22 Lessons I Learned in 2022

Good evening sipsters!! Wow, it’s been some time. You will have to forgive me for my year-long hiatus. It truly felt like it was one thing after another. But y’all, the persistence and patience of God!! Though I wanted to look at my lapse and come up with all the excuses as to why I couldn’t return to the blog after being silent for a year, my spirit and prayer would not allow me to give up. So I put on my seeing utensils (glasses), grabbed my handy-dandy notebook, and turned off the very loud voice of doubt.

I don’t know how this happened, but the books I primarily read during 2022 were on the self-development and finance spectrum. And while I still read books by Black authors about Black stories, I took time to become the author of my life and care about my Black story. And what better way to return to the blog and end 2022 than to impart the lessons I learned this year? Without further adieu, let us sip!

1. Progress doesn’t look like progress under a magnifying glass.

This is important in just about every aspect of your life, from finances to your health. Progress takes time, but if you’re constantly checking if you’ve improved or grown every minute, you won’t notice that you are, in fact, improving. Every minute on the minute is best reserved for the CrossFit workout and not self-reflection.

2. We should all be contributing to our retirement accounts ASAP (as in starting in our teen years) if we can.

I didn’t know what compound interest meant until 2021. By then, I had been in the workforce for 8-9 years and had not contributed a single penny to a retirement account. Being a first-generation immigrant comes with its vantage points; however, it does come with its drawbacks. My mother did not start contributing to a retirement account until the age of 40 years old. Even after she started contributing to her account, she never contributed up to her company match and continuously used it as an emergency fund. Thus, she was leaving money on the table and breaking the one rule of compound interest, which is to never interrupt compounding. Needless to say, I did not think that retirement accounts were important. Praise God, I now know different.

3. Habits have a way of compounding into destinations.

In October, I found myself living on autopilot. I quickly realized that my autopilot tendencies did not include good habits. Y’all, I’m talking about stretches of days waking up at ten, working in bed until 5 pm, having one gigantic meal of junk, no workouts, streaming some show in the background while scrolling on Pinterest (forgive me, I don’t really use popular social media platforms) after work for 7 hours before falling asleep at 1 am, and repeat the next day. Y’all, I don’t even know if my depressive state during this time was the reason for this time or if it resulted from this time. What was the chicken? Who was the egg? How did they even get involved in the first place? Anyways, I digress.

What got me out of this? The power of the Holy Spirit and Darren Hardy’s “The Compound Effect.” The Spirit moved me to daily Mass and prayer one Wednesday afternoon, and God gave me the most loving yet stern talking to. After God told me that “They weren’t one of my little friends and that I needed to stop messing around,” I plugged in my headphones and took a long walk as I listened to “The Compound Effect.” This book put me onto audiobooks and the fact that habits beget destinations. Hardy’s breakdown of how small choices, active or passive (aka living on autopilot), leads to a final destination really opened my eyes to my habits and how they affected my current position. I highly recommend that everyone give this book a listen (at least 2 times on 2x speed).

4. We are all consumers of content. Make sure you are consuming what you want to consume and not being algorithmically pushed into certain types of content.

In a world where everyone and everything is listening, it has become increasingly simple to only consume products that are algorithmically tailored to your viewing habits. If you don’t change your viewing or consumption habits, you may lose autonomy over what you consume. While this is more of a slippery slope type of argument, While this is more of a slippery slope type of argument, you should regularly check in with yourself about what you would like to consume and how often you would like to consume certain types of content. For example, while I have fallen in love with personal finance topics, I have to take extended breaks from these communities because I can find myself continuously moving the final goalpost and not being content with my current financial wins.

5. Read more!

The power of self-investment is huge! One of the best ways to invest in yourself is through knowledge. I strongly believe reading in whatever form (audio, physical book, osmosis, etc.) is the best way to acquire knowledge. I could be wrong, but I have yet to experience differently.

6. Therapy may not be a cure but a treatment.

This is healing! Being able to see this sobering reality and still choose therapy is healing. I remember that just 12 months ago, I had dreams of how therapy would cure me enough to feel ready to open myself in my relationships. Working with my therapist has shown me that that dream was a pipe dream and not based in reality. After all, it had taken 24 years for me to accumulate these wounds; how could one year reverse all of that? Secondly, Gifty’s learned lesson in “Transcendent Kingdom” was reinforced; there is no cure for being human. This leads into…

7. Internal healing is an active process.

My time with FOCUS left me with a great nugget of wisdom: internal healing is always possible, but you must choose it. I am not trying to simplify or make small the traumas of life. Humanity is beautiful, but humans have found awfully creative ways to hurt other humans. If you have experienced some trauma, I am sorry, and I promise you that God was there and was painfully wounded by your trauma. Being in FOCUS brought its fair share of hardships, but this lesson that God was there and wants me to be healed has been the most freeing lesson to date. However, we can only find healing if we show up daily for ourselves and put in the work. We can only get rid of the negative thoughts if we ask how these thoughts became a part of our belief systems and begin to attack these lies with truths. Let’s all make the goal to pursue healing in 2023!

8. Invest in your knowledge development.

Whether reading a book, listening to a podcast, or using your employer’s education assistance benefit, for the love of all things holy, invest in your knowledge. That’s it!

9. Action ≠ motion.

James Clear’s “Atomic Habits” blasted my favorite procrastination tool. How often have we used doing another thing to procrastinate on what we are supposed to be doing? If you have ever fallen into this trap, you have fallen into the trap of thinking that motion = action. You may be doing something, but it’s not the action you should be doing.

