Month-in-Review Highlights: January 2022

I took this photo the day before January 1, yet let’s pretend I took it in January. After all, this second attempt at baking this cake from scratch took place on New Year’s Eve as a celebration for the year to come. The good news: After one cake too dry and one cake too moist, I feel solid that cake attempt #3 will come out perfectly. Lausanne, Switzerland. December 31, 2021.

I postmortem each month shortly after it ends, reflecting on what happened in general and, more specifically, in the context of my goals. Though I don’t share all my insights here, I have made it a practice to share at least one key highlight or insight. (To read previous months’ reviews, click here.)

Who with a fresh set of annual goals doesn’t go into January all fired up?

I can’t congratulate myself too heartily for having tracked well on my 2022 goals progress in the first month of the year. By the end of the 2021 holiday season, during which I’d relaxed a bit to start 2022 full of energy, I had all the motivation I needed to dig in.

And did.

I leaned hard into my professional goals, thoroughly exhausting myself each week of the month. By the end of each Friday, I had nothing left—though, unlike in other years with my professional goals, these Fridays I had a good feeling of depletion. I may not have loved every minute of the work (who does, no matter what they do?), but I felt true joy in getting to do it, in working on something I’d held back fully from doing for a very, very long time.

However, the universe has its crafty ways of thwarting our best intentions, and it managed to throw a few surprises at me to keep me from launching full-force across all my 2022 objectives in January.

We decided to lay low in mid-December, given the rise in COVID cases across our area, which meant that I had less opportunity to do some of the social activities I’d had in my sights. Some of these social goals included more interaction out in the world of French speakers, employing my language skills in the wild while meeting people and, in the process, continuing to improve my French conversation abilities. (People who follow along and remember my DELF examination misery will remember that I’ve had the least practice—and feel the least comfortable—speaking in French.)

Perhaps this feeling of stuck-ness—I don’t feel like I can really improve until I can use my French in real-world situations, not just via classes and reading and watching and listening to things—combined with the exhaustion that followed taking the DELF test, provoked a bit of motivation depletion when it came to progressing further with my French in January. However, I’ve reassessed and will throw myself back into the thick of it in February—which I hope a general decrease in COVID craziness will help make possible.

And just like that… one twelfth of 2022 has wrapped!