2019 End-of-Year Goals Check-In
This end-of-year check-in feels like eating a caramel apple. I know it’ll be a little unwieldy—especially since I didn’t, for the second year in a row, do a Q3 check-in and now have to process six months of data and life versus three—and a little uncomfortable. Holding yourself up to the light always is. But once I get past that, it will be rich and enjoyable and stay with me for a long time.
Let me open this second paragraph with how I usually open the first one. I’m writing this from Mexico City, with the traffic humming and the bright-green trees reaching for the clear sky outside my window. It’s strange to be in the northern hemisphere and have some visible signs of the end of the year—brown leaves underfoot, days that grow dark at 5:30 p.m.—but having skipped others, like the leaves turning red or orange before falling and snow accompanying the darkness.
And on my failures to do a check-in September: it’s not that I forgot. I’ve probably thought of it twenty times since. So why didn’t I sit down and complete it?
One answer is that I was busy with client work and pitching and publishing on sites that aren’t my blog, was barely able to prioritize publishing a few of my longform travel essays here, and deprioritized (implicitly) doing something more mechanical like a check-in. But it’s not like I’m working 40 hours a week; I could’ve found the time.
A more reasonable answer is that it just didn’t feel like enough had changed. After the first half of this year’s transitions of living in BA and leaving BA and spending three months backpacking across the US, much of which I reflected on in previous goal check-ins and essays, I let the other months kind of fade together.
But that’s the point of a check-in, isn’t it? A scheduled time to stop and measure progress? And if it feels like not enough or too much has happened, that’s probably a time especially ripe for stepping back, taking stock, and re-engaging.
One more thing I messed up: in my first quarter and then subsequently in my second quarter check-in, I completely forgot to copy + paste in my final goal category, Invest in my communities and relationships. Pretty telling that that one completely slipped my mind, isn’t it? Just wait till we get there this time. It doesn’t look so good for me.
I failed. That’s okay. We continue onwards.
And now for the goals (all of them this time!) and their mark-to-market. TL;DR edition: travel, good; mental and physical health, medium to good; work, very good; money, medium to bad; relationships, medium. I did much of what I set out to do in 2019, but not all of it, and failed on some pretty painful sections.
Let me tell you how.
Keep travel a part of my life.
1. Live in Buenos Aires (and maybe another city later in the year—CDMX?) with a traveler’s perspective. How? Explore new restaurants, theaters, museums, neighborhoods; don’t get complacent, do make new friends with locals and other travelers there.
I said in Q2 that finding my next city would be the focus of Q3 and building a base there would be the focus of Q4. It hasn’t worked out that way.
We got to Mexico City in Q3, gave it an eager two-week exploration before zipping over to New York for a week and a half, and then came back, having experienced life in a great city, and realized we had signed up (literally; we’d signed a sublease agreement before leaving) for three months in a not-great city. We decided CDMX wasn’t right for us but we still enjoyed it, and enjoyed it like locals who are also travelers: we luxuriated in the routines of going for walks in the park and cooking dishes that required more than three ingredients, while also visiting museums, exploring other neighborhoods, and eating many a street taco.
We didn’t do quite as well on restaurants as I would’ve liked; food is expensive here, and also, after a long time of eating out on the road, I appreciated cooking at home more than I ever have before.
But this counts as a win. I can honestly say that I’ve lived in three countries now (I think having your own apartment / lodging + related utility bills is necessary condition for that; months as a live-in nanny in Spain or Uruguay or receptionist in the Galapagos don’t count). I now know that Buenos Aires is a place I’d go back to and call home again, and Mexico City isn’t.
2. Get back out on the road. How? Spend at least four months of the year backpacking / seeing new places.
Was already a win, and finished that way. A week in Brazil, three and a half months in the US, two and a half months traveling around Baja California and the interior of Mexico. Check.
Stay well-rounded.
3. Be confident about my fluency in Spanish and continue to improve it. How? Continue to communicate in Spanish with potential clients, read one long article or short story in Spanish/week, get back to regularly writing in Spanish a little every week.
Hello, failure! Nice to see you again.
Again, like I wrote about in Q2, my Spanish is definitely at fluent level and it does continue to improve, but that’s mostly from eavesdropping on old Mexican men as they gossip on the street and/or talking to Diego. Plus watching Casa de Papel and La Casa de las Flores in Spanish. I don’t talk in Spanish to clients, I don’t read in Spanish, and I rarely write in Spanish. It’s just hard and inefficient and I don’t like it. And that is not good for my continued language acquisition.
4. Keep my reading up. How? Read at least three books/month, and try to have one of them be something other than a novel, to improve diversity of my library.
Still a win. Have fully leaned into the hack I discovered earlier this year, where I realized reading well-written, well-structured essay collections and/or memoirs totally counts for this and that I enjoy both of those genres.
