Goals from Last Week – How Did it Go?

Welllll, the fact that I’m writing this post a day late should say something. It was probably the roughest week yet.

Writing

• work on Moonchild (writing project) all seven days – four.
• work on blog at least five days – three.
• at least seven sessions of digitizing old writing – I don’t think I did any?
• craft and send an important tweet – I did this one. Now that it’s done I can say what it is. I tweeted my leaving med school post at Taylor Swift. I knew it was a long shot that she would ever see it, but her album, and especially “exile” has become so inextricably linked to me leaving school, and to me telling people I’m leaving school, that I wanted to share. I think that years in the future when I look back and think of folklore, I’ll think of leaving school and telling my story.

Music

• seven guitar practice sessions – two.
• get up through song 100 of Book One of my Hal Leonard Guitar Method Complete Edition book – which means FINISHING BOOK ONE! – nope.
• seven piano practice sessions – two.
• Continuing on my quest to catch up on Technic and Composition sections previously skipped in Keyboard Musician for the Adult Beginner book, I will do the composing for Unit 4, technic and compositing for Unit 5, and technic and composing for unit 6. Then I’ll be all caught up and can continue forward – nope.

Lifestyle

• sleep without the phone (a struggle you can read about here) – this will put me at 189 nights (27 weeks) in a row – yes. Getting extremely tenuous.
• write Morning Pages every day – four.
• don’t look at phone until after Morning Pages – this is back on – four.
• Finish The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd – I’m very close to the end – and start a new book. Not sure yet what I’ll start with, as I’m in a few different book clubs and have so much I want to read – DONE, and I also read 11/22/63 by Stephen King, which is 850 pages, this week.
• do an Artist Date – maybe? Maybe some of the reading counted? I don’t know.

Reflections on the Week

General

Yeah, this was a rough week. I keep thinking it can’t get rougher. The stress of this year, with a lot of added stress this week, plus my personal stress of all the medical school stuff, has really, really gotten to me. There is a limit to how much stress someone can hold and I feel like I’ve surpassed that limit, like, fifty times over.

So I did almost nothing this week. Along with skipping most of these goals, I also did no exercise, ordered junk food off Postmates, slept a lot and had a completely disastrous sleep schedule and basically was barely functioning.

You know what though? This was my first week since officially leaving school. Last week, I still had a (virtual) class to finish up. I thought that would mean that with that off my plate (and more for the mental space it took up than the actual amount of work needed), that would free up more time and space for the things I wanted to do, but I was just too stressed and wiped out.

And you know what? This week was Fall Break for my school, and I haven’t taken a break, really, since October. When classes ended in December, I went straight into “dedicated,” the time that we have to study for board exams. And ever since, I was studying (to varying degrees, as covid turned the studying sprint into a marathon with my test being canceled and rescheduled over and over), then had classes, and all the leaving negotiations hanging over me.

So, I took the break. I READ. I’ve been rediscovering my love of reading these past couple weeks and months and this week I went full on and indulged and read a huge, epic book in six days. And napped a lot. I don’t know that any of it felt particularly refreshing (I felt like crap all week to be honest) but mentally I needed all the escape I could get.

Disability Letter

A lot has happened with my school in terms of disability and access, and as part of that, I need to write a testimonial about the specifics of what I experienced. I’m resistant to starting (which I think fueled a fair amount of my avoidance this week) because I don’t want to re-experience the anguish of the experiences and it’s been hard to write about it in a vaguer way, a way without digging into too many specifics and details, without feeling absolutely destroyed emotionally. So the idea of starting this has me all tangled up.

But, I think it will help people that come after me, and could help make changes for the better, and that’s important to me. And with the dread there is also a part of me that wants to give a voice to the specifics of what happened and to what I see as potential solutions. And I also think it could be cathartic to get it out.

So ultimately I want to do it, and it will be on this week’s list.

“I Think It’s Coming Back Around”

(Those are Soundgarden lyrics, btw, from the song “Dusty.”)

By the end of the week, it did start to come around a little. I got a massage on Friday (first in almost a year), took a misty walk in the rain with a friend on Wednesday, and had the Mabon dinner (mentioned in the Synchronicity post) on Sunday, and today finally started pulling my shit together. I meal planned and grocery shopped (online) and cooked for the week. So hopefully, it’s swinging back in the other direction.

Goals for this Coming Week

Writing

• work on Moonchild (writing project) all seven days
• work on blog at least five days
• at least seven sessions of digitizing old writing
• work on disability letter for the school

Music

• seven guitar practice sessions
• get up through song 100 of Book One of my Hal Leonard Guitar Method Complete Edition book (catch up from last week) – which means FINISHING BOOK ONE! – and move onto songs 1-4 (all very short) for the first lesson in Book Two, which focus on the Am chord
• seven piano practice sessions
• Finish last week’s keyboard goals – catching up on Technic and Composition sections – and move forward, getting through page 61

Lifestyle

• sleep without the phone (a struggle you can read about here) – this will put me at 196 nights (28 weeks) in a row
• write Morning Pages every day
• don’t look at phone until after Morning Pages
• do an Artist Date
• clean my apartment – it’s gotten totally out of control and I have to move in a month so yeah

-April

PD: There’s a picture that says GOAL where the O has been replaced with a target. There are arrows stuck in other letters and on the stand for the goal, but none on the target. That’s how this week felt!

Notes:

• Morning Pages, referred to in the lifestyle section of these goals, is the practice of writing three long-hand pages right after waking up in the morning.
• You can read about them in this post where I introduce what they are and my history with them, and you can find all posts that mention Morning Pages here.
• The practice comes from The Artist’s Way, the seminal creativity book by Julia Cameron. I’m doing a weekly column called The Artist’s Way Reflections, which was introduced here in my blog re-entry post.
• Artist Dates, the practice of doing a solo activity to take time out and connect to your creativity, also comes from The Artist’s Way.
• Moonchild is the name of my memoir project, which you can read about in more detail on my Memoir page or on this old post with a rough sketch. You can also find LOTS of other posts about it here.
• digitizing my writings is first introduced here.
• You can check out other posts about goals (goalposts?) here.