Happy new year! I realize we’re already 20+ days into 2020, but I figured a reflection on 2019 was better late than never. This was the first year in a while where I was traveling instead of spending New Years at home, so it was noticeably harder to sit down and reflect in real time. That said, here are some of my reflections on the year:
- 2019 was a year of extremes. I grappled a lot with how I want to live my life – often alternating between feeling very content and happy with what I have and feeling very frustrated and bored with the status quo. A lot of my struggles centre around what I should be doing as a 24-year-old. Should I be responsible and meal prep to save money, or should I be letting loose and just eating out all the time? On a Friday night when I’m sitting at home watching Netflix for the umpteenth time, should I feel guilty for not doing enough? When does binge watching TV go from self-care/relaxation to being lazy? Is it bad if I don’t make my bed? Am I taking enough risks with my career choices? Should I be quitting my job and traveling the world? I let myself spend the latter part of the year pushing the boundaries on some of those questions and I’m entering 2020 with a newfound comfort with oscillating between the different ways to live, knowing that I’m not committed to any singular approach.
- Tradition really matters. I’m really lucky to have a job and be building my adult life each and every day, and I’ve decided it’s more important than ever to create my own traditions while also upholding my favourite ones, whether they’re my family’s, friends’, or some sitcom character’s. Life has a tendency to pass us by, and traditions serve as bookends and bookmarks in the various chapters of life. As an example, there is something that’s incredibly powerful in touching a handwritten, snail-mailed Christmas card when you know that the sender had held the very card in his or her hands (even if you have to decode their scrawled Christmas messages). Similarly, eating the same familiar, delicious food for specific holidays creates a special thread of commonality that spans across the years, bringing us closer together to our past and future selves.
- The excitement of fancy food has worn off slightly. These past few months, I’ve found myself increasingly excited about hearty, traditional meals (especially home-cooked) rather than creative, inventive fancy meals. It may be testament to Toronto’s solid mid-tier food scene, or perhaps it’s because I haven’t cooked a lot for myself recently and am missing simpler, home-cooked foods. In 2019, I spent a lot of time looking for the perfect croissant and that may have brought me more satisfaction than any of the really fancy meals I ate. (I do still really want to eat at French Laundry in 2020 though.)
- In a similar vein, doing-it-yourself has been a big source of personal satisfaction and accomplishment for me in 2019. The first half of the year was marked by many opportunities to cook and bake new foods (and also make my own pickles and fruit gummies), which were not only fun but also very fulfilling – it’s always cool to know that I can make food that tastes similar to (if not as good as) what I might get at a restaurant.
- Big spending doesn’t feel as exciting or weighty as it used to. There were a few big ticket items I invested in over the past few years that made me very giddy, but now I find it increasingly hard to imagine being that giddy over similar purchases. Instead, I’m much happier when I find the perfect item/piece (whether clothing, jewelry or household items such as furniture) for a reasonable price and know that it’s reliable quality and will last a number of years. Maybe this is just increased pragmatism as I get older. In many ways, everything feels marginal because my core happiness and needs have been met. I would say that I’ve had my core happiness and needs met for most of my life, but my acute awareness of this reality is new to 2019 and gives me more food for thought when it comes to figuring out what I want in life.
- It always pays to spend money on healthy food and comfort. Especially on my most recent trip to London and Marrakech, I realized how much I value physical comfort – having good sleep and eating well make such a big difference in my mood and experiences. Relatedly, I think my goal for 2020 will be to travel less and spend the same amount of money on having a better experience when I do travel. (Thus far, travel has found its way into my life without my active effort, so maybe we’ll see more traveling less in the second half of 2020.)
- I’ve realized that theatre and other musical performances bring me a lot of happiness and I should more actively indulge in going to see shows. It’s not only a great intellectual escape from my day-to-day, but also makes me appreciate how powerful the arts can be at conveying emotions. In particular, because my daily life at work is often so detached from feelings and instead, grounded in fact, music and other art make me feel enriched and enhanced in a very different way. At the time, I didn’t really fully appreciate why my mom made me take music class throughout high school, but now when I look back, I am grateful for having unlocked enough elementary knowledge of music such that I can appreciate just how complex it is to compose a classical piece of music or put together a full musical. E is likely taking up violin again and I am very excited to have a bit more music in my day-to-day life.
For 2020, here are my three goals:
- Spend a few months (at least two) not working, in light of my realization that these are probably the best years of my life to forget about all my duties and just be selfish to enjoy life
- Finish my storybook, which will involve wrapping up six months of drawing lessons with my teacher in Toronto and graduating into the world of drawing on my own to put together all the pictures
- Live without a budget as an experiment for whether I will really go off the rails or if I’m actually going to still be reasonably sensible; I realized that I probably live my life a bit too responsibly and by the rules I’ve set for myself, so this is a year about loosening those boundaries a bit to see what happens
The first three months of the year will be devoted to making the most of my time left here in Toronto, while the months of April through December will be spent enjoying and appreciating all the traits of SF that I’ve come to miss while I’ve been gone. Being in Toronto for only six months made me much better at appreciating my everyday and not complaining about the small things (like weather). I really want to bring that appreciation for everyday life back with me to SF, with the hope that I can view the next chapter of my life in SF as if it were only for six months.
I know that 2020 will be a year of change for me, both professionally and personally, and I’m going to make sure that I take time to appreciate everything I have at each stage of my life before I rush into the next chapter. It feels very much that from 2017 up until 2019, I was trying to check off various boxes that meant I was “adulting” well, and now that most of adulting is taken care of, it’s time to step back a bit and just live.