January Dids and Didn'ts

A public record of all the things I failed at this month!

Listen, I’ll spare you the joke that everyone has already made over the last week (“wow, January sure was 89 days long, huh?”) because as I get older, time seems to speed up in such a distressing way that I actually want January to be 89 days long and am kind of sad it’s over already. But here we are a week into February (!), my birthday is tomorrow (!!!), and I thought I’d try something new. Every month, I like to make a list of the things I want to do, then go back at the end of the month to check off what I accomplished and beat myself up for the things at which I failed miserably. Usually, I do this in my planner, where nobody can see it, but this year I thought I’d keep a more permanent record here. For motivation? For accountability? So you can feel better if you too only achieved 57% of your goals, which, may I remind you, is a solid D-minus, maybe even an F? Sure, all of the above! Anyway, here’s what I did and didn’t do this month.

January Dids:

• DID: Make egg bites
  Look, we are starting small. This was a very tiny, easily manageable goal, and yet somehow I had it on my to-do list for the entirety of 2024 and never did it. So the fact that I actually made egg bites in the first month of 2025 is an act of heroism! Also an act of not-paying-$6-for-them-at-Starbucks. The first time I made egg bites, I used a recipe that was not good and basically resulted in soggy, crustless mini quiches (whatever, I still ate them), but the second time I used a recipe that appeared unbidden in my feed from this random person that I have never followed or heard of, and it was really good! I have so far made a spinach/red pepper/feta situation, and also a mushroom/spinach/gruyere situation, and—as per the agreement that all the ladies of my generation have somehow collectively made—I am very proud when recounting to people how much protein is in them.

• DID: Plant spring bulbs and winter veggies
  We have five raised beds in our backyard, built by my husband during some sort of 2020-lockdown-inspired midlife crisis, and it brings me great Martha Stewart-type joy to grow seasonal produce and flowers in them. In January, I planted one with kale and arugula, one with broccoli, carrots, and cauliflower, and one with bulbs that I am hoping will blossom into a cut flower garden in the spring (ranunculus, tulips, and daffodils). The other two are dormant right now, but will become dahlias, raspberries and blueberries in the summer. Wow, I just read that paragraph back to myself and was like tradwife much???

• DID: Write two substacks
  Did you miss them? They are here and here!

• DID: Start going to yoga classes

  One of my sister’s goals this year was to start doing yoga regularly, and since we often exercise together—for accountability and also the fact that it’s way more fun to go get a little treat afterwards if you have someone to go get a little treat with—I was like sure, what the heck, I’ll start doing yoga regularly too! The first class we went to was some kind of restorative thing, which was honestly a bit of a snoozefest (literally), but the second class we went to was…..oh my god. My sister was like “sign up for this Thursday 9am class, I’ve done it before, it’s great.” So I signed up, we met there, we started the class…..and we immediately descended into hell. It was not yoga. It was, like, military boot camp. The room was a thousand degrees, the teacher kept screaming “DO IT! DO IT! COME ON, DO IT!”, there were zero breaks for resting or stretching, and at one point I genuinely thought my legs had ceased to function. One lady walked out halfway through! (Impressive that she could still walk, tbh.) Somewhere near the end (though honestly, time lost all meaning), I tried to remember when I had last felt so similarly sweaty, exhausted, and physically drained, and realized it had been seven years earlier during the labor of my second child. Was this class really as hard as giving birth? The evidence doesn’t lie! Afterwards, I said to my sister, “wait, I thought you’d done this class before???” and she was like “whoops, I guess I hadn’t?” Turns out, she’d actually done Slow Flow and this was Sculpt Flow. Let me tell you, there was no flowing! It was only sculpting! Sure, we did like two downward dogs at the beginning, but then it was 59 minutes of weights and torture and drills and crab-walking along the edge of your yoga mat while someone screamed at you to crab-walk faster. FASTER! DO IT! COME ON! Anyway, I’m counting “start going to yoga classes” for January, because I guess I technically went to a yoga studio.

• DID: Start taking magnesium
  I mean, I’m doing it. I don’t know that it’s doing anything for me?

• DID: Have a 1-1 date with each child and also my husband
  My son and I went to the mall (twice!) as he is now a tween firmly in his mall era, which is charmingly retro even though malls are kind of grim these days. We went to Crate & Barrel and tried to guess what things cost, always an exercise in humility! My daughter and I went out for frozen yogurt, during which she combined pineapple froyo with Reese’s Pieces and somehow ate the entire thing without vomiting. My husband and I caught a matinee of “A Complete Unknown,” which I loved and couldn’t stop talking about for days.

• DID: Start getting acupuncture again
  I found acupuncture really helpful during my cancer treatment, and equally helpful as I rode (and continue to ride!) the waves of its after-effects seven years later. But I hadn’t been in a few years because the place I used to go to was in San Francisco, I no longer live or work in San Francisco, and I couldn’t find anyone in the burbs who would take my insurance. I found I greatly missed not just the mental and physical benefits of acupuncture, but also the enforced 20-minute period of immobility in a darkened room. So at the beginning of the year, I re-committed to trying to find someone locally, and now—after one million Kafka-esque phone calls, during which I white-knuckled the highs and lows of the American health insurance system—I finally have. I’ve had three sessions so far, and it’s helping.

• DID: Organize my closet
  Oh, it is so thrilling to open the door and see things hanging so neatly and well-categorized. I arranged my jeans by order of wash, from dark to light! I have special hooks for them! I have little plastic discs that divide sweatshirt-type sweaters from normal-type sweaters! Yes, I was a pleasure to have in class!

  

January Didn’ts:

• DIDN’T: Organize, like, any other closet in my house
  Man, I had so many plans. The coat closet. The linen closet. The closet of shame in my office. My bathroom drawers. I did none of it.

• DIDN’T: Write every day

  I mean, in hindsight I kind of set myself up to fail on this one. Every day? I should’ve scaled that back from the start, what is this, NaNoWriMo?! Still, I kind of wish I’d actually touched the three big writing projects I’d wanted to dive into this month (re-working a short story, writing a first draft of a different short story, doing something with my novel other than thinking about it). I worked on some paid writing, sure, but this one was definitely a big fail this month.

• DIDN’T: Play pickleball four times

  Eh, played twice. Good enough.

• DIDN’T: Go to pilates four times

  Eh, went three times. Too busy being tortured in military boot camp!

• DIDN’T: Read four books

  Read two and a half. Didn’t really love any of them. I’m kind of in a reading slump right now and need something super addictive and inspiring to drag me out of it. Any thoughts? I have The God of The Woods and Good Girl lined up; maybe they’ll help.

• DIDN’T: Find a new black or camel winter coat

  Not for lack of trying! Why do winter coats only exist at “$4,000 Max Mara” or “polyester nightmare” and nowhere along the spectrum?!! I just want to be warm and chic and not broke!