33 lessons learned in 33 years.

a list you'd gaze at on the ceiling of a dentist's office by me 4 u

Hi, I’m excellent at lists, so skilled, in fact, that I spend more time listing tasks in multiple places than on chipping away at any one of them. Through trial and error I've noticed it is more productive for me to start any one item on the list, rather than contemplating what I should do when. The momentum from a bit of productivity will get me farther than attempting to prioritize. 

My mind hates this—it thinks I will forget things if I don’t write them down. The truth is I will be reminded externally of important tasks and unimportant ones I may forget, but they were actually distractions not tasks. I’m trying to spend more time completing some of the things I need to do and less time listing all the things I want to do. 

A list, even of mundane tasks, leads to feeling the anticipation of completion. Like the promise of a new diet that starts tomorrow, list making creates an alluring future when everything is completed and I can relax. And since that future only comes about once every three years, my present often feels stressed.

Nada has a line in the story “Giving Up” from her book Bad Thoughts where the character says, 

“I preferred being on the verge of something which was my problem with everything, I never arrived.”

If I want to get anywhere, I need to change my ratio between listing and doing and between ideas and execution. 

Nevertheless, I will always love a good list. There are several famous ones from people like Woody Guthrie’s New Year’s Rulin’s or Sister Corita Kent’s Art Department Rules I return to often (more on that here) and in my consideration of great lists, I revisited a list I made at the end of 2019.

It was the most difficult year I’ve had to date, so it was concentrated with hard-learned lessons, many of which I’ve since forgotten. Revisiting the list of 19 lessons I learned that year made me realize how, in some ways, I was further along then than I am now. This is frustrating, but growth isn’t always linear; it is often six steps forward, five back.

I hope this list of specific reminders from my past self is as useful to you as it was to me. And consider cataloging lessons you’ve acquired into a list too.

So in no particular order, here's a list of 19 things I learned in 2019 as well as 14 things I learned between 2020 and now.

19+ 14 = 33
LESSONS I’VE LEARNED:

1. people will surprise you. they will also disappoint you. don’t attach too much to either.

2. you are a romantic, idealist & extremist, work on moving toward the middle. ⠀

3. overthinking is a distraction from intimacy.

4. you crave intimacy & fear it in equal measure.