physical Maintenance
Being sick made me healthier.
I’m proud to say that I took better care of myself this year, and it may be because of my migraines. I continue to take medication for them, but I also started taking notes on them (from my bed, not bothering to fix typos). The "mygrin_noots.txt" revealed that my migraines seem to happen when I am suffering from some combination of being poorly slept, poorly fed, poorly hydrated, and feeling bad generally. That is to say that they're moderately correlated with what I suspect reflect the later stages of burnout.
Thus, this year, I tried to figure out what dynamics seem to cause me to burn out, how to counter them, and how to prioritize my health, especially to reduce migraines. I gathered that one major contributor of burn out for me was the way I navigate social, professional, and academic environments. I love to take on new work if I feel it helps others or helps me to extend my abilities, but sometimes I can’t finish the work unless I decide to sleep less or eat only rice and broccoli. I often choose to do the work instead, but for some reason I am also always surprised that I burn out after only a week or two. When I put it in words like this it seems clearly silly.
However, I do understand that some of the professional and academic demands come from other people. My mentors or supervisors or teachers, the deadline deciders, love ambition, and I’ll be the one to say it: I don’t think they’re very good at knowing how long stuff takes. Either that, or they are expecting me to be late almost every time. In any case, this year, I have asked for extensions when I am burnt out and need to dedicate a few days to re-establish my routines and rest. Each time I ask for extensions, I feel less and less bad about it.
Finally, I have also made more time to celebrate being in this body. When I am burnt out, I feel strange in my own body, despite having inhabited it for 29 years. This year, I took myself out to walk and bike more, even in the winter when I didn't want to. I also started bouldering, which I had never tried before. I sense that I have more command over my limbs, and feel more at home in my meat case.
Psychological Maintenance
Being good at being awful is still being good at something.
A memory that I hope will be funny some day is when my therapist asked me what I thought was good about myself. I’m not sure how long the silence was, but it was long for me to become confused, awkward, embarrassed by my confusion and awkwardness, and then embarrassed at my own embarrassment. And it was long enough for her to say, "Oh? Is my Zoom working?" I told her that I didn't know the answer to the question, and she have me a little smile, “This is a hard one, I guess,” and thankfully moved on.
Finding the good in myself is still hard for me because I have a bully in my head, and she is persistent and nasty.
There was a moment this year that I thought I had destroyed her. I thought I finally had the retort that would make her recoil forever. I yelled it in her face until her voice was drowned out, and I thought I’d finally achieved peace.
Then, from her crumpled shadow, it emerged: a second nasty bully. She was ready to say whatever she needed to say at whatever volume was necessary to put me in my place. I couldn’t win. There was no winning. The emergence of the second bully implied that she could regenerate herself indefinitely. I would spend my lifetime fighting her and it would deplete me every single day until I died. It was bullies all the way down, and I would never see on what ground she stands to say what she does.
Or was it? How does she know all of this? I’ve been a private person my entire life. She knows things I’ve never said or typed, terrible thoughts I’ve entertained only when no one else was around in the private corners of my own mind. She couldn’t know unless she could literally read my mind.
But she can, or rather, I read it to her.
It’s not that the bully regenerates herself indefinitely–it’s that I regenerate her. Not only does my mind create a nemesis for itself, it regenerates her continuously, sabotaging its efforts at peace existence.
I am frightened at my mind’s infinite capacity for torment. And I am frightened at my mind’s instinct to point it at itself, fully loaded.
How did she get so persistent? How is she so agile and precise? She could choose all the right memories, use them to make all the right inferences, and use these inferences to create the perfect theory as to why I am the most disgusting being in the universe. She brought evidence and solid reasoning. She could even generate multiple good explanations. If I waved one away, she gave another, and another, until I had no choice but to agree that yes, I am disgusting and should be ashamed. Her reasoning and explanation skills were indefeasible.
But, I generate her and she uses my memories as evidence–maybe this means that she uses my reasoning and explanations capacities too. It all makes sense. Theory-building, analyzing concepts, critiquing arguments, generating hypotheses, inferring generalizations: these are exactly the skills that I have been working almost every day to cultivate. I have improved in these areas especially in the past few years. It’s no wonder that I am good at generating imaginative, argumentative bullies.
I see two possible solutions.
- I could make myself less good at the things I’m good at, so that she becomes weaker. I could stop putting effort into my work, allow myself to lower the quality standards for my thoughts, and avoid diving deeply into any area. This seems pretty obviously the wrong idea.
- I could identify the reasons my mind generates bullies and address them. This involves retraining my mind to not generate bullies but to react in some less destructive way. This also involves figuring out what combination of situational and mental factors create the need for my mind to generate bullies. This will be a thorny, complicated puzzle. Luckily, it involves explanation building, which, I guess, is something I might be getting good at.
Personal and Professional Enjoyment
I need to think less.