I’m not on some crazy reading kick so far—I track reading on my birthday cycle, and right now I’m about three months in to my 26th year and I’ve read 20 books, just below average—but I am reading a good balance of material. I think part of my slightly slower pace is that a lot of these are books that aren’t quite as captivating as a well-plotted novel, but part is also that I have good wifi for once and have been watching a loooot of TV. Finally got to see My Beautiful Friend, and it’s magic.
5. Maintain a healthy level of normal activity. How? Hit 10,000 steps/day or above for all of 2019. Any extra working out is great.
This remains a win, barely. I have maintained a healthy level of activity, hitting that average, and in CDMX, I did Pilates twice a week for two months and felt deeply happy about it. But a combination of waaaay overindulging on favorite treats when we were in the States + eating poorly on the road + giving in way too many times to the “we deserve this” logic for eating pizza for dinner again has meant that I’m not feeling particularly healthy, even with the steps. I know eating is such a major part of health and I truly am trying to ignore it less. I ate a bag of spinach by myself in our last week in CDMX, nary a wilted leaf left to waste. Now if only that happened once a fortnight versus once a year.
6. Get and stay outside. How? Be outside for minimum of 15 minutes every day and never fall into vitamin D deficiency again!
This is a win. Sunshine is great, and being your own boss means you can regularly take off two hours in peak afternoon rays to bumble around and be happy in it.
And with Kav having given me the best-ever birthday gift of a complete, personalized skincare regime that included a fantastic daily SPF 45 moisturizer, I have been doing it with sunscreen! Though I went for my annual skin cancer screening and the dermatologist reminded me I gotta pay attention to the boring parts like hands and elbows, too. Okay. Always room for improvement.
Write.
7. Keep writing my blog. How? Write a minimum of 2,000 words/month in blog posts.
Win. Wrote 30,000+ words here this year. I didn’t publish every month, but overall monthly average is above this goal, so let’s count it.
8. Keep writing for others. How? Get at least one six
pieces of writing published under my name in some kind of publication in
2019, and get paid for at least three other pieces of writing five of
them.
Very, very much a win. I’ve published 15+ articles for five reputable online platforms this year—The Everygirl, HelloGiggles, FastCompany, OZY, and LiisBeth—and worked with half a dozen big-name corporate clients to publish dozens of marketing-focused blogs and webpages, often under my own name. And all of them paid.
I don’t plan to write for free again, unless the byline is truly incredible, and even then, ideally not. And I think I’m going to focus much more on my journalism career going forward than I thought I would at the beginning of this year. I started off editing to make money, then moved into some writing, and now realize that writing is just as lucrative as editing and even more enjoyable. (Though my ideal portfolio would always include a mix of both.) I’m getting giddy about setting my goals in this category next year.
Money, money, money (must be funny / in a rich man’s world).
9. Support my life in Buenos Aires and later on the road by
writing and editing, and make enough to supplement the $5,000 I have saved
for travel later in 2019. How? Pull in $800/month with freelancing work
and continue to live by my BsAs budget. Make minimum $1,000/month
freelancing, save anything additional (and pay taxes with it appropriately),
and live in line with a travel budget of about $30/day once on the road.
Huge fail, but not without promise. Let’s cover the bad first.
Budget-wise, I expected that Diego and I would spend a collective ~$50/day on the road. In the US, our actual spending was $73/day. I figured we’d be able to cut down in Mexico.
That was not at all true! Our traveling-around-Mexico average was $120/day, driven up mostly by transport (I expected our two flights to be expensive, but the expensive buses were an unpleasant surprise) and occasional luxuries (like a tequila tour in Jalisco or a snorkeling trip in Loreto). That average doesn’t include Diego’s $$$ emergency dental care. I shudder to imagine what it would be if it did.
Our based-in-Mexico-City average finally, finally came in at $60/day, the closest we’ve made it to our budget. But five sustained months of higher-than-expected spending, combined with Diego’s bumpy road to finding a sustainable freelance income base, meant several bad things:
1) I dipped into savings to pay bills. (This is kind of a stretch, since the savings were unexpected; I overpaid into my 401k in 2018 and got the refund this year, and dipped into that. It’s a little funny, as at this point in my freelance career I can’t imagine having enough extra money to pay into a retirement plan, yet alone overpay…but that’s okay! We’ll get back there one day.)
2) I upped my income goal to $2,000/month to cover Diego’s portion and our increased need. Not bad so much as unexpected, and the first few months were stressful.
3) I didn’t save enough to pay my tax bill come next April without digging into savings again. I’ll be able to write some things off and hopefully lower it, but that will be painful. I’ll need to get on quarterly payments next year.
The good, though:
1) I still have savings to pay things like my tax bill with, having not touched my non-travel savings.
2) I met my $2,000/monthly goal (and even met double that goal for November and December!), and diversified and increased my income as the year went on. I moved away from Upwork, which was a great platform for getting started but got increasingly expensive with their 20% cut of my fees + their new pay-to-apply program, and went out on my own and got clients + bylines and managed all of the logistics of it. And now the majority of my income comes from clients I work with directly, which is great.
3) …nothing good about taxes.
