You know how sometimes you sit down to write a blog post, and then life gets in the way, and all of a sudden half a year has elapsed? No? Just me?
Okay. Well, first of all, apologies to Tay-Tay for the blog title (see “Anti-Hero” by Taylor Swift if you don’t get the reference).
Secondly, this post was originally supposed to piggyback off the season of New Year’s Resolutions but now it’s mid-June. Whoops.
(I’m the problem, it’s me.)
But even though we’re well past the point where most people have either committed to a life change or broken their resolutions… I’ve been thinking about goals a lot. Or rather, my coaches have been telling me how valuable it is to have them, to write them down and have them visible on a place you look at all the time like the fridge or your phone. And I get that, I do. But to understand my reticence, maybe it helps to know a bit about my life.
For those who don’t know me, my name’s Lee-Ann. Some people call me Lee or L.A. for short. (They also just call me short, and at least one person describes me as “4 foot nothing”, which is very hurtful because I’m more like 5 foot nothing, lol.)
Once upon a time, I got told I was a gifted child. I don’t exactly know what that means. But I was reading and writing before I started pre-school, and could read adult books by the time I was about eight years old, though I didn’t do it often because… well, the lives of grown-ups weren’t very relatable to me, unsurprisingly.
(My alleged giftedness came with no social skills whatsoever, but that’s another story. I’m also not that great with numbers.)
Point is, I was supposed to be really smart. But I probably peaked around the age of 12 and was positively average thereafter. And thus began a life of ongoing existential crises and abandoning anything I did not immediately excel at.
I mean, that’s the oversimplified version but it sums me up pretty well.
I can and believe I do work hard in my professional life.
At home though? I start things with a bright vision, then quickly get overwhelmed and stop. Whether it’s a creative endeavour/potential hobby, or something more basic like getting rid of stuff I know I don’t need.
But I’m trying not to be like that anymore.
I’ve been training both Muay Thai and Western boxing for a while, and heaps of people who started after me are more advanced, but you know what? That’s okay. I’m on my journey, not theirs.
And I just really like training – a surprising development for the girl who’d do literally anything to get out of PE back in the day. Muay Thai in particular has probably been my main focus for the past seven months or so. It’s given me an outlet for my anxiety, and my mental health has improved a lot as a result.
To be clear, I don’t think physical activity is some magic bullet for mental health conditions, and I get really peeved when folks tell someone with a mental illness to just go outside or exercise. I’m just saying that training has become one of the tools in my personal wellbeing toolbox.
One of the flow-on effects of never committing to anything before has been that I’ve rarely ever set goals for myself. In recent fitness-related questionnaires, I’ve listed tongue-in-cheek goals like sweep the head Muay Thai coach (unlikely), land a head kick on the very tall club manager, and not run a marathon because that sounds bloody awful.
So what are my real goals? I mean, to be perfectly honest, it’s to keep going and just get by. Which is not a SMART goal at all, but it is the thing underpinning everything else I do.
Obviously, I want to finish my next books too. And I will, but my day job does come first, given a) that’s what pays the bills, and b) I love it and would continue to work there even if I was one of the few authors who actually made a living from book sales.
Oh, and conducting an epic spring clean is a must. Or maybe I can hire an awesome, non-judgemental, professional declutterer to do it for me instead. 😉
Lee-Ann Khoh 