i just went running for the first time since (i think) february! i’m so proud of myself 🙂 i didn’t run that much, just a mile, but considering that i rarely ran a nonstop mile even while i was in track… (hey, i fudged the warm-up runs, okay? 🙂 ) it’s pretty good for me!
i’m still going to try to keep up my yesterday’s plan of always being productive, even though it didn’t work out so well last night (i wound up going to building one to hang out with erik, who was there doing his problem set, and eating some brownie/cake bars they had there), but i also developed a new plan of action while i was running. every week i will set three goals for myself: one goal for how much i’m going to run that week, one goal to get myself to eat more healthily, and one more which can be academic or something else. i think they key is probably to set goals that are reachable for me; after all, the important thing is not that i keep up with the full-time athletes who are also on the track, but that i do something good for myself.
on another note, who’s out there reading this? i haven’t heard anything from anyone, so i don’t know if i really have an audience or if i’m just talking to myself. i don’t care if it’s just the latter, but i would like to know.
[note, 4/10/14: Imported from my old blog at satsumabug.livejournal.com. This was one of my earliest posts; I’m not making all of them public.]
satsumabug.com | Lisa Hsia 
Ariana. Ariana is reading this. 🙂
And considering how to set achievable goals that will help me do good things for myself.
😘 Sometimes I read these old posts and see how absolutely set I was on being the best I could be at everything, and I feel a bit wistful that I gave over so much energy to that. I wish I could tell that person that it’s ok to be a mess and make mistakes and just like… be the age that I was. On the other hand, I’m sure 25 years of obsessing over things like achievable goals has done a lot for my overall skills and knowledge!!!
I mean, you do have quite a lot of skills and knowledge at this point. ☺️ I really hear you about the being the best part, though. I really struggle with that, too. I just struggle myself out of actually starting things and doing them. Your idea of creating achievable goals seems like a vast improvement over my perfectionism paralysis. It seemed like a kindness to oneself to break things down and make the goals smaller and keep them within the range of what actually might be possible and realistic for you. But I can also see the deeper kindness in letting go of what is driving the behavior, the need to be the best or to not be messy or to do it right or the best way. It feels like I spend sooo much more time researching how to do things in the best way than I spend actually doing anything. And somebody else’s best way might not be mine. Somebody else’s best way probably just involved somebody else experimenting til they found something that worked for them. Though I love learning in those ways and sometimes really cool things come from my research and optimization strategies, there are so many ways, without thinking about it, I restrict myself from playing and experimenting and trying. I know there are plenty of areas of my life where that’s not the case at all. But I am more conscious of the former because it frustrates me. I feel like your last message is an invitation not only to your future self but to my present self to gentle the effort and let myself be where I am. May we keep inviting ourselves to greater levels of freedom.