Year of Radical Self-Care: January

PSA:  This is a post about my goals.  I need to write it for myself, but I’m fairly certain nobody else actually cares.  No need to read.  It will not hurt my feelings.

In the past, I have done the Year of Butterflies, the Year of Don Quijote, and the Year of Trying to Clear Off the To-Read Shelf.  In 2024, I’m doing things a little differently, but the overarching theme is the Year of Radical Self-Care.

 

For Reasons, the last few years have been hard.  I mean, there was a pandemic in there, among other things.  I’ve been coping (you can tell, because I’m still here!), but recently I’ve begun to realize that I’ve been using up my reserves of, well, basically, everything.  I’m less healthy than I’d like to be, more stressed, and less cheerful.  In short, it is time to do some restoration work on myself.

 

The first challenge, in coming up with a way to make a goal for self-care, is that the goal itself could be counterproductive, adding more stress instead of reducing it.  I mean, writing “Relax” in a beautiful cursive script on my endless to-do list is not going to work, exactly. 

 

Then there is the whole question of what counts as self-care.  I recently read something somewhere (yeah, sorry; don’t remember where) about how we culturally conflate self-care with self-soothing.  Self-care can be hard things like dealing with bank stuff or doing tough workouts.  Self-soothing things, like hot baths or comfort foods, can also be self-care, but are not, by themselves, going to solve long-term life issues.

 

But wait!  There’s more!  I, as an overachiever, have many areas in my life that need some radical self-care.  Tackling them all at once would be… something between overwhelming and hilarious.  How do I figure out what is most urgent and/or important?

 

Here’s what I’ve decided to do:

 

Each month, I can choose up to two areas of focus.  For each area, I have a rule, a list of challenge options, and a list of soothing options.  I need to follow the rule and do one challenge and one soothing each day.  At the end of the month, I get to choose the focus for the next month.

 

In January, I decided that I would get the most traction from taking care of my body and improving my mind.  The body rule is:  no sugar.  No sugar means no soda, no candy, no cookies, no cake.  It does not mean that I can’t eat things like fruit.  Challenge things for my body could include things like longer than usual cardio, weight workouts, bonus workouts, and the like.  Soothing things are things like naps and baths and massages.

 

The brain rule is:  no TV.  It’s not that think TV is bad, it’s just that I get into a couch rut in the evenings.  Instead, I’m going to read.  I’ve had one particular anatomy book sitting on my to-read shelf for years now.  I did the math, and I’ll finish it handily if I just read 20 pages a day.  (Actually, I’ll finish early and I’ll start on some other nonfiction book in my shelf.)  That’s the challenge part.  For the soothing part, I get to spend at least fifteen minutes a day reading something fun.

 

I even made myself a mini vision board and checklist.  With luck and hard work, by the end of the month, I should be ready for a new couple of rules and the challenges they bring.

December 2023 Reading

I began the year with a semi-goal of reading 69 specific books.  Here at the end of the year, I read 89 books, but some of the 69 are still unread.  I am all right with this.

In December, I read fourteen books, of which four were picture books, three were nonfiction, and the remainder were fiction.

 

Picture books first.  My librarian kid gave me four picture books for Christmas because he said I needed them.  He was right.  Grumpy Monkey by Suzanne Lang is both hilarious and useful for those of us who could use some practice feeling our feelings.  It’s a fun read-aloud for kids of all ages (yes, I did read it to my 26 year old because he was handy; this is normal in our family.).

 

Joseph Kuefler has created an adorable world in his Digger books.  I read The Digger and the Flower, The Digger and the Duckling, and The Digger and the Butterfly.  All three books are about increasing our awareness of the world around us and gaining empathy.  I love the caring community built by the heavy machines and their surroundings.

 

On to nonfiction.  I got The Portable Renaissance Reader edited by James Bruce Ross and Mary Martin McLaughlin out of a Little Free Library some time ago.  It has both the virtues and the drawbacks of an anthology.  It was great to get a taste of various kinds of writing around all kinds of topics throughout the Renaissance period, but each selection is presented with nothing but a title, the name of the author, and the year.  A small amount of context might have been helpful.  Further, the selections were not chronological.  I’m sure the editors had some reason behind their organizational scheme, but it remained opaque to me.  As an introduction to the thinking of the period through primary sources (albeit translated and/or abridged), it is a useful book.  I know more after reading it than I did before.

 

My church book group is reading No Future Without Forgiveness by Desmond Tutu.  We’re not quite done discussing it as a group, but I did finish the reading.  It is Bishop Tutu’s first person account of his time with the Truth and Reconciliation Committee in South Africa after the demise of apartheid.  It’s not an easy read, despite Bishop Tutu’s facility with language, but it is important.  I am always shocked by the horrible things that humans think of doing to other humans.  Set against the brutal and terrible events of the times are the kind and humane efforts of other humans to get right with each other.  There are lessons in this book for Americans because we do need to address the lingering effects of structural racism in our own country while continuing to live together.  Highly recommend.

 

Starting in January, I will be helping to facilitate a Sacred Ground workshop (an anti-racism training program at my church that I attended last year).  In preparation, it was suggested that I read Facing Feelings in Faith Communities by William M. Kondrath.  I needed this book.  The central thesis is that many of us have been trained to think that some of our emotions are more acceptable than others, so we tend to substitute culturally approved feelings for our real but less palatable ones.  The trouble with this is that our feelings point us toward what we need and when we make those substitutions, we fail to get our needs met.  The book is definitely thought-provoking and useful as I try to live with authenticity and integrity.

