new year, more grace.

it’s New Year’s Day, a day when many become motivated to make promises they can’t keep. over the years, i’ve promised to keep up daily workout routines and writing practices. more recently, i’ve learned to give myself more grace. to be okay with my imperfections and incompletions. to do what my mind and body allow me to do, and to give myself grace if i have to stop. i have to keep reminding myself to keep living, and to respond to what emerges in my life.

i don’t think it’s necessarily bad to set goals for yourself. what i do have a huge problem with is how we as a society and as individuals treat ourselves when we don’t meet our goals. i see this in “grind” culture. i see it whenever we call on images of hard-working people “pulling themselves up by their bootstraps”. because the other side of this, then, is that if you didn’t meet your goals, it’s because you didn’t “hustle” enough. you didn’t want it badly enough. and that just isn’t fair. it just isn’t true when there are so many other external socioeconomic and structural factors that we have to contend with every day. and, while rest and self-care are becoming more accepted (as in, hashtags and IG posts abound), we still see them as an individual’s responsibility. we never actually question the amount of work, of “hustle”, that our jobs demand of us. it’s just accepted as the norm. if we’re exhausted, we take care of that ourselves. it becomes another new year’s resolution. yet the demands of our jobs, our workloads, never have to change — we put it on ourselves to adapt. we never question whether that’s fair. we value work over our own humanity.

so instead, let’s live life. let’s respond to what emerges for us. let’s be open to the changes and the possibilities that present themselves to us. let’s give ourselves, and each other, more grace when something emerges that is more difficult or unexpected. let’s embrace our humanity and love every part of ourselves.