Hi!
I apologize for the unintended hiatus! It’s been an eventful season. But I wanted to come back with one last newsletter to close off the year. Just something to chew on as we set goals and priorities for the next. :)
Be back soon! Until then, please know that you are one of my greatest blessings this year. Truly thankful for every second you spend supporting my work.
Wishing you all a gracious, centered, and immersive new year!
I’m a quarter of my way through the book Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. I began reading it in November, at the onset of the busiest time of the year, perfectly aware I was five books behind my reading schedule and that forcing myself to read such an information-heavy non-fiction book ultimately meant there’d be no way I was going to meet this year’s reading goal.
So why did I insist? Why was it so important for me to read it as soon as possible?
Because, in the new year, I hope to finally fix my sleep. I say “finally” because I’ve been trying. See, I used to sleep like a rock, but these days I rarely enjoy deep, uninterrupted sleep. I wake up at least once in the middle of the night. I’ve been dreaming more and I’m worried that means I’ve become a light sleeper. Then there’s the reality I can no longer deny: Apparently, I’m no longer an early twenty-something. Nor am I capable of functioning optimally with only six hours of sleep like I used to.
I’ve googled sleep advice. I’ve taken a peek at the appendix of Why We Sleep where the author shares a list of tips for healthy sleep. I’ve set an alarm for bedtime, scheduled the Quiet Mode on my Instagram. In an ideal world, I’d be settled in bed by 10 PM like a dutiful airplane passenger preparing for take-off. All entertainment turned off, with a book in my hand as I cruise the sleep runway and lift off to dreamland.
But it isn’t working. Which is to say, I haven’t been able to make this “ritual” stick.
Why do we sleep? And why should we strive to get a good night’s sleep?
It’s not rocket science: Because quality sleep is vital to our health. But just because we know of something’s importance doesn’t mean we won’t take it for granted, does it?
And so to fix my sleep problem, I’m trying a different approach: I’m reading my way to the solution.
In my years of being a personal essayist (1.5 years), self-help writer (3 years), and growth-is-everything believer (29 years), I’ve come to this conclusion: there’s nothing you can’t immerse yourself in that won’t change you.
And what does it mean to immerse yourself in something?
Originally, I’d thought of this in terms of time. That is, the more time you spend on something — a job, relationship, hobby, or even a pet — the more immersed you are in it. And while this isn’t wrong, it doesn’t feel complete.
Surely, this applies to my dance era. That’s twelve years. Twelve years of being a student-dancer. Twelve frenetic years of dividing my time, my energy, and my whole being between tending to school work and dance training. (Honestly, if you were to ask me then, I felt more like a dancer-student rather than vice-versa). Yes, my priorities were split, but that doesn’t take from the fact that I spent a significant part of my life being as dedicated as a dancer as I could be.
Twelve years. Of course dance had a heavy hand in shaping who I was becoming. Today I really do believe I’m a more passionate and creative person largely because of it.
Maybe this is obvious: If you’ve applied yourself to a thing over a long time, that thing will inevitably influence you.
But consider this other scenario: My four-month fitness journey.
During the pandemic, as a way to recover from burnout, I enrolled myself in a fitness program. Exercise, diet (it was keto), regular check-ins with my coach, the whole shebang. As I was unemployed then, I had plenty of bandwidth not only to comply with my program — but go the extra mile. That is, I was able to dig deeper.
How does the keto diet work? What are macros and how do they affect my body and my energy? Are carbs really evil? (They’re not.) Why am I being given more weight training when I’m used to losing weight from three hours of dancing? Do you mean I don’t have to die from hours of exercising for it to count? For me to get into good shape? ALSO, wait, there are a hundred more compelling reasons to keep exercising aside from achieving visible abs?!
These were some questions I was able to unpack within those four months. Thankfully, I did see results. My body toned noticeably, until I dropped the keto diet and I wasn’t able to maintain it. (I was eventually able to make sense of this, too, after more research). But you know what has lasted until today?
My deeper understanding of fitness. Its fundamentals. Its role. The rich array of rewards it offers. And this, for me, is my most valuable gain from that brief but concerted fitness stint.
Four months versus twelve years.
Time spent is an obvious signifier of personal investment. But it might be more helpful to think of time as a medium for what truly lends something its transformative power. And that is depth.
This is why it’s so essential to immerse ourselves in whatever it is we deem important. It’s why taking the time to follow our noses or let ourselves fall into rabbit holes or, as the cartoonist Paul Karasik quipped, “study something you love to death, I mean… in depth!” for no practical benefit is worth more than we’ll instantly know. It’s why I strongly believe that, given a week, it’s better to travel to one city than squeeze in three where you’re left with little to no room to pay attention to a place beyond its facades and usual landmarks. It’s why the philosopher John Dewey corrected: “We do not learn from experience. We learn from reflecting on experience.” Because what is reflecting, if not applying ourselves to an experience again, but in a more perceptive way?
It’s why I decided to read 368 pages on the topic of sleep.
Neuroscience has shown that reading rewires our brain physically and permanently. But I suspect that this is the consequence of any immersive experience.
Now I’m not saying reading about sleep — absorbing in thorough and impressive detail how it works and why it matters — will be the magic bullet that will get me to build better sleep habits. But I do believe it helps, if only to change or deepen how I see sleep. After all, to understand something more clearly — isn’t that almost always half the solution?
While writing this piece, I thought a lot about my 2023 word of the year: Focus.
At the start of the year I told myself I’d focus on three things: my dog, my writing, and my relationships. Now I wish I could happily report that it’s been a year of razor-sharp focus and relentless commitment to these things, but it wasn’t. Looking back I know that it’s been a year filled with big reorientations and reckonings, and that amidst all of it, I tried my best to align my decisions with my priorities. But I often felt disappointed in myself for falling short of my expectations. It’s been hard not to tell myself that I could’ve been less distracted and scattered.
So it really helps to remember my starting point. That is, who I am by default. And by my generalist, jack-of-all-trades, yes-woman standards, and my astonishing record of spreading myself too thin time and again, this year was a hell of an improvement. This has been the most guided, mindful, and intentional I’ve felt. There were things I deliberately let fall by the wayside, which strangely makes me feel in equal parts sad and proud.
Choosing the word “focus”, I knew that was how it was going to be. It would mean saying “no” a lot, most likely to things I used to willingly say “yes” to. It would mean paring down my commitments or minimizing certain parts of my life so I could show up better in others. Still, on some days, this commitment to focus felt a lot like letting go of variety, which in some ways, felt like resigning myself to a less exciting, less nourishing life.
But as the year comes to a close, here’s what I am happy to report: this was not the case at all.
Now this I know: To focus is to say “no” to breadth so that I can say “yes” to depth. To focus is to invite immersive, intimate, and detail-rich moments.
To focus is to be a hands-on dog mom who gets to lovingly watch my teenage dinosaur, I mean golden retriever, and take him for long walks without haste. To focus is to give every piece of writing the necessary time and space it needs to be finished, and to have the grace and patience to manage my creative blocks. To focus is to do better at being more responsive to my friends and family, and being more present for them in a way that I have ignorantly not been in the past years. To focus is to steep myself into what matters most — and notice how I’m nourished by them.