2023 Mid Year Review

I've been drifting for the past six months

What are the main things you’ve been doing in June? How are they going? Why did you choose to do those things? And were there any surprises this month?

What were the main things you worked on in May? How did they go? Why did you choose to do those things? And were there any surprises in May? Now go back through April, March, February, and January. What did you work on, why did you work on them, and did anything surprise you?

I went through this series of exercises as a part of a mid-year review my friend Emily Crotteau held. Whenever I reflect on the past, I usually don’t match my intuition against reality. I usually find myself latching onto very specific moments, rather than taking a more holistic view. I found Emily’s suggestion to actually survey my life — both intuitively AND actually flipping through the past six months of my Google calendar — a foreign but surprisingly valuable experience. I was shocked by how valuable a mid-year review was, and I wanted to share some of my findings in part to inspire some of you to survey your past six months as well.

I Have Been Aimlessly Drifting This Past Half-Year Because I Have No Idea WTF I Want

When I was going through the past six months and trying to figure out what I did in that time, I realized the following: aside from publishing my dad essay, I had no true goals in mind for the past six months, and for perhaps the first time in my life, I had no distant goal in the future that I was working towards. I emerged out of my mother’s womb with the Ivy League one-track mind, and after I crawled my way into those pearly gates of prestige, I immediately set my sights on Most Prestigious Quant Finance Company Or Bust.

Post-college, even though I occasionally dream of the Living and Perhaps Prosperous Wage From Substack life, I haven’t exuded any consistent effort towards that dream. (Yes, I know I’ve talked a lot in the past six months about getting better at marketing, but I haven’t done a lot to that end if I’m being fully transparent.)

While I should be trying to grow to 1,000 and then 10,000 and then 50,000 subscribers, my revealed preference is that I’m not inspired enough by that goal. I talked a big talk about getting better at marketing, but my revealed preference is that I’m not willing to network in the conventional sense or learn how to distribute my content yet.

Why do I fixate over having such a large following, anyways? If I had to put it in a single word, I’d say SHAME. Some people are obsessed with their writing because they want to seek the truth or change people’s lives. Don’t get me wrong, I care a lot about helping people explore difficult emotions and feeling more liberated, but I also care about being able to save face at dinner parties rather than seeming weird. To this day, I am motivated in part by seeming impressive to Asian parents who pitted me against their kids. Yes, hello Karen’s mother, I’m not Most Prestigious Quant Finance Company material, but I do happen to be a Niche Internet Micro Celebrity with 15k followers, so suck it!

After graduating from college, running my life trying to win the Asian parent status game feels a little more distasteful. In other words, I think some deep part of my subconscious recognizes that I use my subscriber count as a proxy for how much I’m allowed to feel like a failure and doesn’t want to reinforce that pattern with a large subscriber count. I’m writing this blog to try to transcend my Asian parent stuff, not fall into the same patterns again!

I Have Been Aimlessly Drifting This Past Half-Year Because I Don’t Know How to Do Things Without Coercing Myself

What do brushing my teeth, consistently being a Slytherin about my self-promotion, and cleaning my room all have in common? Every time I think about these things, I want to curl up into a little ball of resentment and listen to ten hours of emo music instead.

Growing up, I was also forced to clean my room, and even now as a rent-paying, job-holding “real” adult who knows it’s good to be a neat person whose floor doesn’t look like their drawers vomited, I can’t clean my room in a way that feels good. Same goes for flossing or self-promotion. If I were a full-time flosser or marketer in corporate America, I’d immediately be fired for being completely ineffectual at coercing myself in these domains.

I can go to the grocery store and buy my favorite fruits without any self-coercion. For the past six months, I sometimes haven’t been able to take on more than that without feeling coerced. At some point, I’d like to take on more responsibility. It would be nice if I knew how to protect my oral health without wanting to throw a tantrum every other time I tried to floss, and it would also be really nice if marketing or you know, not being a dysfunctional hobgoblin, felt more natural.

My Life Will Go a Lot More Smoothly If I Track Variables That Are Currently Hidden To Me

Sometimes it takes me months to do something that’ll take five minutes, like when I spent a few weeks putting off asking for my vaccination records, only for the task to be easily completed in five minutes. There are a bunch of tasks in this domain: sending someone a text back, driving to an ATM and grabbing a bunch of cash, submitting some receipts for reimbursements, and so on. It can take me a few months to do any of these, depending on how much resistance I have.

During my mid-year review, I realized that while I COULD be faster by coercing myself into being a more functional adult, I should also consider being more REALISTIC with myself about how long it’ll take for me to get these done. I have a lot of resistance towards texting people back when I feel unresolved tensions with them or when I feel awkward around them, and it’s really costly to me to take pictures of receipts and catalog all of them. Even though I wish it were easy, it simply isn’t.

A big growth edge for me in my journey to be less of an anxious, angsty mofo is moving from deluded with false optimism to actually being calibrated to reality. Now that I know that being calibrated to reality, even if the reality is a bit brutal (like I will schedule a hang out in the next three months, and not last week like I hoped), is much better in the long run, I think I’ll be able to stop disappointing myself as much.

So there you have it. I was basically drifting for the past six months, but at least I got a funny Substack post out of it LMAO. (I actually got a lot more, such as realizing the root cause of my drifting). Let me know if you end up doing your own mid-year review, and let me know if you want any reflective prompts. Happy to prompt some existential crises!