bc MY calendar isn’t YOUR calendar

🌵🌵🌵 PART 1

When midnight struck at the very beginning of 2024, Brandon and I were on the couch eating Whataburger and watching Naked Gun.

It was perfect. 👫

In the ten (almost 11!) years we’ve been together, our holidays have drastically evolved.

The first few years, we did the more conventional stuff — like buying gifts for each other on all the standard gift-giving holidays and ensuring we attended as many family / friend functions as possible.

But now we’ve settled into selective celebrations.

Outside of each other’s birthdays, we don’t really do gifts.

Instead, for Christmas or Valentines or anniversaries, we spend money planning trips — even if they’re small.

We just decided we’d rather buy plane tickets or hotel stays instead of tangible items, and it’s been lovely.

Especially because we both work from home.

It often takes us leaving the premises for days at a time to actually mentally unplug from job things anyways.

There’s always a productive task I could be executing at home, no matter the room or the hour.

But for some strange and unexplainable reason, hotels are safe places to not check my work apps on my phone or my laptop, even though both things are in that tiny room with me.

It’s some kind of weird magic and I’m not here to argue with it.

Also, conventional holidays just simply don’t feel like “our” days.

If everyone is celebrating the New Year out on the town, that’s exactly where I don’t want to be.

(this was obviously the exact opposite case in my early 20’s when I was a party animal 💃 but that was a totally different person i don’t know her lol)

If everyone is expected to go to Christmas festivities with their family (including us), then we simply celebrate our own christmas together on a different day.

This year we went to Six Flags and rode rollercoasters.

It wasn’t ON christmas day, but it was ours ❤️

And we loved it.

🌵🌵🌵 PART 2

Additionally and similarly, I don’t personally have New Year’s resolutions.

It’s been at least half a decade since I can remember my last one.

Rather than waiting around for each January, I try to create new mini eras for myself every chance I get.

I like to trick myself into believing I have a lot more fresh starts than I actually do.

Remember how exciting it was to have a new semester, new school year, new job, all that fun stuff???

It’s like you get a chance to lightweight reinvent yourself, which is always a good time.

Typically for me, I use travel plans as the end of one era and the start of the next one.

So right now, yes, I do feel a little newness at the top of the year, but not because of the calendar - it’s because i just got back home from holiday trips.

My next little travel break or event is with my dad in late February.

So I have about 6 weeks to see how much progress I can make and who I can become that’s just like 1-3% better than when this little mini-era started.

I’ll do my absolute best to unplug while I’m gone.

Then I’ll take a day or two to catch up when I get back home.

And finally, I’ll sit down and plan the next stretch of time before traveling again in May.

Rinse and repeat as often as possible every few weeks or months — because life is short and we all have shit to do and I simply can’t wait around til the beginning of 2025 to make my next stage happen.

🌵🌵🌵 PART 3

I wrote Part 1 and Part 2 of this separately in my notes over the past week because this time of year brings these kinds of conversations.

But I didn’t realize until I put them both in paper (on screen?) that they both kind of follow a more timeless lesson in breaking up the big shit.

Things tend to be scary or anxiety-inducing when they seem too giant.

Rather than making one single Christmas celebration grand enough to keep my family, friends, and boyfriend all taken care of (which is never possible anyway), I split them up.

Rather than making one single resolution or sweeping life change every January, I create 5 to 10 smaller ones every year.

At work, the 3DMJ guys and I kept feeling ourselves get hung up on making one big, giant, multi-hour video course every few months — we felt they always had to be soooooo groundbreaking and perfect.

This felt slow and painful and gave the whole squad tons of friction due to the pressure and bloat of the project.

Instead, we switched to an all-access subscription model which was HUGE for our stress levels and output.

People pay to subscribe to our full library of video courses, and now we can make way more frequent additions to it.

If one of our coaches wants to take multiple months making a monster course, they still can.

But most of the time they’re happy to record a super specific mini-course on a niche topic that adds one more small notch to the catalog of learning content and keeps our creative juices flowing.

As a final example, I tried to convince myself this Substack you’re reading could be a monthly, bimonthly, or even weekly newsletter project.

But the lack of frequency made each entry feel way too important and precious.

If I keep it at least twice a week, this feels much more cozy and natural — like I’m in a constant conversation or thought stream.

As weird as it may sound, the increase in frequency makes it feel like a way smaller deal.

It’s easier for me to know that I’ll always be publishing something short in just a few days all the time, rather than taking a full break for a week or more without it top of mind and have to be reminded that “oh shit! it’s time to start thinking about the newsletter now!”.

It’s just simpler to decide like “the newsletter is part of my daily life now. it’s what i do”.

And I really appreciate you reading it very much 🫶

xoxo,

AV