Oh, the places you'll go

Last week, I was sitting in my office, reading through a proposal for a grant, when I looked up at my calendar and realized it's been exactly five years since I was diagnosed with melanoma. How funny it is to think back five years. In some ways, I feel like I'm the same person, but in so many other ways, I feel like I'm not.

I watched a TED Talk over Christmas break called, "The psychology of your future self." The premise of the talk is that--because we can't imagine where we'll be in the future--we underestimate how much we'll change five, ten, or twenty years down the road.



Here's a snippet:

At every age, from 18 to 68... people vastly underestimated how much change they would experience over the next 10 years... Why does this happen? We're not entirely sure, but it probably has to do with the ease of remembering versus the difficulty of imagining. Most of us can remember who we were 10 years ago, but we find it hard to imagine who we're going to be, and then we mistakenly think that because it's hard to imagine, it's not likely to happen. Sorry, when people say "I can't imagine that," they're usually talking about their own lack of imagination, and not about the unlikelihood of the event that they're describing.

The bottom line is, time is a powerful force. It transforms our preferences. It reshapes our values. It alters our personalities. We seem to appreciate this fact, but only in retrospect. Only when we look backwards do we realize how much change happens in a decade. It's as if, for most of us, the present is a magic time. It's a watershed on the timeline. It's the moment at which we finally become ourselves. Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they're finished. The person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting and as temporary as all the people you've ever been. The one constant in our life is change.

This year, instead of coming up with a traditional New Years Resolution (or in my case, usually about 15), I decided to set one goal: Travel to Australia to visit my good friend from college.

Sounds simple enough, right? Then why have I been putting it off for the past year and a half? Perhaps the thought of spending a whole paycheck on a flight is scary and it's inconceivable for a work-a-holic like me to take 12 days of PTO in one fell swoop. But I'm doing it! I booked my flight over the weekend, and now I have a little less than three months to plan my trip to the other side of the world. I'm giddy with excitement, and yes, a little scared, but I hope that by continuing to push myself a little outside my comfort zone, I'll become an even better version of myself in 2020, 2025, 2030, and beyond.

Give yourself a break

A few weeks ago, I was sitting around a table with seven  women I went to high school with about ten years ago. After years of feeling like I'm the youngest person in the room and a novice at being a grown up, I had an epiphany: Somewhere along the way, we turned into adults. Real adults. We're no longer in entry-level jobs, we're getting married (well, not me, but several of my friends) and starting familes (also not me, but you get the idea), buying cars and houses, and paying for our own cell phone bills.

Although things seem great on the surface, one of the things I think I've struggled with most since graduating from college in 2008 is striking the right balance between my inner child and becoming a responsible adult. Recently, I discovered a gem of a TV show on the CW called Emily Owens, M.D., that reminds me of first-season Greys Anatomy. The main character, Emily a.k.a. Dr. Owens, a huge geek in high school, draws parallels between her first year of medical residency and her teenage years. To make things worse, she matches at the same hospital as her high school arch nemesis and the boy she has a crush on sees her as "just a friend." No matter how old I get, I think I'll still be able to relate to this predictable but endearing storyline. Rumor has it that the CW is cancelling it, which breaks my heart, especially because the most recent episode had a couple great lines that I heard and immediately knew I'd be sharing with you.

As Emily berates herself, her adorable male coworker/friend/crush interrupts her by saying: "No one's judging your flaws except you."

Later on in the episode, as Emily is celebrating her birthday, she takes her friend's comment to heart. She says to herself:

"It's hard not to try and judge your flaws because we're aware of every mistake. We know our inner doubts, our hidden motivations. So my wish for next year is to be easier on myself. Focus less on the bad and more on the good. Really just give myself a break."

Leave it to me to find inspiration from a soon-to-be-canceled sitcom. But there's something about this quote that really resonates with me. As I reflect on 2012 and start making plans for next year, "giving myself a break" is probably going to end up somewhere on my resolutions list this year.

I mean think about it. It's so easy to hate on ourselves. Just today, I've had the following thoughts: my legs are gross and pasty (yes, I am still self conscious about my winter white legs), I need to tone up before I go on vacation in April, I wish I was a better cook, I should be spending more time being productive over my Christmas break than vegging out on trashy TV... the list goes on. We are always are own worst critics.

What are you most critical about? Have you found a way to cope with negative self talk?