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I don't do new year's resolutions, but I am trying a yearly theme to guide me. My theme for 2023 is “body,” in all ways — listening to my body, caring for it, looking at it without flinching. In this essay, I am trying to look without flinching.

I’ve been lucky to usually be upset about my body’s form, not its function, but age and stress are taking their toll. Everything works just a bit worse than it used to. Time to take care of it before it’s too late. I know I will look back, thinking I was so young, foolish enough to try and slow time.

—

Content note: body dysmorphia, mommy issues, anti-Asian violence

2022 was a reboot.

i used a flip phone for a few months. i signed a new lease in new york, after a year without one. i turned 30 and had my first birthday party 8 months later. i tried to donate my eggs to help my friends become parents. i became pescatarian. i got covid for the first time. i was promoted to lead my team at twitter, lived the chaos of history, then quit. i learned who the real ones are. i stopped caring about being fully known. i started using a flip phone again.

a year ago, i’d have written more words, tried to please, performed for an audience — but no longer. i share on my own terms. i keep it short and direct. i don't second-guess. after years of feeling like an npc, i’m ready to become the main character.

my body carries a mind pulverized and made anew. you’d be forgiven if you thought you were talking to the same person.

*Law and Order voice* Previously, on Touch Grass: 

I’m a digital product designer in tech, trying to quit my tech addiction. I structured this experiment as an elimination diet: cut out my smartphone, social media, and streaming services, then re-introduce inputs one by one to understand their effects. When we last left off, on the first night of this experiment, I was convinced it was the best decision I had ever made. 

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It’s been over a month since I stopped using my smartphone. The first seventeen days coincided with my winter vacation. Nonstop rain and the latest Covid wave kept me at home, so I started reading seven books, finished four, reread one, and bought twelve more. I used up all the blank pages in my journal, then got a new notebook and filled up half of that too. I read every single email newsletter that came through my inbox, wrote two newsletters of my own, and had fifteen email conversations with friends, which adds up to more emailing in seventeen days than in the last two years combined. I say this not to boast of my productivity, but to show the breadth of my boredom; I simply had nothing else to do.

It's the end of the year. I invite you to reflect.

I created this journaling prompt after seeing a Tweet about how “work gets the best version of you.”

1. What is the best version of me?
   e.g., I pay attention, I don’t take things too seriously, I set clear expectations

2. Who do I currently give it to?
   e.g., my job and coworkers, my children

3. Who do I want to give it to instead?
   e.g., my new woodworking hobby

4. What would this change look like? What specific things would the best version of me do for them?

I like that this isn’t framed around achieving specific goals — which often just adds more to my plate without proper rebalancing, and can trigger a nasty fear of failure or pressure to achieve. Rather, these questions help me focus on my most positive attributes, and frames any changes as simply redirecting my energy… which sounds a lot easier! (Of course, ymmv.)

For those of you who don’t know, I’m a digital product designer by trade. My bread and butter is designing mobile apps, optimizing for usability, and thinking about how to make things easier and clearer. I’ve noticed that designers, myself included, particularly struggle when trying to parse unintuitive interfaces. The typical user often blames themselves when struggling to understand an interface; we designers, however, are so aware of what is “standard” or “best practice,” that we know to blame the software when something doesn’t make sense. It can even make us angry and offended, like it's an affront to our values.

Anyway, setting up my new phone was a trip.

—

I started using my new dumbphone on Friday evening.

The novelty of my dumbphone gimmick has been one of the few bright spots of my Seasonally-Affected, Disordered week. So far, I...

1. ...ordered a glossy blue Nokia, which arrived, but the phone inside the box was actually a matte gray. Packaging error.

2. ...found out this phone also came in a gold color, which sounds much more fun, so I ordered that too. Should arrive next Monday.

3. ...planned to return this supposed-to-be-blue-but-was-actually-gray phone, but I briefly put in my SIM card and explored its basic features just to see what I’m getting myself into. It has a camera! It has a browser! It even has Facebook! (Which I don’t intend to use!)

I’ll be starting my Great Offline Experiment this Friday evening, which marks the start of my holiday vacation until the New Year. (I'm just staying at home with family, which makes things easy.) I’m going for an elimination-diet type of reset, whereby I cut everything out and slowly reintroduce stimuli one-by-one, to better understand what affects my mental state the most.

My whole master plan actually makes for pretty dry reading, so I’ll just tell you about Phase 1: The Clean Slate. The goal here is to make any tech usage very deliberate, and cultivate a healthy degree of boredom. Reset all my habits. No mindless scrolling, no notifications, no easy dopamine.

The nights are getting longer and I’ve had a stressful week, so some of my demons have come out to play.

I met up with some old friends yesterday. One of them told me, “This is the most normal you’ve ever looked.” It’s true — these days, I have long black hair, wear unassuming outfits, and I’m probably tongue-tied and tired. A standard Asian woman working a standard Asian-woman job living a standard and small life. Don’t feel exceptional, don’t take up space, always shrink away instead of leaning in. A forgettable side character in the stories of stronger personalities and more interesting lives; here to help when you need it, and not a bother when you don’t. An NPC in my own life.

At the root of this all, of course, is ego — the insecurity of being unremarkable. But let’s box that up for another day.

Desperate for a quick-fix quirky schtick, I bought a flip phone.

Welcome to my new newsletter, a format I have avoided for years. I didn’t think my thoughts and words were worth the obnoxious push into people’s inboxes, and I didn’t want to deal with the pressure of promising regular issues.

What changed? Well, I plan on using social media less in the next year, so I’m laying the foundation for a new way to stay in touch with people. I’m also curious about what would happen to the landscape of my friendships in this new format. I feel the most honest, the most myself when writing and creating — something most of my friends don’t get to see.

This is intended to be a playground of random thoughts: some worthy of reading, some not, but all wholly mine. A public journal that hopefully feels more true to myself than any awkward spoken conversation or engagement-chasing Tweet. I hope this doesn’t devolve into performance.

Below is a little journal entry that I worked into a more legible essay. I’m not exactly happy with it, but I have to pause working on it for now. If you read it, I’m curious to hear what you think. What resonated, what didn’t, suggestions for what could be better. Thanks for spending time with me.