2023 Goals
I said I was going to live my last day of 2022 one half hour at a time and then I did.
I read in bed and highlighted lines I loved from the book I’m reading. “Amsterdam had swollen like a cracker in hot milk.” (Barkskins.)
I texted people I wanted to see. I walked to the park and pulled up my shirt and rolled down my pants and laid there, sprawled on an old sheet in the December sunshine, under palms trees that, delightfully, exist year round in this place I thought I might like moving to and then did, this city of moveable feasts and wet afternoons. I lived in my body. I had a coffee and a beer and not in that order. I kissed and was kissed. I ate carrot cake. I drank some, danced a lot, wore cargo pants for 17 hours straight.
It felt so good I continued it into the first morning of the new year. I kept living one half hour at a time, my decisions stacking like an Annie Erboux sentence, slowly filling the page. Eating up the blank hours, soaking in the arbitrary newness.
I went back to my favorite spot in my favorite park. I ate a pastry under a cobalt sky. I listened to music, and I talked to people I love, and I took pictures of fun things I saw on the ground. I wore a thick fuzzy scarf looped twice around my neck and bits of it got in my mouth when I drank a green juice. I walked home under orange trees. I lit a diffuser and laid down as my living room went dark around it, breathing in the smell of clean laundry and watching the flame. I slept not enough but that was okay.
A half hour isn’t very long. It’s a significantly shorter timeline than I’m used to thinking in. I am not preternaturally good at living in the present. I feel safest when I can see the scaffolding.
But I have learned through five years of travel and love and loss and pandemic and physical and mental health trials that I don’t need the scaffolding. I can live in singular moments. In dinners and sunsets and embraces and conversations and skinny dips and long mosquito-saturated waits for the bus back from Tigre.
I was always good at living in the future. As it turns out, I’m pretty good at living in the now, too.
In 2023, I’d like to live in the half hour.
This year, I have no plans to move continents or embark on a massive journey or double my income. (I once had all of those goals, and you can read about how they went here, and here, and here.)
I don’t plan on becoming a new person, one who meditates every day and sees “feelings [as] natural phenomena, just tides lapping the shore.” (That’s from Bliss Montage, and it got highlighted on December 29.) I still have goals, because I’m me and I always will. This year, though, they are about little joys. Everyday acknowledgment. Gratitude and creation. I want less to accomplish things and more to appreciate them.
Here, specifically, is what I hope to do in 2023:
Cherish my existing community and invest in new ones; love well and be well loved.
It comes down to people every time, doesn’t it?
A friend recently told me that all relationships are ephemeral. It was depressing advice until it wasn’t. If he’s right — if every time we love someone and they love us back is a temporary, unplanned overlap and not a foundational eventuality — it gives a certain freedom to the whole proceedings. “Time is a circle, and every circle eventually must close.” (Cloud Cuckoo Land; highlighted the second week of January; I’m late in posting this in case you couldn’t tell.)
In 2023, I want to love and let go and keep loving anyways — and I want to be loved along the way:
- Continue to find community in Valencia. Part of living in a country I’m not from means befriending other outsiders. Part of being an outsider is leaving. My Valencia social circle has changed more than I’d imagined it would when I started. (More than my Buenos Aires circle did in a year, for sure.) I accept that now. I want to hug my people close and stay open to meeting new ones. How? Throw and attend goodbye parties. Be generous with my friends and listen to my instincts when I find people I click with. Plan things. Attend things. Spend a night a week in community.
- Stay close with my people. Bringing together some of my all-time favorites for my birthday last year was soul-changingly fulfilling. I want to keep that energy, even when international reencuentros aren’t in the cards. How? Invest time in regular catch-ups and phone calls and video chats. Travel to see Miss Brin. Travel with and to my sister. See my aunt and my grandma. Make it to at least one big friend wedding in the States. See The Light Brigade for our retreat. Visit Cam and Camilla in London. Visit Jigs in Milan. Visit New York babies.
- Be a good host. I loved having so many people come visit in 2022, and I want to keep the threshold propped open for the next 12 months to come. I want to be the host I felt lucky to find in my travels. I want to bring people who visit into this home that I love in this city that I love and wrap them up in care. And for people who share my city, I want them to come for breakfasts and baking dates and feel at home in my space. How? Keep my house and take care of it. Invest in things that matter to me: art, a stocked pantry, a Rolodex of all breakfast deals within a 20-minute walk. Welcome the people I know are coming (Tracey! Gabi! DZ! Dani! Katie?) and those who will.
- Build a stronger literary community. My writers’ group gives me support and accountability and no shortage of book recommendations. And I have book clubs in English and in Spanish I love. I want to keep those communities up and running, but I want to expand into a broader literary community, too. How? I want to start working with some kind of publishing enterprise again — being a reader for a journal, or planning a festival, or participating in some kind of English-language project here in Spain.
- Be in love. I debated if this belonged on this list at all, and if it did, if it belonged here. But I believe in wanting things — in articulating needs and desires, in tacking a route towards them. I have never not been grateful for love, even if the me of five months ago would’ve struck a big red line through that sentence. “I live my life in widening circles /that reach out across the world. /I may not complete this last one /but I will give myself to it.” (Rilke.) How? Be open. Be communicative. Be experimental.
Make things.