10. Balance competing with the old version of you with comparing yourself to your past self.

Comparison is the thief of joy. We often hear this in reference to comparing ourselves to others, but I encourage you to stop comparing in reference to yourself if it is not serving you. We should always strive to be better but also recognize that there are things that our past selves could do because of the tools we had at that time. For example, in 2020, we were forced to have ample free time. Some took up running; others took up making bread. We improved at certain things because all we had was time to improve these skills. Today, many of us have returned to the office in some capacity, and activities have opened up. We may not have five hours to work out and make bread; thus, our bodies may not look like they did in 2020, and our bread skills may not be as refined. Instead of comparing ourselves against ourselves from 2020, we can strive to be better than we are today.

11. Pay for the premium experiences.

I went to my first concert ever this year. And, of course, it was the Maverick City Kingdom tour. However, I “forced” myself to buy the Gold package that included a Q&A with the artists. Money well spent. It hurt to shell out dollars for this experience, but per Ramit Sethi’s “I Will Teach You to be Rich,” after following my financial plan and goals, my budget should include experiencing fun activities with discretionary income. I don’t regret spending this money; in fact, because of the Q&A session, I now know that Naomi Raine and I are supposed to be friends. Can’t nobody tell me differently!

12. Allow your passions and goals to change.

We are not stagnant beings. Even our very body goes through changes; we call this the aging process. Why aren’t our dreams allowed to change if our bodies are allowed to change? This year alone, I learned that I might be into finance and the underlying economics that makes society go round. We are still sorting out what this shift means for me. Your girl stayed as far away as possible from Economics courses in college and thought that anyone who studied Finance was a shark. Now, I’m regularly consuming financial and economic documents and content. We will be working through this identity crisis in 2023.

13. Sadly, not everyone makes the roster of your inner circle at the end of the year.

No malintent; it’s just that our growth sometimes requires us to shed our old skin. The old skin protected us during its time, and we still love it, but we must learn to love our new body with new skin without the old skin. That was very metamorphic, but you get what I’m putting down.

14. Power is not evil.

I heard this from a female surgeon during a women in surgery event that allowed many of the walls around my desires to fall. She said it is a neutral thing that we only hear evil stories about. Her advice? Define what power means to you and achieve it. To take this a step further, often, our solutions end with awareness and advocacy. However, we rarely talk about the other side of the equation. We usually advocate by bringing awareness about certain circumstances and conditions to those in power. Why should it be someone else in power solving our problems? Why not you? Since this wall-crumbling advice, I have allowed myself to envision a world with me in power. But like I tell my friends, we won’t know for a while whether my presence is a good or bad influence. Hopefully, it’s good…

15. Stop the bleeding!

Too often, I have left my self-reflection paralyzed by the amount of work I must do on myself. Instead of leaving ready to do just one thing, I leave believing I will never be better. I was praying with the hemorrhaging woman in Mark 5. I realized that this woman had many things against her. She had an incurable illness; she was broker than broke from medical fees; she was viewed as unclean because of her condition; she was lonely; she was a woman in a patriarchal society. Just thing after thing, but she chose to focus on the bleeding instead of trying to solve everything. She was only trying to stop the bleeding because that was the most pressing issue. I have had to learn to look for the bleeding in my life. Where am I hemorrhaging? How do I stop that one thing first? Only after I have figured this out or am in a process that will stop the bleeding can I look at the next issue.

16. Every story has multiple perspectives; depending on the narrator, you may be the hero or the villain. Accept that you may be the villain from someone’s perspective.

Maturity is understanding that others may perceive you entirely differently from how you see yourself. While we should all strive to be compassionate and just, we cannot control how others see our decisions. Apologize if you have unintentionally impacted someone negatively, but do not allow anyone to guilt you into anything!

17. The stories we tell ourselves have power.

Stories are the foundation we use to build our identity and self-efficacy. What are the stories you tell yourself? Where are you stripping away your control? Where are you giving yourself power? Do the stories you house align with where you would like to be? If you want to see a change in your life, change the story.

18. Pick your hard.

It is hard to remain in our bad habits, and it is hard to gain new and improved practices. Which hard leads to a better you?

19. Balance not only looks different for different people but it also looks different for the same person depending on the season. Don’t be afraid to constantly adapt to your definition of balance.

Don’t allow external forces such as others or your past to define what balance means to you. Define balance for only you in your current season.

20. Everyone is or has gone through their valley of tears. You may never know at which point your smile is interacting with someone else’s story. Smile!

I have a confession. I have one of those auras. You know the type; the type where you feel comfortable enough to divulge your entire life story after meeting me five minutes ago. It came in handy as a missionary. As a self-proclaimed lover of stories, it’s one of my best God-given gifts. I have heard many stories, and just about everyone I have met has had their hardships. During my hardest days, receiving a smile has allowed me to step out of my darkness for a brief moment. And sometimes that is enough.

21. Allow your relationship with your parents to change and grow as you age.

In life, many of us start off believing that our parents are perfect. Those with hard childhoods learn early on that they aren’t, and we hold that against them. Through years of active healing, my relationship with my parents has changed. They have hurt me, and at 18 years old, I blamed them and stayed away as often as possible to learn how to love myself. As a 25-year-old, I have slowly shifted from full blame to “they did the best they could with their trauma and life experience.” I am still healing, but through this healing process, I have learned that I needed to distance myself from them, and now it is necessary to remove that distance slowly.

22. More faith!!!

I am certainly not perfect, but God gave me many opportunities for continued faith this year. And while I faltered, through the grace of God, my faith remained steadfast. I was ready to live in a cardboard box in the name of faith! That, my friends, was and is growth! Luke 18:8: “When the Son of Man returns, will he find faith?” will forever pierce my heart; however, I will take the win!

Disclaimer: Though influenced by the institutions that formed me, the views expressed here are those of my own at a specific snapshot in time. I make no promises that said ideas will remain constant as I age.