In 2017 I had the sensation that I was collapsing toward a bottom, and then in 2018, I felt like I had barely survived, and I kept not thinking about how big of a psychological hole I needed to dig myself out of. I began to feel I was unstacking problems that were stacked very high, like when you need to get to something that is buried under a lot of other things that it turns out you also have to deal with. So I just kept trying to unstack them.
In 2019 I attempted to keep consequences of actions close to their causes, as I described in this old Quora post I wrote in October of 2019:
Keep consequences tied as closely as possible to the action you took that precipitated them.
Don’t let yourself get away with as much as you are able—-crack down on yourself quickly. Otherwise your problems will stack and knot over time.
In late 2019 I also began to get the message that I needed to level up a few things, and end a few things. This came to a head at the end of the year and into the beginning of 2020 when I ended some of my strongest social patterns and also ended my work situation, in which I was playing something of an apprentice role. I set off on my own into 2020 and I feel professionally fine about how it went, given the pandemic.
I also ended my writing drought and started writing again daily thanks to Josh’s idea to do this newsletter.
And finally, I ended my divorce, aside from the final dotting of the i’s and crossing of the t’s — we went to trial in October and finalized all our negotiations. I grabbed the last of my stuff in November. The Hot War is over, basically.
2021 feels to me to be a year in which I’m going to keep exercising new patterns and ne`w muscles in order to take maximum advantage of my current situation: I’m a father with a close relationship to his kids but only am in charge of them 28% of the time. The rest of the time is mine to build stability and get out of various kinds of debt and build strength.
What are you working on this year?
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