4) BONUS: I got to invite my family to Mexico for Christmas! A very good use of what could’ve been my tax savings, in my book.
Overall, I’m really proud of this fail. A full year of working on my own, supporting myself and often my partner, and learning about running a business while also improving my craft. I’m excited for another year of doing it—hopefully with even more payout.
10. Make sure I have enough money to move back to the States when/if the time comes. How? Do not further touch that fund.
Win. Travel savings are mostly gone, but separate other-life savings are still doing fine.
11. Make giving money to people and causes I care about a real part of my life. How? Donate 10% of my income. Even if it feels harder now that I have less. If I get in the habit of doing it now, one day when I have more, it’ll be easier to continue.
Nope. Fail. I donated 3% of my income this year—less than a third of what I set out to. I am spending more money on other people, like Diego and family, but I don’t think I can count that as giving money away.
I continue to have so many issues around money. I want to have enough of it to be able to support myself—but also to be able to live a life of moderate pleasure, and to save for the future, and to be a responsible taxpayer, and to keep traveling. And I can’t even meet all of those goals, yet alone the separate goal of giving to charity. I’m afraid I won’t have enough one day. That something will happen and I’ll need to not have given any away. And while I logically know that it probably won’t and that I’d figure it out and that giving money makes us happy and is the right thing to do, I can’t do it. Not at the scale I set out to.
I need to think about what to do about this next year. Do I accept this about myself and let it go? Or do I double down on trying to improve here?
Invest in my communities & relationships.
12. Stay in touch with my family and, in the healthy relationships, be there with and for them however I can while away. In the unhealthy ones, don’t get hung up on them. How? Weekly phone calls, regular video chats, and planning some family time for next year (May or December).
Maybe. A half-credited semi-win here. I’ve maintained good relationships with some members of my family, but not all, and I’m not sure if the ones I’ve failed at count as unhealthy or not. My therapist would say they do, but it feels strange to write off family like that.
I did make double family time, though—all of May we were in and around Michigan, and my family came down to Mexico for Christmas. I’m very happy to have had both opportunities to see them.
13. Stay in touch with my friends while I’m away. How? Build & execute a better birthday-remembering/acknowledging process, send regular missives to those I really care about. Be planful about this because that works for me.
Fail. Perhaps because it’s a hard nut to crack, perhaps because it requires money, perhaps because I didn’t even look at this goal once after writing it, but I did not do this. I’ve stayed in touch with some people very well, some people okay, and some people poorly. I haven’t been very planful (perhaps that’s the failure), though I have gotten lucky, remembering to check in on certain days or finding time to connect every once in a while. I know from my time in the States this summer that many of my relationships can survive long periods without regular contact, but I don’t want to lose any accidentally. I need to improve here.
14. Grow my girl gang in Buenos Aires for as long as I’m there. How? Host events at least weekly and work on at least three new creative projects for ourselves or for clients. Enjoy it and them.
Ugh. Why did I write “girl gang”? At least in that, I have matured this year. I would count this as a win; I did continue to see many of the women in BA that I grew close with and did do a couple of exciting content creation projects before leaving (though I think just two). And Brinley is still someone I talk to on an almost daily basis, and I’m infinitely grateful for that.
The Galentines networking event I organized and hosted for 30 women was definitely a highlight… and massive thanks to Cam and Brinley for pitching in!
15. Continue to grow in my relationship with Diego. How? Keep doing what we’re doing—have fun, communicate well, show our love for each other in all the ways that we’re inspired to do—and be able to start planning (and then executing on!) a big trip together.
Phew. A win, certainly, but not one without its setbacks. Relationships are hard! Ours was hard when we started and I’d never dated anyone before, then hard when we had to deal with money and finance three months into dating, then hard when we packed up Diego’s life and set off for the States, then hard as we traveled for 5 months without any kind of home, then hard as we settled down in CDMX and tried to make one. Beautiful, too, along the way, without a doubt: cooking together, laughing together, exploring together, learning together. Trusting one person more than anyone else in the world to take care of you. Feeling adored and adoring in return. Building a feeling of home with another person that can live within you no matter what walls you’re surrounded by (or not). But not without its low moments: screaming at each other in a motel parking lot in Utah, having the same fight about money six times in Mexico City, hurting each other’s feelings while whisper-crying in a hostel lounge in Puebla.
I love Diego, and we have grown together, and I look forward to the growth and the adventure to come. Full stop.
But—not full stop—I will never stop talking about the fact that not-so-great moments happen, too. We (as in humanity) normalize this version of relationships that is all vacations and happiness and perhaps a passive-aggressive Instagram caption at the most, and that’s not what relationships are. They are all that beauty but also moments of insecurity, frustration, anger, and pain. And they’re worth it so long as there’s more of the former than the latter. But they are not perfect. My relationship is not perfect. I’m very happy to be in it nevertheless.
Onwards to 2020
A new decade! New goals to write (and hopefully achieve, or certainly learn from the pursuit of). Writing, living, traveling, exploring, eating to do. And how thrilled am I to be here doing it.
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