Beyond Selidor

This is the last open thread of 2023, and unlike the cliché, this exhausting, difficult, complicated year has felt very, very long indeed. No rushing passage of time for me, no I can't believe it's almost 31st December, this year.

Today's prompt is the one that I always have on the mind this time of year:

What is something you want to carry forward with you into 2024, and what is something you want to leave behind?

One of the best revelations of 2023 was how good I was at building certain habits, and sticking to them. I supplemented what were already pretty solid habits — swimming four times a week, yoga every day, certain habits in relation to work — with additional routine activities. These included two hours of fitness classes at the gym — picking things up and putting them down (aka pump class) and very silly dances (aka zumba) — which have had a profoundly beneficial effect. I'd like to keep these things going, and add to them with further habitual activities.

I've also, finally, managed my relationship with social media in a way that protects my mental health. I left Twitter, and felt as if a weight had lifted from my shoulders, and made the decision not to replace it with any similar platform. I'm still on Facebook and Instagram, but the former is mainly friends and family posting updates about their daily lives (family photos, pictures of their pets, renovations, holidays and so on), and the latter is something I ruthlessly curate, and leave for weeks at a time if it's getting too much. All this is a very good thing, and I will definitely carry on with it in 2024.

One of the worst revelations of 2023 was the slow realisation that the pandemic has exacerbated some of my worst tendencies: inflexibility (and really bad reactions when this inflexibility is challenged), hermit-like retreat into my own, controllable little world, a gradual shrinking of in-person social activities to the point that they are basically non-existent, and tense anxiety hovering in the background at the slightest hint that this safe little bubble was pierced. It's led to the point that all this tension is written into my body: my jaw and shoulders are almost permanently tense (even when I sleep), and I had a massage last week which did nothing, because I tensed up involuntarily every time the masseuse touched me, and couldn't relax. My neck, shoulders and jaw are always painful.

I don't know yet what I need to change, but I know that something has to. It's hard to know exactly how to get the balance right — I'm someone who's very good at building and maintaining routines (and as I've said I want that to continue in certain areas), but I think I also take it to such extremes that my world has shrunk to a space that's entirely, rigidly bound by routines, and any spontaneity seems like a terrifying threat. I want to find a way to leave that behind — I want better coping mechanisms, and I want my life to open up in ways that I seem to have closed off without realising in the past four years. I just haven't landed on the right way to do so. I have some ideas, but nothing final — and I suppose, in some ways, that leaving this post inconclusive is exactly the kind of flexibility and openness that I'm trying to bring into my life.