Looking backward, looking forward
A reflection on lessons learned and experiences had in 2023, plus hopes and intentions for 2024
Hello, friends and subscribers. It has been a while…roughly three months, to be precise, since I last pushed something live on Substack. 🫠 I’m sorry I haven’t been more active here—in part due to busy-ness and in part due to editorial self-consciousness. I am embarrassed to say how many pieces I currently have in ‘draft’ purgatory.
Regardless, thank you for standing by me and reading today. I hope you’re celebrating the New Year in a way that is true to what you want to bring into the future.
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How and why to read this piece
This post is broken down into two sections: about what I learned in 2023 and what I hope for in 2024. The themes beneath those chunks are not in any particular order of priority, but if you read (or skim) through all of them, at the very least, you’ll see some fun pictures.
I hope some of these lessons may resonate with you, else make you think, else inspire some introspection of your own on the dawn of a new year. Now let’s get down to business.
What I learned in 2023…
Related to Weddings
On Invitations: Invitation logic is an art and a science. You’re making bets on who will come, who will get mad if forgotten, who will get mad if not invited, etc. It’s really just gambling with expensive paper and dinner plates involved.
On Seating Charts: Once you get RSVPs and you determine rough category groupings (e.g. school friends, old coworkers) and compatibility concepts (e.g. these two relatives cannot coexist at the same table), seating charts piece themselves together. It’s always one or two people who can be the domino that causes the whole thing to be rearranged
On Guest Dynamics: People are adults and will get along. Family members can be challenging but family is implacable and the least they can do is pull it together for a party that, theoretically, is about the happy couple and not about them. Theoretically.
On the Most Important Things to Remember as the Bride or Groom: You can’t make everyone happy. Your “happiness responsibility” is to yourself: to have your most fun and best day possible. If you’re having a ball, everyone else is more likely to, too.
Related to Marriage
On What Marriage Changes, ~ 3 months into it:
Calling my partner “my husband” in polite conversation.
Checking the “Mrs.” box on forms requesting my personal information.
Wearing a ring daily
Likelihood of getting a default +1 to future weddings
On What Marriage Does Not Change, ~ 3 months into it:
Household chores
Laundry
Bills
The continuous need to collaborate and compromise
Related to Jiu-Jitsu
On Competition: There is a fine line between pushing your limits and pushing past them to the point of burnout, and because I disregarded that line, I had my worst performance ever. I broke my own heart from the pressure and expectations related to my performance, and I spent the last few months healing from that heartbreak and from various injuries. Moving forward, competition needs to be a net positive experience for my life, not a controlling, obsessive force that leaves me physically and mentally shattered.
On Teaching Children: There are other ways to see the sport than as a competitive outlet—the way that I had been seeing it. Co-teaching the 5- to 7-year-olds’ class made me realize that jiu-jitsu can be pure play, pure fun, and, failing that, pure relief for parents: it’s at least one hour a week during which they can offload the responsibility of being the ones disciplining and entertaining their children. Most days, I feel like a foolish babysitter sitting the kids upright and preventing them from eating their belts, but some days they learn something, give me a big smile, or tell me a funny story about their day. Interacting with the kids compels instantaneous presence, taking me out of my own internal milieu and forcing me to see life a little more simply, minute to minute.
On the Role of Training in My Life: My relationship with training must evolve (even more than it already has) in order to be sustainable. This came up in this podcast I recorded earlier this year, where the host and I talked a lot about aging—specifically, the struggle of training with spry teens and professional twenty-somethings. This also was echoed in my last Substack post on the importance of “respecting the season” and honoring my current stage of life. Recently, it occurred me that I spent nine of the last twelve months holding my feet together with athletic tape—not great. What keeps me in the sport is the people, and I need to take better care of my body in order to keep doing something I love with the people I love.
Related to Work
On Being Laid Off: While on sabbatical in 2021-2022, I struggled with being jobless as someone whose sense of self was defined by where she worked—and that was in a situation where I had voluntarily quit my job. When I got laid off in December, it was a pressure test of how much I really believed “Your work does not equal your worth.” In the past, I might have taken the layoff a lot harder, blamed myself for what happened, and been slower to grieve, process, and rebound from the loss enough to start looking for work again. In this case, I acted quickly, got my resume in order the weekend after the layoff, and, thanks to a solid referral and a lightning-fast interview process, received an offer for a new role starting mid-January.
