I’m sitting in the dark with my laptop on New Year's Day, forcing myself to write. Because if a new rotation around the sun isn’t enough motivation to put something on my blog, I don’t know what will be. I have made endless excuses to prevent myself from journaling and writing:
A perfectionistic pickiness - if I can’t make it sound profound enough, I can’t post it.
A fear of disinterest - if I don’t have anything specific enough to write about, no one will want to read it.
A persistent laziness - writing is hard, and writing words that sound alright is even harder.
A pessimistic despair - I don’t want to admit that I don’t know how to help myself, or I do know how to help myself and I’m choosing not to.
All of these are aspects of a writer’s block that is equally valid and also entirely in my head. So I’m sitting in the dark with my laptop on New Year’s Day, forcing myself to throw all my unhappiness and unfinished ideas for a blog post onto the page, because I have to start somewhere rather than nowhere. And admitting where I am to an audience is an embarrassing, scary, and necessary place to begin.
I feel like growing up is often looked at like a puzzle. Life is made up of pieces, assembled one at a time to slowly but surely complete the picture. The youth and young adult years are viewed as formative for good reason, because our views on friendship, faith, career, morality, finances, time management, family, priorities, pleasure, and play are all meticulously compiled from every aspect of our upbringing. It’s in these final years of “young adulthood” that we get to hold up our partly completed puzzles against our peers’, and figure out if we like the picture on our box or the way our friends’ puzzles are looking instead. We hope that the more important puzzles are finished earlier, and the final picture is completed and can’t be changed (Morality, faith, and good sense for example; career and friendships are traditionally allowed more time for the final image to reveal itself). I feel like all my life, people have thought I was really good at puzzles. I demonstrated through leadership, capability, self-sufficiency, faith, and hard work, that I had a clear view of the pictures I was filling in.
And so it’s been scary and confusing to me, that as everyone around me is adding new pieces to their puzzles, I’ve just been breaking mine apart.
That analogy feels so much more fitting in my head than it does in words, but the feeling it conjures does perfectly encapsulate how this year has felt. Like I feel more unsure of everything now than I did a year ago. I’m back to just the edge pieces, and I have no idea what image I’m putting together anymore.
I know I’m solidly into my twenties now. When all this uncertainty is supposed to happen I guess. I’ve discussed on here before how wide open the world becomes as the societally set-in-stone norms of high school, college, and living with parents end. It’s normal to feel a little unstable. Deconstructing what you believe and having no idea what’s going on is a normal stage of life for everyone in their twenties (according to Instagram at least). So I shouldn’t be alarmed. Usually the best impact of these blog posts is teaching me that I am not as alone and unique in my struggles as I like to make myself believe. Yay.
I don’t think this re-evaluation of my character, beliefs, and time management is what bothers me the most - it is the idea of backsliding. This feeling that, in my laziness and limbo surrounding this mess, I have become less and less of a person I even like. I’ve forgotten what kind person I want to be, and listened to much to who I thought everyone else wanted me to be *. As this examination of what is important to me borders on neglect, I lose good habits and discipline. My exorbitant screen time and wild sleep schedule (both of which I will not be revealing) would probably be enough to demonstrate my point, but these changes become much more sobering when my resultant selfishness and inattentiveness rear their head around the people I care about. I could wax poetic about my many failures and missed opportunities as a friend, individual, and member of a larger society, but this blog is not a place for wallowing (hopefully I will not use this statement as an excuse to not write down the line).
So I made a nice graphic summary for you so we can move on.
I sat down recently and did some reflecting on goal-setting for 2025. “New Year, New Me” sounds better and cheesier than it ever has before. Because no matter how much reflecting and soul-searching I did on my sad state of affairs in 2024, the worst part was the total lethargy I felt towards doing anything about it. The steady decline of discipline and internal self-care is insidious and often too gradual to cause a depressive spiral I can be dramatic about (I’m sure my medication helped with that bit as well). So it’s time to stop ruminating on all this in my head and start taking some solid steps… Solid steps like ruminating on all this ON MY BLOG!
I’m only half kidding, because we got this far, and it’s better than nothing. So I’m going to start these steps in the right direction by reminding us all that growth is rarely a linear path **. It’s been too easy to despair in the feeling that I’ve changed so much for the worse recently, and I need to remind myself that just because I maybe took a step backwards, doesn’t mean I’m lost. Breaking down my puzzles doesn’t mean that I lost all the pieces.
My buzz word for 2025 is Discipline. Something I have lost so much of. It takes discipline and commitment to face these questions of faith and morality rather than avoid them altogether - to invest in a good community and to choose what messages from this world I will listen to. It takes discipline to go to the gym consistently, eat well, and sleep enough. It takes discipline (a LOT of it) to put my phone down and read a book for a change. It will take discipline to move beyond the rumination stage to create new habits and real change.
I always try to accomplish so much and so little with these posts. It has been awhile. Part of this felt obligatory - to myself and to my readers. Part of this felt like an apology - to those who have been privy to a Daniel I am not proud of. Part of me hopes everyone will tell me it’s actually all in my head and there’s nothing wrong. Part of this is for accountability - so that with patience and understanding, we can all nudge each other in the right direction. Part of this is just for me - to discipline myself and do something difficult. And ultimately, as always, I hope this meager attempt at expressing myself will help anyone who reads feel a little less alone and a little more capable of growth.
A sincere thank you to anyone who read this far into my ramblings.
Puzzle on ;)
*James 1:6 says: "But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for he who doubts is like a wave of the sea driven and tossed by the wind".
I think of this verse whenever I think about who I was this past year. It’s been eye-opening and challenging to re-read Bible verses now and see myself as the doubter and the lost one in them rather than the faithful.
** I heard this quote from my very wise father, and I cannot take any credit for it, although I am not sure if it originated with him or not.
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