From Ferrante to Rooney, these are the sentences that stuck with me this year

With one month left of the year, it’s easy to call it done and get ready to make 2021 a better year. But there’s still an entire month left. A month is plenty of time to turn things around and redeem 2020.

I have some ideas.

I recently became a full-time stay-at-home mother of two thanks to a layoff. I don’t get a ton of free time, but when I do, I spend it trying to get some writing done.

At first, it seemed like every time I got to my computer to work, I spent the majority of my small break trying to decide which project to work on. Since I could never decide which was most important, I switched between all of them.

This is not productive. Multitasking like this is counterproductive and promotes stress and fatigue. According to Psychology Today:

“Multitasking creates an illusion of parallel activity, but actually it requires mental switching from one task to another. This drains the glucose fuel needed by the brain, making the brain less efficient and creating the feeling of being tired.”

I am one of those people who posts pictures of the books I’m reading on my Instagram stories. I do this not to show off how many books I read, but because I like talking about books almost as much as I like reading them, and this opens up a space for the kind of dialogue I desperately crave. You’d be surprised how much of my meager following likes to engage with these posts.

One message I get over and over is, how do you find time to read so much? They especially want to know now that I have two children. It turns out a lot of people say they want to read more, but they just don’t have the time. I know life is busy, but we have the time; we just need to prioritize it.

We celebrate birthdays, weddings, pregnancies, and retirements. We celebrate promotions and bat mitzvahs and business launches. There is a party or a shower or a happy hour for every occasion, but there is something we don’t celebrate—something that is arguably more important to acknowledge than all of the above: our differences.

Social media is delicious. It is mind-numbing enjoyment that’s almost as great as eating pizza. It’s beautiful, inspirational, funny — it’s everything you want it to be.

And that’s exactly what scares me.

I have just completed a year of habit tracking. For 365 days, I’ve tracked, analyzed, and reflected upon all the things I do day after day. It only took one month of tracking for me to realize the discrepancy between what I thought I spent my time doing and what I really do. A year later, I’m happy to report that the results in my habit journal are significantly more satisfying than they were when I started out. I also feel better about my lofty goals, as I began spending more time working toward them once I realized how infrequently I actually had been before.

The sound of a cracking spine, the smell of musty pages deep within an old book, the scratch of a pen underlining masterpiece sentences—there is absolutely nothing I dislike about reading books. Real ones, the kind you can dog-ear, highlight, lend to someone, and stack up on your shelves like souvenirs from all the places you’ve traveled. Because what are books if not reminders of the journeys you’ve taken?

Through books, you can visit new places, learn new things, and even get into bed with new people—all the while drinking a cup of coffee on your lawn chair, the cool breeze tickling your arms the only reminder of your reality. Reading, to me, is one of life’s greatest adventures.

Have you ever felt like you’ve got everything in order, you know what you want to do with your life and have an idea of how you’ll get there — and then everything changes? Like the world is testing your dedication and resilience, and as soon as you feel like you’ve made progress, your map is turned upside down and you are once again disoriented? Directionless?

I am a part-time stay-at-home mother. This means that two days per week, I have the solo task of preoccupying my toddler while hopefully providing her with some sort of education. Some days go better than others. Some days we get out of the house early enough to swing by a Caribou drive-thru and make it to kids’ yoga (not right now, of course, but in more normal times). We get home by lunch, at which time I’ll cook up broccoli, spinach, and cheese tortellini, and the two of us will have a nice meal together while discussing what a great morning we had. After her two-hour nap, we will go for a walk, paint pictures, and build towers. These days feel good.

Death is on my mind a lot.

Having lost all of my grandparents early in life, I don’t know what it’s like to be an adult and lose someone. I fear the day death introduces itself to my family, but I know it’s an inevitability.

In one of Ryan Holiday’s Daily Stoic correspondences — an email sharing stoic wisdom — he says:

“Too often there is far too great a disparity between what we say we feel and how we act on those feelings. It’s only after the sudden loss of a friend that we realize we had been taking them for granted, for instance.”

We need to say more of how we feel before it’s too late. What a terrible feeling it must be to realize we hadn’t shared our true thoughts with our loved ones.

It can be difficult to love yourself when you’re infiltrated with images of beautiful people and success stories of influencers all day long.

And yet social media apps are built to be addictive — and they work. American adults spend an average of 11 hours per day consuming media, 2.2 hours of which are social.