Finally, we’re nearing the year’s end — a time to rest, reset, and reflect. Even the apps on my phone are eager to review my year, feeding my own data back to me: Strava tells me how many miles I’ve biked, Reddit shows me the number of posts I’ve read, and Spotify feeds me a nonsensical noun pile to describe the music I tend to listen to in the morning (if anyone can tell me which artists comprise “gothic happycore film noir,” please comment below).
That inspired me to spend a half hour compiling a personal 2022 review. I started by tallying professional achievements: the number of pieces I wrote and edited, the events I spoke at, awards and recognition. Then I thought about obvious personal highlights: the places I visited, the concerts I went to, the books I read, the new hobbies I picked up. What a fun and easy way to feel like stuff happened this year, that I did things!
The most difficult part of the process, but perhaps most important, was recalling the less tangible or exciting moments that have taken up my time over the last year — the instances that were essential to my year, but that the outside world will never celebrate.
It’s the stuff you can’t see, or that didn’t happen: the number of times I said no to projects I don’t have time for, the cumulative hours I’ve spent thinking about my gender identity or if I want to have kids, how I handled rejection. Then I felt silly because isn’t that just life? The quiet, unglamorous shit is actually who you are. The habits and decisions you make are your life, and sometimes that ends up leading to cool opportunities, but most of the time, it doesn’t, and you just have to live with yourself anyway.
In my ideal world, surveillance culture would not exist and yet somehow we would be able to see these stats in our “2022 wrapped”:
- The number of times I thought about ordering delivery on Caviar but ultimately decided to just cook what was in the fridge (and the number of minutes spent flopping around on the couch before arriving at the responsible decision)
- Minutes spent gazing out a window while writing
- Compliments given and received that really stuck with the recipient
- Cumulative dog snuggle time
- Number of times and why (at least one person on TikTok does quarterly crying reports and I admire their dedication to record-keeping)
- Ideas I wrote in my notes app or on a scrap of paper and never looked at again
- Ounces of abandoned coffee
- Times I decided not to get on the bus
- Items given / received via Buy Nothing or neighborhood free piles
- Dishes washed, counters wiped, surfaces dusted, floors vacuumed
- Time spent single-tasking vs. multi-tasking (e.g., walks or bus rides without music, cooking and cleaning sans podcast, perhaps even pooping without scrolling)
- Top referenced memes
- Top 10 most-texted friends
- Pleasant interactions with strangers
A very merry end of 2022 to all friends of LWON, and a happy 2023.
I’ve had an up-and-down kind of year, but after your example, I’d like list a few of my 2022 items.
–Number of running shoes purchased and used on services as varied as 3 inches of packed snow, black ice, and dotted-with-frogs-macadam.
–Children’s books collected from library, and recorded by name on a sheet with the aim of reading 500 books before kindergarten. (We’re at 155 after several months, and have 8 months to go.)
–Number of not-as-single as I thought men that I called on the phone, and talked to for a remarkable number of minutes just-the-one time, of course.
–Number of names I’ve had on twitter. Right now, Ingeborg is my preferred praenomen.
–Replies submitted to LWON blog posts (my biggest number yet!).
Thank you!
oh these are GOOD, especially the last one 😉 and i just learned the word praenomen!