On the Value of My Former Job: Much as I love Mad Men, I don’t think I ever imagined a version of my career where I ended up working at an advertising and creative agency based out of Manhattan. I don’t regret it, and even with the letdown of the layoff, I found the opportunity deeply fulfilling for the year and a half I was in it. It reminded me that I was still good at my job and still enjoyed the work, even after my year away from the corporate world. It made me believe that I was truly adaptable, that my skills were extensible beyond working at specific companies or in certain industries. It proved to me that I could be a good manager and that I enjoyed it: few things from this job brought me more fulfillment than the feedback of people reporting to me, who found our management relationship both purposeful and edifying. The people I met in this job helped me navigate some of the biggest milestones of my life: returning from sabbatical, buying a home, and getting married. I learned, I grew, and I’ll be even better in my next role because of everything that happened in this one.
Related to Creative Life
On Teachers: I will never be able to repay the gifts that my best teachers gave to me in my younger years. In October, I went to my high school reunion, less so for the classmates and more so because I was in the area for a wedding dress fitting and wanted to witness some of my favorite teachers being honored with classrooms dedicated to them. The reunion unexpectedly became one of the most influential moments of the year and will be the subject of an essay I’ll write and pitch in 2024.
On Rejection: Submitting my book proposal to publishers in the last few months has been an exercise in coping with rejection. So much rejection. I talk about this at length on a recent podcast, but rejection on the road to creative success isn’t unlike getting your ass beaten in jiu-jitsu: You have to redraft, revise, and resubmit countless times before you finally get your breakthrough piece much like you have to get tapped out a lot before you eventually tap someone else out. In the words of Hunter S. Thompson: “For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled,” and I’m certainly having my soul trampled in this process of finding a moment of triumph. Rejection sucks, but I have to endure it and can’t let it get in the way of moving forward and having my creative work thrive somewhere outside of my Google Drive.
On What My Best Published Work This Year Has In Common: a focus on the people in the corner, from family members, to teammates around the world, to leaders-by-example who give us hope for what we might become.
What I hope for in 2024…
Building Community
Apart from retaining my new job, I hope to establish a stronger professional network in Atlanta. After being laid off, I realized that I don't have a critical mass of meaningful connections here. The people I know well and who wanted to help me find a new opportunity could only do so in places like the Bay Area, LA, New York, or Boston. If I want to find a workplace with an Atlanta presence in the future (which I do), I need to step out of my suburban routine and make an effort to meet new people.
Pushing Creatively
I want 2024 to be the year I push the quality and reach of my creative work. Ideally, this means securing a book deal and engaging in extensive edits on the book with the support of an editor. If that doesn't happen, I aim to work on a new book proposal that requires some heavy research and pushes my limits in interesting ways. Book work aside, my goal is to publish at least once piece somewhere other than my Substack or a jiu-jitsu media outlet. To prevent myself from getting stuck in a rut or feeling too lonely on the journey, I plan to keep engaging in writing groups I'm involved in and book some retreat weekends for myself where I can get inspired by a change of scenery and focus on writing.
Celebrating Intentionally
I’ve got a few friends’ weddings on the books for next year and I’m excited to pay back the joy I experienced in having them with me for my “big day” by being present for theirs. My mom is turning 70 and we’re working on a big trip to Napa to honor that milestone birthday, Once I get settled at a new job and carve out a healthy chunk of time off, my husband and I will belatedly head on our honeymoon to Japan, likely in the fall so it can coincide with our first anniversary.
Closing Out
Wishing you a happy, healthy, and fulfilling start to your new year. If the spirit moves you, please drop a comment to share what you’ve learned in the last year and what you’re hoping for in the next one. I’ll also take any recommendations or tips on things you’d enjoy reading about here in the new year. If you’re willing to do so, send this Substack along to someone else you know who might enjoy picking up what I’m putting down in 2024.
Until next time,
EZ