I feel alive when I’m making. I can be chopping vegetables or designing a party invite or shaping clay or writing down the beats of a story while looking out the window so I don’t scare the words on the page. The feeling is the same. If I am using my senses and my hands and my brain to create something new, I feel like bread rising on a warm windowsill: slowly bubbling, content in my expansion. Zephyrean.
This year, I’m separating the process of making from the process of making money from it. I want to:
- Write regularly. I’ve tried for years to be prescriptive about how my writing should happen: morning pages, daily half-hours, long Sunday afternoons. I’m not saying any of that in 2023. How, then? Write six short stories and six essays I’m proud of. Length to be determined; subject matter, too. But I will write and I will finish things.
- Craft regularly. Craft is making. It is tactile and explorative and fun — and all of those things more than art is. I want to practice crafts I know I enjoy, like ceramics and cooking, and also try a few new ones. How? Keep up with once-weekly ceramics class and make and gift many beautiful, satisfyingly-hewn things. Take Sunday art classes whenever I can. Try a new craft (jewelry making, sewing, cooking class) at least twice.
- Host events. I debated whether this went in community or making or business (should I make money from these one day??), but it feels like it belongs thoroughly here. What I like most about having events is the full sensory leap of them: the theme, the decor, the food, the atmosphere, ready to be drawn up and played out. The making, and then the experiencing of what was made. How? I’d like to host something once a month: a dinner party; a games night; a party-party.
Take care of my body and brain; live in the present with them whenever possible.
2022 was a big year for the electronic lump of meat and the collection of bones and vital organs that is Katherine. Both brain and body changed significantly, neither one on purpose. Moving to Europe and eating more whole foods and getting back into sport made me feel stronger than I have in ages; moving away from everything I knew and trying to build a fulsome life and regularly putting myself out there made me feel more emotional than I have in ages. I learned I can run faster and feel worse than I thought.
I went to physical therapy for the first time, when I hurt my shoulder playing volleyball. I went to psychiatry for the first time, when I needed extra tools to sort out less visible hurts. The same thing helps with both kinds of hurt (and the contentedness / satiation / pleasure / joy / happiness / richness that is its opposite): presence. Feeling the feelings, the pain, the sensation, taking them in and then letting them go. I want to keep that up in 2023. I will:
- Move my body regularly. How? Work out at least thrice a week. Walk as much as I can. Hit my favorite life metric: 10,000 steps.
- Appreciate and care for my brain. How? Keep going to therapy. Use what I learn there. Go to psychiatry for as long as I need to. Spend time alone when needed, and with people when needed.
- Be outside — especially in water — whenever possible. Not going to recommit to my first-year-in-Valencia goal of getting in the ocean every month, though if it happens I’ll be happy. And as we learned in Bariloche, I like hiking fine, but it’s not a passion. I just want to be in and around nature: parks, beaches, water, gardens. How? Spend some part of most days outside.
Create future optionality.
A big part of living in the half-hour means not obsessing too much about what’s next. I don’t know what I want to do in 2024 or 2025. I don’t need to know. But these things should help me with whatever I eventually decide:
- Make enough money and save some of it. This is the first year in four years I don’t want to double my income. For one, I need less to live well in Spain than I did in New York, and for two, I’m taking Laura’s advice about ignoring the siren’s call of the hedonistic treadmill (the ingrained sense of “more is better”). In fact, I would like to halve how much I make. How? I’d like my business to gross $110,000 this year, and to save half of my profits, including in retirement accounts.
- Formalize my forays into writing. How? I want to publish three essays and three short stories in external outlets.
- Finish a longer-term project. This is a goal from last year that I’m hoping my upcoming writers’ retreat lets me make real headway on. How? Finish a script or a book proposal or a story collection.
- Renew my Spanish visa. I want to be able to keep living here legally. How? Successfully navigate this process in March.
Learn.
- Do harder things in my business. How? Take on a few bigger-picture, white-space consulting projects, even if that means cutting some content or copy projects.
- Get better at Spanish. How? At some point in 2023, take a class and pass a C2 exam. Get certified by the government as being proficient. (On a daily level, keep Spanish friends and read Spanish books, of course.)
- Stick with volleyball. How? Stay in class twice a week. Do at least four tournaments. Make the podium in one of them.
Consume beautiful things.
- Read and love books. My relationship with books is maybe the best thing I’ve ever had in my life. How? A favorite annual goal, I will read four books each month, at least one of which isn’t fiction. I’ll keep a log of what I read and share my favorites.
- Eat and love food. I could fulfill this with a long Michelin-sponsored road trip or with a copy of Deb Perelman cookbook (hi loved ones, feel free to give me this) or with the continuation of my now-permanent Spanish breakfast habit (thank you Em and Carol!!). The how doesn’t matter here. I will do it most days and in many ways.
Not me wanting to live in the half hour but then setting out to accomplish 20 goals
Being present and being planful don’t have to be as incompatible as they sound. All my goals are simple: I want to love, make, be, learn, experience. Setting out specific stakes for each of them helps me channel all that wanting. It’s kind of like how I feel when I go to the page, whether as reader or writer. We all have the same 26 letters to feed ourselves with and yet each of our banquets is sui generis. Source material swims around us. We built wifi out of rocks, for god’s sake. There are a thousand ways to live and maybe all of them are valid.
For now, for this year, the way I am going to live is in small circles, drawn over and over again: this city, this home, this plate, this embrace.
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