You Can't Fail in a Cycle

5 lessons learned

Here’s what I learned in 2024:

1. Take the long road every day, take the shortcut every year

This sentiment came to me on a sunny day in Brighton Beach over the summer, after realizing that I’ve lived it for many years. I like to shake shit up, especially when everything is going great. I love to drop out, move thousands of miles away, break up, drain my savings, quit something smart and traditional, start something frivolous and time-consuming, and other similarly extreme measures. If there’s something that I’ve been wanting to change for more than a year, I always change it — no matter how life-altering the consequences.

I like to live my life that way, but I can’t live my days that way. Every day, I try to take the path of most resistance. I try to keep my commitments, be on time, cook my meals, and walk or take transit when I go places. I try to stay uncomfortable for as long as I can before I pick up my phone. I try to do things out of principle and obligation, like playing make-believe with my little sister and brushing my teeth before bed. I do all of this so that, about once a year, I can take a big swing and fuck everything up. It pays, in my opinion, to be fully insane in a big way, and relatively measured and calm in all your smaller rituals.

I think a lot of unhappiness comes from doing the opposite — going down the traditional, “right path” out of obligation while revolting daily in ways that make your life chaotic and unpleasant. I know a lot of alcoholics who work high-paying jobs and remain married. Here’s to embracing the chaos while remaining accountable to mundanity.

2. There’s no failure when your life is cyclical

Every year, I set out to use my phone less, pursue healthier habits, and make strides on my creative and personal goals. And every year, I have long stretches of time when I’m glued to socials, smoking and drinking like I’m a beat poet, and not picking up my guitar. I used to see goals as some utopian promise that I never truly believed I would achieve, but as things that nevertheless made the process of rolling the rock up the hill seem like it might have some sort of point.

But, of course, the rock will always need rolling and since I will never meet the top, the journey will have to be the point. Just as there are times when I’m the furthest thing from embodying these goals, there are times where I’m staying present, drinking water, and making a ton of art. It just doesn’t happen all the time.

When I looked at it that way, I realized that there was no such thing as “backsliding.” Or rather, there is, but it’s in the way that a skateboarder glides to one end of the bowl before pushing off to pursue the other. I always come back, and in fact, I usually go farther each time. If I look back through my life, I have, in general, made considerable progress towards the same goals that I’ve had for years. I also realized that I have to enjoy the sliding back.

I try to embody, not the Zamboni that sweeps everything clean, but the ice skater — making marks, circling back, doing the same move over and over again, each time a little bit better. Looking back at my metaphors, maybe skaters of all kinds just have the whole cyclical nature of life thing figured out.

3. Attaching morality to my desires did not help me

I lost weight this year, on purpose. Feel free to skip this whole section if you hate the vibes of this! I really won’t be offended.

Before that, I spent two years uncomfortable in my body, and even more uncomfortable with the fact that I was uncomfortable in my body. But this shame around my desire to change how I felt in my body allowed me to conveniently look away from the bare facts: I was incredibly depressed, not moving, and not actually nourishing myself.

I kept an eye on my eating disorder brain and allowed myself to get a little regimented with food and exercise in order to achieve a few goals around health, movement, and, yes, aesthetics. I never let myself go hungry. I learned a lot about how to actually feed myself and how to not feel like total shit after each meal. I learned that I love walking and yoga and lifting heavy things. My eating disorder brain remained at bay, even if it was relatively miffed when I decided to stop tracking everything after a few months.

I am no longer regimented about food or exercise. My body has returned to a set point that feels great to me. I gained a kind of trust in my intuition and my body that had never existed before. I could only do this when I decided that what I want didn’t make me a bad person, and that engaging in *some* form of control around food and/or exercise was not equivalent to relapsing with my eating disorder. I did not find it helpful to insist that I was a bad person for desiring a change in my body, or to overly psychoanalyze my decisions when these changes were, on the whole, making me feel holistically better.

I understand if reading this makes you, personally, feel uncomfortable, angry, or upset. I have, and will always have, a long, storied history with body image. I also want you to know that this is a short snatch of my personal life — I do not think that any of this information necessarily applies to anyone but me, specifically; this is not a diatribe on what anyone else is capable of or should pursue.

I am learning that, as a woman, it’s difficult to talk about your body as though it only belongs to you. I feel, somehow, responsible to all women when I talk about my body. I want to write about this more, but I’m afraid to. I want to write about this more, but I don’t want to become a person whose body is perceived to dictate her politics. Maybe I’ll learn more about this next year.

4. Wherever you go, there you are… but you can also go somewhere better

The old adage “wherever you go, there you are” (which I believe has its roots in AA), is meant to remind people that they cannot run away from their problems and that a change in environment will not fundamentally change the person who lives within it. I believe that this is true in many ways. Famous people are unhappy, rich people struggle with purpose, and we’ve all left a breakup with a “toxic” person only to relish in our own miserable company.

As a big subscriber to the idea of Working On Myself, I was fully prepared to accept the reality that my life was feeling sad because I was feeling sad. That is definitely part of it, and Working On Myself has been a big contributor to schlepping myself out from my rut. But also, making my cross-country move from LA to New York simply improved my life on basically every front. Before moving, I sensed that I would enjoy a walkable city, four seasons, and a place where my best friend lives. That was all true, and I love it here. The problem will always be me. But I learned that, sometimes, it’s not just me.

5. I am so wrong, so much of the time

Here’s a vulnerable quote from my Notes App:

“Kate always makes me feel like an asshole but only in comparison to their genuinely humble nature”

My best friend is one of the most truly humble people I know. Despite being extremely smart and intuitive, they leave room for people to surprise them and ask a lot of questions to people who know things that they don’t. I admire this greatly, and also struggle to achieve this often.

One of my Big Wounds is that I was a very parentified child. Eldest daughter syndrome, blah blah blah, please shoot me with a gun if I ever use that phrase in earnest... Essentially, a lot of the stress in my early life came from adults looking to me for the answers. This is why I love to know The Answers, and it’s also why I experience profound irritation, discomfort — even pain — when I don’t.

But I obviously do not know all The Answers, and my belief that I must severely impedes me from knowing more. I make a lot of assumptions from a vestigial place of defensive security-seeking. I’m working on enjoying when I’m wrong — using these experiences as an opportunity to remind myself how large the world is, how many amazing, smart people there are in it, and how there’s literally no way that I will ever know everything.

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Thank you for joining me for another year on Substack <3 I recently passed 24,000 subscribers, which feels fully insane to me. Thank you for reading.