24 Days of Making, Doing, and Being: December 20
Space for reflection, but resisting glamorous recaps and roundups.
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I think I have hit my maximum on year-end recaps and roundup posts.
I know I know, they can be fun to do, and people clearly love them, but they all end up feeling incredibly accomplishment focused, rounding up bullet lists of outcomes and successes to communicate a sense of value. They’re the TLDR versions of a year—we want to show that we did something, that all those small things built up to something big and important.
Personally, I get to this time of year and feel pretty muddled. Up against the usual social framework of worth and value, I start wondering if I did enough, and if I could have done it better, so the thought of circulating back through the list of highlights does in fact feel alluring.
But if I check in with myself, I find that what I really want is just to stop. To pause. To take a moment to breathe. To have some space. To sit for a bit before I even start to think about considering how successful the year was or wasn’t (which of course, all depends on whose definition of success I am abiding by).