My Journey (so far) with the 12 Week Year

My attempt to stop myself before I self help into oblivion

It’s week three of my first attempt at a #12WeekYear, and I am currently in a fist fight with my brain over whether I should A) start over because I only did 62% of the 24 tasks I outlined for myself to complete last week or B) give up on this endeavor all together.

I was first introduced to the 12 Week Year on TikTok in 2020, and as I write this, I feel the need to warn you that many of my Substacks will sprout from the shit of 2020, an arduous fertilizer for my seeds of change. I did not have a job during the pandemic, and that distance from capitalism released a hefty amount of the guilt I felt using time for myself. I created a good morning routine, waking up, doing yoga, journaling, and then making myself some breakfast and coffee to go sit in the broken wheelchair I used as a chair and watch the world outside by scrolling on my phone at the window. As I talked about last week, I struggle with comparing myself to perfect lives portrayed on social media, and my self-destructive drug of choice was videos about morning routines and productivity programs. I would sit for hours and save videos for “inspiration” which would later became attempts to Frankenstein other people’s “lives” into my bettered personhood.

5-9 routines, 75 hard challenge, 75 soft challenge, 80/20 lifestyles - take your pick, there’s a hashtag for you. 75 soft challenges and 5-9 routine videos were the tags I would most often find myself doomscrolling through. In each of these videos, I would see usually a woman sharing not only her process and progress but also all of the items she needed to achieve this lifestyle. She often had her pink fuzzy headband so she could do her skincare routine, her Stanley so she could go to the gym, and her can shaped cup with its bamboo lid and glass straw (what the hell do you call these types of cups?) so she can make herself her iced coffee before the 9 am chime rings. The #12WeekYear had its own shopping list from creators of Notion templates, new journals, and .5mm pens in order to best track progress. I’ve found it funny to see the frustration people have felt with the rise of TikTok shop as if the money spent on Amazon during the pandemic wasn’t a reflection of the influence the platform has had on people’s spending habits. Purchasing decisions influenced by social media has never been unique to TikTok, but the volume of content regarding viral products has such a bigger affect on us than we are willing to admit (we being me, myself, and… well me). My excessive collection of nearly new journals chronicle many failed attempts to “get my life together” like these creators have. I’ve perfected the art of ripping the first ten pages out of a Moleskin, shredding hours spent replicating minimalist bullet journal spreads from Pinterest to make room for new opportunity and attempt to ignore the ugly scar left behind.

I have struggled with feelings of not being enough since I was a kid, raised in a family that preached about the “better” I would become if I did more. I grew up thinking that if I had free time, I was not doing enough. I could be cleaning, volunteering, learning something new, helping someone, the list of to-dos endless to reach this state of perfection that though I had no real-life examples of was very real to me. As I became an adult, my chagrin with myself became an obsession with the cult of self-help, a capitalist scam targeting women at a younger age each year and telling them that they need to do more “for” themself in order to be happy. Books, beauty products, brands, all of these “solutions” are presented as an “investment” when in reality, it’s targeted marketing meant to isolate individuals with the idea that their experience is not only their own but theirs to process alone.

I had turned to the brands and beauty products as my fixes, but I had always turned away from books with false promises of fixing my life on the cover. I would fill digital spaces and blank journal pages with the words of the voices preaching betterment instead of buying their New York Times bestsellers, protecting the activity that had become the refuge for and from myself from becoming another place where I felt that I wasn’t enough. There’s been a long list of self-help books that have been recommended to me by people who had previously been a large part of my life but who I have since spent hundreds of dollars healing from in therapy. Actually, it was in therapy that I finally felt that healing work was an investment in myself rather than a source of shame, and in the past four years, I’ve changed so much. Recently, I’ve reached the incredible milestone of wanting myself to be happy despite not being perfect. I would love to say that this has been a relief, but it’s been an absolutely terrifying process so far. With the recent cross-country move, I haven’t had the opportunity to restart therapy and continue exploring this epiphany, so I decided to trust myself and see if I could try to navigate the self-help book space while taking care of my mental health. I started researching and picking up titles in the ever-growing pool of self-help e-books I have access to on Libby. Some were genuinely thought-provoking. Some felt like the author stroking himself while he talked about how much “better” people’s lives are because of his work. I DNFed books that were not healthy for me, and I stuck through to the end of books that made me uncomfortable yet empowered.

I read Financial Feminist by Tori Dunlap just before I picked up The 12 Week Year. Dunlap has been a creator I’ve followed since 2020. I’m also a long time listener of her podcast (also named Financial Feminist) which breaks through the patriarchal and white supremacist messaging around personal finance to empower personal and communal change. I highly recommend her book to any human who will listen to me rave about it, the lessons leaving me with so much perspective on myself and the world I exist in. There is homework at the end of each chapter (I see you gifted-kid, oldest sibling burnouts starting to foam at the mouth), and part of the homework at the end of the first chapters is describing your dream life, a terrifying exercise when you have never felt like you were enough to think about your own happiness. As much as I wanted to avoid it, I sat and cried and reflected and wanted to throw up and thirty minutes later, I was staring at a dream I had always woken myself up from thinking it was a nightmare. It feels weird to admit that I’ve never had a dream, but truly, I didn’t think I deserved one yet. But there it was, my dream, the life I actually want, and I no longer had the opportunity to be in denial about it.

Even worse, I want to make my dream come true (and with that, welcome to my Substack).

With this newfound excitement, I redirected my search to self-help books centered around goal setting. I had no idea that The 12 Week Year was a book and was excited to pick it up and see if what I had been seeing on social media was what was detailed in the process. To no ones surprise, the TikTok videos left out so much of the work, and instead of relying on the shame I felt watching other people’s successes on social media to be a catalyst of change, I decided to shake things up and see if the book could provide some insight and strategies to help me reach my goals. I felt very empowered by Part 1 analyzing the emotions and struggles that come with setting goals and worked through all the homework in Part 2 until there was nothing left to do but start.

In both Financial Feminist and 12 Week Year, a big part of finding success in the work you're doing is to establish community where you can share your goals, ask for help, and have open conversations about struggles regarding them. This was so counter to so much of the self-help guidance and advice I’d been fed, and it took me time after I’d finished both of the books to understand. Though you are the one who is putting in the work, your community is vital in your growth as an individual. Because being an individual is being part of the community that you live and serve in. It finally clicked that taking care of myself didn’t mean reaching the state of perfection I’d been fed since I was in middle school before I was allowed to become part of a community. It meant showing up as I am and continuing to grow with people who want me to succeed as much as I want them to. My god, my therapists are so proud of me right now.

So I’m not gonna give up on the goals I’ve set for this 12 Week Year. I’ve established community and space to talk about and grow in these areas of life I’ve been so scared to admit were important to me. I am taking time to review my progress and make sure I am not attempting perfection, instead focussed on showing up for myself. In short, I am helping myself, no affiliate link needed.