 

Now the fiction.  My other kid gave me the new Patrick Rothfuss novella, The Narrow Road Between Desires, for Christmas.  It’s sweet and funny and clever and exceptionally well-written.  I will take any opportunity to spend more time with Rothfuss’s characters in his world.  Check it out.

 

I continue to gallop along through the Veronica Speedwell novels by Deanna Raybourn, polishing off A Murderous Relation, An Unexpected Peril, and An Impossible Impostor.  They are always good fun, although the particular set-up to the last one was a little anxiety-provoking for me.  It was only my faith in the genre requiring everything to turn out at least mostly all right that got me through to the end.  Highly recommend the series as a whole.

 

Speaking of series, I read The Silver Tracks by Cornelia Funke, which is the fourth of the Reckless books.  I thought it was also the last, but I was wrong.  I have to wait for the fifth one to come out for the various issues to get resolved.  This is unfortunate, because I want to know.  I am liking the series quite a bit because it does not skirt hard problems and because the characters are strong and relatable.

 

My librarian kid gave me The Bromeliad Trilogy by Terry Pratchett for Christmas 2022 and I finally read it this week (not because I didn’t want to do it earlier, but because I was trying to prioritize reading stuff that had been on my shelf for longer).  It is hilarious and true and wonderful, like basically all of his other work.  The three novels that make up the trilogy are not Discworld books, but rather set in our own world.  They treat the adventures of small people called nomes, who discover that the world is much bigger than they imagined.  Chaos ensues.  I laughed out loud repeatedly and would recommend this book to everyone.

 

Finally, I read The Sun and the Star by Rick Riordan and Mark Oshiro.  It is a story about Nico Di Angelo from the Percy Jackson book.  Like the rest of the series, it does a really good job of allowing characters to be who they are and to become even more.  It’s funny and complicated and sometimes sad, but 100% worth reading.  It also centers around a young gay couple in a deeply affirming way, so it would be a great gift for any young queer people who need to see themselves as protagonists in a positive light.

 

So:  December total:  14

Fall total:  34

2024 total:  89

November 2023 Reading

I did not meet my JaNoReadMo goal of ten books, but I did read seven.  Four were nonfiction and three were fiction.

Last year when we went to Pismo Beach to see the butterfly migration, I bought Pismo Monarch Butterflies:  Magic, Myths, and Mysteries by Cheryl Powers et al.  It was informative and fun to read.  Among other things, I learned about the link between monarch migration and Day of the Dead in Mexico; butterflies may be the souls of our dearly departed visiting us.  The book points out that the Pismo butterfly grove is located on land appropriated from the Chumash people.  Of course, there is also a bunch of information about the butterfly migrations themselves and the butterfly lifecycle.  Reading the book is not nearly as cool as going to visit the grove, but it is pretty cool.

 

One of these days I’m going to get back to biking and one of the things I want to do is to bike the American River Parkway.  So when I came across a helpful book called Biking and Hiking The American River Parkway by Robin Donnelly, it was a no-brainer to buy it.  What I particularly like about this book is that it gives information about the history and natural history of the places along the trail.  I learned all kinds of good stuff.  The book takes the trail in small increments, so the information is truly extremely local.

 

Carrots Love Tomatoes by Louise Riotte is more of a reference book than a book to read straight through.  I skimmed and will keep it handy when it is time to plan next year’s garden.  What I read was informative and clear.  I might have read the whole thing if I happened to be ready to cross the line from enthusiastic but unwilling to do hard work gardening to gardener seeking expert knowledge and advice.  What I did take away was that some pairings can repel pests, which is super double awesome.

 

What I learned from Yelizaveta Orlova’s Chess for Beginners is that what I need to do now is to play a bunch of chess if I want to get better at it.  Given a puzzle, I can usually figure out the correct next move, but confronted with a new game and all the choices, I freak out.  Again, I have not made the decision to develop past dabbler, but I know that options exist if I ever do.  Frankly, I preferred the book I got on chess for kids (I wrote about it whenever it was that I read it), but that might just be because I am basically a child.

 

The first volume of Amadis of Gaul translated by Edwin Place and Herbert Behm covers the first two books of the epic work.  I’ll get to the second volume (books three and four) eventually.  I chose to read it because it is the foundational text of Don Quijote’s madness.  Of all the knights, he esteems Amadis the most.  I’m kind of surprised, except that Amadis was in Spanish.  I liked the story, but it is not as deeply engaging as the Arthurian cycles nor as fanciful as Orlando Furioso.  There is a lot of fighting in lieu of conversation, which gets boring.  Possibly my favorite part was when Amadis and Galaor come to a crossroads and discover a dead knight laid out in state and Amadis, who wants to hurry back to his lady, basically says, “Crap.  Another adventure that’s going to delay me.”  (That’s the gist, but he says it in elevated and knightly language.)

 

Finally, I read the next two books in Cornelia Funke’s Reckless series, Living Shadows and The Golden Yarn.  I enjoyed both of them very much, but I need to get the fourth book.

 

November total:  7

Fall to date:  20

Year to date:  75