This Christmas season was the first one “back to normal” since 2020. I had made my life easier by preparing gifts earlier, sending out bags of lemons before November ended. The traffic and multiple meet-ups in a week were grueling though. There was a point right before Christmas where I asked: “Is this how we used to celebrate? Because I am exhausted.” My boyfriend answered, “That’s why they call it the holiday rush.”
This year, our come-down from the holiday rush was a glorious staycation in Tagaytay with my cousins visiting from Sydney. We cooked, ate, talked, napped, read, and it was wonderful. The weather was cool; the Airbnb was decent; the kids had just enough exploring to do. I’ve always loved this week between Christmas and New Year. No expectations, no pressure. Time is wobbly and it goes by both too slow and too fast at the same time.
Today is the last day of the year. I’m not a goal-setter, so this season is not my season. I’m very much a Christmas person and less so a New Year person. A new calendar year, historically, doesn’t feel significant to me. I avoid the pressure of setting new year’s resolutions that I end up not keeping.
And yet. 2022 was a year that I did many things differently. It was a year that I had to confront my anxiety and burnout, over and over again, until there was no choice but to surrender to it. This sounds strange but once I had stopped resisting it, then I stopped feeling imprisoned. It was like, “Okay, well, this is my reality, so what can I do now that this is really my life moving forward…”
Here are some notable beginnings from the latter half of 2022, after elections:
Listening to my body
This phrase used to come up for me, pre-pandemic, in a yoga setting. It means don’t push yourself to the point where you’re already straining the muscle, back up so that you still get the benefits of the stretch but you’re not at risk of injury. Throughout the year, my body and my mind screamed for rest. I grew to accept that the burnout I was experiencing in 2021 as I was leaving my last corporate job was still around. I had been able to keep it at bay during the campaign, but it came back with a vengeance afterwards. Stress manifests in the body in mysterious ways. I’ve also picked up biking, partly to please my boyfriend, but also to get moving again. I hope to continue that and also healthier eating in the coming year.
Most proud that we got this bike secondhand :)
Overhauling my wardrobe
Like most women, I have a complicated relationship with body image. Having gained so much weight during the elections, I was panicking about my upcoming travels. Then I remembered the body positivity / body neutrality / body acceptance influencers I had followed years back. A key piece of advice: “Dress for the body you have, not the one you want.” This is a work in progress, but I’m happy with the clothes I have now, especially my swimwear – typically a fraught area for body image issues!
I am a walking Rifle Paper Co billboard, and I don’t mind.
Thinking long-term, or at least, beginning to
Most people are surprised when they hear that I don’t make long-term plans. Now that I’m partnered up with someone who does, who also has a very niche career, it’s inevitable that my mindset is shifting. While there’s nothing to report on this front yet, there are some opportunities we’re waiting to see unfold. 2023 is going to be interesting in that regard.
Celebrating our one-year anniversary <3
Assessing career paths
It took me so long to do this, but with the anxiety of not having a corporate job like a vice around my body, I would browse job postings on LinkedIn. Slowly, I was able to identify what I want to do and what I don’t want to do. Life’s too short to toil at a job that I’d hate. I figured out what interests me, what I want to learn about, and that’s already progress. I’ll take it.
If only being ARMY meant getting paid instead of spending all your money on merch…
Reevaluating my relationship with social media
Compared to previous years, I was posting a lot less. This doesn’t mean I was consuming less, just that I was almost completely intaking without much output. That also led to only a few issues this year, compared to a disciplined churning out of this newsletter. I did miss it, but I could not muster up the energy to keep up the old habits. I was also purposely avoiding local news, as my response to the heartbreak over losing the election. There’s only so much energy I have to get angry about something. I do miss creative years like 2013 (scrapbooking), 2017 (one photo a day), 2020 (one vlog a day), and 2021 (one newsletter a week) in the sense that I want that historical record of my life. I’ll keep thinking of what can be sustainable and fun for me in the long term.
So many unposted gems from our Morocco trip!
Traveling again, finally
Covid gutted us in many ways, but being trapped in the Philippines – at home! – for so long was awful when my calendar for the coming year had been planned from trip to trip. This year I went to Morocco, Singapore, Baguio, Pampanga, Tagaytay, and Boracay. A taste of my ‘normal life’ on the go does wonders for the soul.
Revenge travel in full (Singapore) sling swing
Resting / Making friends with my worries
Brene Brown talks about resting as time spent without a purpose. Back when I was a corporate girl, my time was very structured: weekday mornings squeezing in a yoga class if I could, working until the evening, then dinner after a short/long drive home and in bed by midnight. I’d pack my errands and meet-ups back-to-back on the weekends and feel proud whenever my schedule carried just as I’d intended. After the elections, I was left with a wide open calendar. So much time with not much to do. I didn’t want to meet up with or talk to people. Though I ran through the typical “down-time activities” of napping, binging Netflix, listening to podcasts, cleaning my closet, these were all still purposeful activities. At the back of my mind, my worries never left me. What was I going to do? Should I look for another job? What’s going to happen to us? I kept filling my time with activities to build a moat against the worries, yet I didn’t feel rested.
I wish I had a magic formula to impart how I overcame my anxiety. But I don’t have any. I did begin to relax when I came to terms with my life as it is now, and I accepted that I didn’t want to return to how it was before. And on the question of what I want my life to be, I can set my mind to flip the coin from fear to excitement. My life in the coming years can be many things, and I can figure it out along the way. I’m lucky to have a good support system that can help me through it.
Francis really enjoys catching me laughing.
During a Christmas meet-up with some friends, we were sharing about tough situations we’d each encountered this year. “Heavy times for all of us,” one of them said. 2022 has been a heavy year for me, but that doesn’t mean it was entirely unhappy. I’m in the most stable relationship of my life; I’ve had significant quality time with family; I’m largely still able to keep up my standard of living despite leaving the corporate world. The joy of having BTS in my life has been the same. Generally, life is good, when we look at it from that zoomed out angle. In 2023, I still want all of that. I haven’t thought of a word for the year yet, and reading back my entry from this time last year, I hadn’t come up with one then yet either. Maybe it will come to me, maybe it won’t. The seven beginnings I’ve identified are what I hope to continue in the year to come, possibly even after.
Thanks for sticking with this newsletter even though I’ve only posted four (!) times this year. I appreciate you being here through my low season. Energy permitting, I hope to update more frequently next year!
Feel free to share this newsletter, it’s open to the public. I always get excited any time people engage with me about things that I post, so please don’t hesitate to share your thoughts. Unless it’s mean or mansplainy: in that case, no thank you. <3 If this is your first time reading this, you can subscribe via the button below and then the next issues will land in your inbox.