31 in January 31
Today is the first day of the rest of my life.
Of course, everyday is the first day of the rest of your life, but it’s especially poignant on January first.
It’s a new day, a new month, a new year! Everyone talks about starting fresh, setting resolutions, gym ads flood our feeds and everyone is over it within a few weeks.
No, resolutions don’t work for most people. Change is hard, and however shiny you try to make it look when the ball is dropping, January first is no better day to make a change than January second, or 15th, or April 29th, or August 3, a Monday, the end of a vacation, the start of a vacation, they day you start a new job. There are chances for change every day and, in fact, change needs to happen everyday, or it’s just a blip on the radar of life.
So, how do you change? Some people say to create a new habit it takes 21 days, or 30 days, or 60 days, of doing it everyday before it becomes habit and doing it becomes automatic. I don’t believe that for a second, partly because I’ve never been able to get to that point where anything is truly ‘automatic’.
I’m one of those people who still has to remember to brush my teeth everyday, and I’ve had a few good runs. I’m the kind of person that even missing one day means I struggle to get back on the wagon. Doesn’t matter if it’s something I want to do or long to do or should do. Nothing is automatic.
And doing half measures doesn’t help. I know my vices, I know that I crave the dopamine you get from doom scrolling. I’ve had to uninstall YouTube and Instagram from my phone because I cant be trusted with shorts there. Even timers, capping my time every day, is no good because I can just allow 15 more minutes.
I’ve come to the conclusion that no amount of short form video content is healthy. Like no amount of alcohol, or secondhand smoke, or asbestos, or lead is healthy. Once I start, I’m like some doped up mouse with a really bad case of the munchies.
So, no more videos, certainly not on my phone. But I still feel the craving, I need my next hit. So, what do I replace it with? Mindfulness? Reading? Writing? Walking? Does not watching shorts help me be the person I want to be? Someone who reads and creates and who takes better care of themselves?
There was a time I was closer to being that person. Circumstances have changed, the framework of my life has shifted away from what it was. I no longer work retail, I work from home. My days are longer, but there is no commute. The gaps that used to be built into my day are gone, the gaps that pushed me away from being at my desk and connected at all times, to someone who can go days without going outside, to someone who barely looks out the window, who has trouble reading more than a few pages at a time when once I would devour books.
Today is the first day of the rest of my life. I want to spend the first 31 days of my new life figuring out who I want to be, and what I want to do to get there, and what has to be done that I don’t really want to do.
That means I plan to write one 500 ish word blog post a day. Each day, I will post that 500 word post. I would say a certain time, but I’d rather not commit because that doesn’t seem fair. On a day off, I may be able to get it done early, and I don’t want to fall into the temptation of over editing, and on the days I work, it might be hard to get it out at a decent time because of when my work hours are. Ideally, i’ll pick my subject for the next day so I’m committed.
This is an experiment. I plan to use this blog as a way to track my experiments. This is for me, but feel free to join in. #31inJan25