We are what we repeat.
I’ve spend the past few days collecting my thoughts and impressions from this year. I started with viewing my important life areas one by one and spewing my thoughts about each of them onto the page in a massive brain dump. From there i went on to catalogue both my successes and failures. This is important work–it showed me where I can be better and where I am already strong. Today’s work synthesizes this into recognizing patterns that have shown up for me again and again in this past year. Understanding these patterns is the secret to finding ways around the walls we build for ourselves and to understanding what works and even the very essence of who and what we are.
When I Keep Getting Stuck
When I consistently am unable to meet a goal, the best thing to do is take a breath and ask why. What is the blocker? What is the thing that keeps me from doing what I really want to do? But also, what am I doing instead? Why do I keep making the same mistakes? I have a vicious doom-scrolling habit. It’s easy to be mean to myself about it–but in the end, it gives me joy and I feel like I take a lot away from it. I learn a lot. I connect with others. I find new hobbies, new skills. It’s not the social media that is the problem. It’s that I’m choosing to make it a priority over completing my goals. I’m doing it at inappropriate times. Recognizing the pattern, there is a temptation to scold myself or feel shame over this. “I’m bad.” “I’m lazy.” But shame isn’t helping me, its just making me more miserable–and locking me to where i get overwhelmed and scroll even more. Identifying habits and triggers can be a powerful start to the process of getting unstuck.
So why am I doing this? What triggers it? Looking at it honestly, its a few things–a lack of “fun” in my life and a sense of burnout. I’m always working so hard, i need rest. This is coupled with anxiety about failure. I don’t get up to try the scary new thing because what if I fail or look stupid. It doesn’t matter if I tell myself not to feel that way–the result is a “freeze” state where I literally can’t do anything. So now that I’ve recognized these life patterns, how do I break free? A lot of times the answer is to make the scary thing smaller. Am I having trouble taking out the trash? Ok. Just take the trash bag and put it by the door. I don’t want to do dishes? Ok get the water hot and do one dish. These are silly examples, but that’s part of why it works. I get to the front door with the garbage and think–heck, I’ll just walk it outside, I’m right here. I get one dish done and, well, the water’s already hot–might as well do a few more. Examining the patterns in my failures and asking myself what the blocker is helps me think of creative ways to get through the wall. The line isn’t always a straight path–sometimes you crawl over, go around, or dig your way under if that’s the way that’s working. Breaking down the wall starts with self-reflection and understanding my behavior.
When we have patterns of “stuckness” it is almost never because we are “bad” or “lazy”, “stupid” or “broken.” There are many root causes–and just as many ways to honor and heal them. It could be something that runs deep–old fears or trauma, learned patterns from childhood, beliefs about what’s safe or possible that got baked in long ago. It could be more situational: burnout from carrying too much, anxiety that triggers a freeze response instead of action, relationships that drain energy without boundaries in place, a habit of managing everyone else’s needs before your own. Maybe you’re just trying to do too much and need to shift priorities. Maybe you need to go outside, touch some grass and let a little joy in. A lot of the time it’s something simple. Maybe working out at a different time. Meal prepping to clear some mental space during the week. Once you identify your blockers, you can start to try things that are a little out of the box. Buy that fun toothpaste–or give yourself permission to sit down and brush your teeth in the shower. If nothing works, it might be time to reassess whether the goal is really for YOU or for some version of you that you just think you should be. Or maybe you, like me, just need to let go of it being perfect. Lazy half-ass mopping is better than NO mopping. Recognizing patterns is the first step to moving forward–patterns that work for us, and patterns that don’t.
When I Keep Succeeding
Looking over the last year, my biggest successes came when I stopped efforting so hard. I was still working—real work, sometimes intense work—but there was a difference between working and straining. When I hit a flow state, when I was hyper-focused on something that actually interested me, things just happened. The work didn’t feel like work. This year especially, I took a deep dive into my health. I had few lucky breaks–running into the right person who had the information I needed just at the right time to send me in a whole new direction that changed everything. Also I got way WAY into Korean skin care and my skin has never looked so nice. I’m hitting my mid-forties healthier and shinier than I was a decade ago.
But those weren’t the only successes. Some came as incremental improvements, so gradual I barely noticed them happening. Others arrived seemingly out of nowhere, years after I’d decided they were impossible. Reading my old journals, I’ve realized my subconscious was working on them the whole time. I had charted things out and then forgotten about them, but somehow I was still doing the things I’d written down. Not because I was forcing myself to follow a plan, but because the groundwork had been laid and the momentum just carried forward. Only through my yearly reflection have I started understanding and recognizing cycles of success.
