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Winter Solstice 2025

As I’ve shared in recent posts, much of my inner turmoil over the last few years has come from feeling pressured to make and keep commitments. I want to acknowledge here that the commitments themselves are not to blame. Rather, there is a people-pleasing perfectionist within me who doesn’t want to let anyone down, and who won’t rest until I am everything to everybody.

This part of me continually agrees to do things even when I don’t have the physical or mental capacity to do them well. I have given a whole-hearted “yes” to many projects that brought me joy and helped me get to know my neighbors a little better. But I’ve also taken on tasks that were a drain on my well-being, just because I didn’t want to go against the grain. These create stress and steal time away from the parts of my life in the Driftless that make it worth living. The number of hours in the day stays the same, and other commitments suffer from my being spread too thin. It is this category that asks me to reflect on what I want to do instead of what I think I should do.

When I was a high school student touring local colleges, my parents and I attended a talk by an admissions counselor at one of my chosen schools. He told us that for decades, students had followed a script about which University of Wisconsin system college they were destined to attend. Each school had a purported specialty; if you were interested in that field of study, you went to that school.

The counselor said that this script was no more. Students were realizing they could pursue their interests and achieve personal growth at any number of colleges. Each path would be slightly different but would yield its own kind of success.

I don’t want to stick to the script if it means I won’t have time to enjoy my home, my loved ones, and the natural world in my own way. The idea that I “should” commit to something may arise from deep in my psyche, but this doesn’t make it good (or bad). As I fill in the spaces on my 2026 calendar, I hope I can be clear-eyed about when that idea no longer fits.