My first goal was to sit at the piano every day. I failed. I hardly sat at the piano at all during the semester.
My second goal was write more, and specifically to publish several times before my next birthday on my blog. This year, I spent more time on this, and my mind is more organized for it. Sometimes I wrote “for an hour”, only to realize that I lost track of time and lunch was now three hours late. While I have written a few things over the course of the year, only one made it on to this blog. And to be honest, I gritted my teeth and pushed to finish it so that I could put it on my blog before my birthday. It went up only two days before the due date. My goal was to publish several times on this blog this year, so I technically failed. But there are worse ways to fail, I suppose.
My work and hobbies tend to be more cerebral, more thinky. My enjoyment of problem solving, sense-making, and learning is real. However, sometimes I need to rest this muscle, and let the other parts out to play and grow. Otherwise, I burn myself out and migraine myself into bed. This year, I did more of this by indulging more in less thinky hobbies, such as cooking and recreational, low-effort reading. This happened only a few times this year, but each time helped me to get unstuck from bed. God, I’ve missed reading fiction.
My third goal was to cultivate experimental skills, specifically in experimental design and method. I was able to do this to some extent, by attending more talks and conferences this year than in the past and by reading methods sections more thoroughly. This year, I got to learn more about the methods underlying memory and cognitive development research.
My final goal was to improve my ability to distinguish meaningful from less meaningful questions. This involved investigation into what kinds of questions ignited my spirits, unified my interests and values, and contributed productively to my field. This process involved consultations with my guts, my mind, and my mentors. This investigation is not finished, and my guts and mind tell me that I need to use trial-and-error to gather more information. However, this did help me identify the more probable and informative directions in the set of possibilities towards which to do trial-and-error. Now, the interests that I thought were disparate seem more clearly part of the same something. There is a thingy, a unifying thingy that is not yet perfectly defined and runs throughout, and I can tap into the unifying thingy to propel myself forward.
Civic Participation and Social Justice
My goal was to find ways to confront prejudice and discrimination and to better understand pain.
This year, I put more effort into mentorship. As a graduate student, I have several opportunities for mentorship, including mentorship of undergraduates with interests in graduate school and undergraduate students I teach. This year, I have had the opportunity to mentor an undergraduate student with high hopes for pursuing graduate work and dazzling potential.
I also leveraged my position as a teaching assistant to better understand and address some of the inequities I noticed in my classroom. In particular, some students have university know-how that others do not–while this is purely anecdotal, the students from historically marginalized backgrounds and who are the first in their families to attend university seem less likely to have this know-how. Know-how includes knowing how to identify and advocate for their needs relating to schooling, including asking for help and deadline extensions. I tried to put in extra effort to approach students delicately about subpar performance on assignments, to offer extensions, and to urge them to ask for help when they need it. While there is no way for me to be sure, my hope is that this treatment has helped to make important know-how more accessible.
This year, I prioritized my civic duties and voted in local elections. While I did follow some of the local issues, I could have put more effort into that this year.
Thirdly, I was able to donate more to causes I care about this year, despite my modest income.
Objectives for the Upcoming Year
Civic Participation
Continue mentorship, especially for students who may not have as good access to mentorship, and aim to make knowhow more accessible to those in my classroom.
Follow local issues more closely, and advocate for groups in need in my area.
Donate.
Physical maintenance + Personal Enjoyment
Make time for less thinky enjoyment
As described above, much of my work and hobbies are cerebral, and a great deal of the reading, writing, meeting, and figuring involved in these happen in a chair and being very solemn. On the other hand, my less thinky hobbies involve standing, walking, biking, tasting, and laughing. Making time for less thinky enjoyment will help me to reacquaint myself with my body and to maintain it. Doing so will necessitate setting boundaries on my time spent on cerebral activity, as well as the time spent on less thinky unenjoyment (e.g. scrolling in intrigue through the stream of materialism and doom online). I hope that this will help me keep healthy, even in the winter when I don’t feel like moving, but also that this reduces the burnout that inevitably overcome me several times a year.
Psychological Maintenance
Console my bully.
I can’t defeat her, so reprimanding her doesn’t work. I can’t make her small without making myself small, and frankly that hasn’t worked for me, even when I wanted it to. The best I can do is figure out why she’s here, and to help her feel better about it. Borne of my mind, she is my mind’s child, and I should take care of her.
Professional Enjoyment
Practice choosing meaningful questions. This requires both introspection and action, as well as a sense for when to apply each.
Look for professional environments that help me to cultivate the knowledge and skills necessary to answer the questions I want to answer. It’s great to have a job that pays my rent, but it may also be possible to have work that gives me opportunities to grow, specifically in the ways I want to grow. This means I need to be choosy about the opportunities around me.
Work hard selectively, and settle for acceptable quality deliberately.
Alright, this is good enough. No more. I’m hungry, and I’d like to go for a walk.
Rina