Success looks different when there’s no resistance inside it. Not because we’re not working, but because the work isn’t a fight against ourselves or against reality. When we’re aligned with what we’re actually doing, when there’s no internal struggle pushing against external resistance, the action becomes effortless. We’re not forcing an outcome. We’re not straining toward something that doesn’t fit. We’re moving in harmony with what’s actually possible, what genuinely interests us, what aligns with who we are. This is wu wei—effortless action. The work still happens, sometimes intensely, but it flows rather than fights. And when we’re in that flow, when we’re not expending energy on internal resistance, our subconscious continues working on everything we’ve set in motion. Opportunities appear because we’re already engaged and paying attention. The groundwork we laid—without forcing it—creates the conditions for momentum to carry itself forward naturally.
The Bigger Patterns
Beyond the individual wins and losses, there are deeper patterns running through my life. The type of person I keep choosing romantically, even though I know it won’t work. How I handle pressure and how it always leads to the same kind of collapse. My relationship with other people’s opinions and how I keep abandoning what I actually want to manage what they think. The reason I stay in situations I’ve already decided don’t serve me.
These patterns are harder to see because I’m inside them. I’m not observing from outside. I’m the one creating them, perpetuating them, struggling against them all at once. But I’ve definitely noticed them. “Why do I keep choosing the same type of person?” “Why do I always give in when someone pushes hard enough?” “Why can’t I ask for what I need even when it matters?” These questions point toward something real about how I operate. The key to breaking these patterns is in reflecting. Through reflection and self-honesty, I can see where the decisions repeated. I can notice the moments when I felt like a passenger instead of a choice-maker. I can pay attention to what keeps showing up across different relationships, different situations, different areas of my life and start to come to an understanding of my behavior.
These deeper patterns are where real self-knowledge lives. They’re not the surface-level habits or one-off decisions. They’re the themes that appear across different relationships, different contexts, different areas of life. The way we handle authority, how we navigate conflict, what we do when we’re scared, how we show up in intimate situations—these patterns reveal something fundamental about how we’ve learned to move through the world. They feel invisible because they’re the lens we look through, not something we’re looking at. But once you can identify the pattern, once you see it repeating in different forms across different situations, you stop thinking “this is just how I am” and start asking “why am I choosing this?” That shift—from passive acceptance to active awareness—is where change becomes possible.
What Makes Me Feel Like Myself
Somewhere in all this looking back, there are moments I want to pay special attention to. Times when I felt completely myself. Not my most productive version or my most impressive self, but my actual real self. The moments when I wasn’t trying to be anyone else or perform anything. When what was happening on the outside matched what I felt on the inside. A few years ago–longer ago than I like to think about–I had the opportunity to do a farm stay and work on the farm for the summer. It was hard physical work, from sun up to sun down. I have never felt happier or more alive. From watching the sun rise over the mountains with my coffee, the dark damp smell of the earth, to a million stars glittering in the night. It was everything I’ve ever needed and maybe the last time that I felt truly alive. I felt strong and capable. I was good at it. I managed to hold my own among much more experienced hands. I loved the peacefulness and quiet of nature all around. Everything I want in the world is to go back to this life. That feeling of aliveness has set the tone for all my future goals. It has been years–much longer than I hoped it would be. But there is a cabin in the woods deep in my heart, and big garden with bees.
These moments matter because they show me something true. What was I doing? Who was I with? What were the conditions? And maybe more importantly—what wasn’t there? What pressure had lifted? What expectation was I free from? The answers tell me what I actually need underneath all the shoulds. They point toward the conditions where I’m already whole instead of constantly trying to fix myself. They show me what authentically works for me.
Most people spend their whole lives chasing things they think they should want. Goals that look good, that sound impressive, that check boxes. But the real work is noticing what makes you feel alive—not someday, not in theory, but in actual lived experience. What conditions make you feel completely yourself? What brings that sense of aliveness? That’s not aspirational. That’s your actual life trying to tell you something. And once you know it, the work becomes about moving toward it however you can. Not waiting for the perfect circumstances or the exact right moment. Building toward it in small ways, in incremental steps, in however many years it takes. Find whatever makes you feel truly alive and do that.
Journaling Prompts
Where do you keep getting stuck? What is the thing blocking you from what you really want? What small think can you do to get unstuck?
Where do you keep succeeding? What made those wins possible, and what does that tell you about how you actually work?
When did you feel most like yourself this year? What was different about those moments? What can you do to bring more of that into your life?
The work of seeing the patterns is uncomfortable because it requires honesty. It requires admitting that I’m not just a victim of circumstance—I’m a participant in my own patterns. But once you see the pattern, you can change it. You can’t break what you can’t see. What patterns are showing up for you as you look back at your year?
Leave a Reply