Year in Review: 2021

Going back and looking at last year’s “year in review” I can only lol. Or rather, lolsob. 2021 was probably my most spectacularly unproductive year to date.

2021 recap

• The Texas Feb 2021 winter storm happened. I’m astounded by how much trauma lingers. My climate anxiety has also gone through the roof. It’s almost impossible to reconcile that this happened this year.

  This past week was a year. The pandemic took our sense of safety outside of the home. The fallout from the Texas winter storm took our sense of safety inside the home. Our core infrastructure, power, water, gas, food supply. Disaster upon disaster. (Tweet).

  American culture is feeling guilty as shit for being unproductive when you’re in the middle of a winter storm that’s in the middle of a pandemic (Tweet).

• I hit my one year anniversary at Netlify. I have overall really enjoyed my time at Netlify. Like any startup, it has its challenges, but it’s been the right place for me. I’m so grateful for the wonderful people I’m surrounded by in my day to day, and it’s satisfying to help build a product that empowers so many developers and companies.

• In terms of software and web dev, I did very little outside of my day job, and honestly… cool. I was also a lot less active on Twitter. Also… cool.

• I hung out with people I love, but not as much as I used to.

• I continued to do a lot of walking, and strength training.

• I spent a lot of time with my dogs.

• Some really awful family stuff happened. Not suitable to go into detail, and we’re now in a new normal. But I’m still sad, and still in disbelief. It ate up a lot of my emotional bandwidth in the last half of 2021.

Idk. Between my complete lack of a sense of time, and the fact that I didn’t write a lot down this year, it’s genuinely hard to remember, and write this post.

2021 goals in review

In last year’s post, I set identity-based goals, and some specific goals. Looking back, some of the identity-based goals stuck, and none of the specific goals came to fruition.

Process goals

• Identity: I am a reflective person.
  • ❌ Process: I take a brief moment every day to reflect and journal.
• Identity: I am a thoughtful member of my community.
  • ✅ Process: I recurringly support organizations doing good in my community, support many levels of journalism, and help my neighbors.
• Identity: I strength train.
  • ✅ Process: I strength train twice a week.
• Identity: I am a student of yoga.
  • ❌ Process: I show up to my mat every day.
• Identity: I am a writer.
  • ❌ Process: I write for ten minutes or more every day.
• Identity: I am a reader.
  • ❌ Process: I read for ten minutes or more every day.

Specific goals

1. ❌ Launch my first small digital product offering. (Inspired by @swyx via @dvassallo).

   • Lol, nope.

2. ❌ Get professional photos / headshots done. I’ve avoided the camera like the plague (lol what an outdated phrase now) my entire life. I keep waiting for the right time to do this — I need to just do it.

   • Lol, nope.

3. ❌ Send holiday cards. Several friends sent them this year, and I genuinely enjoyed receiving them.

   • Lol, nope. But this one actually makes me sad. I wish I’d done it.

2022 goals

I’m going to set twelve goals that are designed to be extremely achievable, and check in on them monthly.

1. ✅ Complete “Dry January” and “No Dining Out January”. (We do this pretty much every year.)

2. “Journal” every day with the “Exist” app. (Kyle has been using this for a while and likes it. I say “journal” in quotation marks, because the daily review is a 1-10 rating, optionally adding tags, and a note section. Extremely low effort, friendlier to tick with.)

3. Eat vegetarian except for holidays and special occasions. (I was a vegetarian for 8 years during my time in DC. We’ve been eating “weekday vegetarian” for a while now, and for many reasons, Kyle and I are going full-time. This is not a hard jump for us.)

4. Read 12 books. (This is very achievable based on my general trends, although I’ve done a poor job tracking it.)

   • I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter.
   • The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

5. Go on one trip, for fun, to somewhere new. (Not for a particular reason, just time away. I haven’t done a good job getting out of my everyday during the pandemic. In 2021 we talked about spending the weekend away in the hill country and just haven’t done it.)

6. Avoid ordering from Amazon, except for digital (i.e. Kindle) and Prime streaming. (Most of what I order from Amazon I could get elsewhere, but I’ve done it for convenience. Avoid it unless there’s a compelling reason.)

7. Continue eating dinner at the table together at night. (We’ve been doing this for a few months already, and it’s something we’d like to continue.)

8. ✅ Create a minimalist wardrobe. (90% of what’s in my closet and drawers, I haven’t worn in years. By the end of this year, I want to work through my belongings and build a more intentional wardrobe, full of only things I actually wear.)

9. Continue strength training at least 2x/week, ideally 3. (Another thing I’m pretty good at already that I want to continue.)

10. Sew four pieces of clothing. (I inherited my mom’s sewing machine last year, and got it all fixed up, got super fixated on sewing YouTube, and then… haven’t done anything. I got paralyzed by actually undertaking a project. The goal of four gives me three months per project, which I feel is achievable.)

11. Sew one baby quilt. (The reason I wanted to learn to sew in the first place was because I received a handmade quilt as a baby, and I always wanted to do the same when friends and family started having kids. The babies started coming fast during the pandemic, so I’m behind here.)

12. Get new headshots. (I genuinely need to do this this year. This is probably the hardest thing on the list for me.)

Bonus: Send holiday cards. We shall see…