Be Cringe is a year-long experience centered on showing up more authentically — even when it feels embarrassing. Each month, I share a theme, reflect on how I’m working with it in my own life, and invite subscribers to explore it alongside me. Welcome to Month 8: Be Cringe about Being Bad at Something. Below, I’ll share insights from Month 7: Be Cringe about Choosing Yourself, as well as how this month will unfold.
The insights from Month 7 are free to read, and the look-ahead to what choosing yourself looks like is available for paid subscribers.
Month 7 Recap: Be Cringe About Choosing Yourself
I need to be honest. When I think about how last month went, my gut is to say I failed.
It’s not quite that simple, and I’ll likely come to the conclusion that failing is in a sense, choosing myself, but it sure didn’t go how I wanted it to.
Throughout this series, when I’m talking about the month up ahead, I give a few examples of how I personally will implement something (in addition to the more general examples I give for this collective).
This time, I really only said I was going to do one thing. I said I was going to reach out to potential future clients as a way of choosing myself and my business, and left it at that. I didn’t think about anything else, really. I saw something that I thought needed to be done, and I sort of molded that to-do list item into the month’s theme.
But to cut to the chase, I’ve reached out to zero potential clients. Not just in July, but at all.
Every meeting I’ve taken, contract I’ve signed, or proposal I’ve sent is because someone reached out to me first. I said things would change this past month.
But when I would think about ‘reaching out’, I didn’t really have a plan. I realized it was just something I said I was going to do for the sake of knowing I needed to do it, and feeling like this month, arbitrarily, was the time to do it.
I need to be able to change my mind; it’s how I fine-tune my discernment. And in allowing myself to change my mind and adjust to the season I am in, I am, in turn, choosing myself (see? I told you I’d get there).
I also want to go through this challenge, month by month, in the way I’ve written them (and hope you all go through them). Reflecting, thinking, testing, and figuring out how I want to push through a theme. Being prescriptive before doing that maybe isn’t the best way to go about that?
It’s summer. It’s hard to prioritize ‘the grind’ during summer. I onboarded a new client this month, and have overall been settling into that rhythm, trying to balance all of my responsibilities — client work, this Substack, my podcast, being a parent and partner, keeping a home in order, etc. I’ve been lifting 3x a week, and am slowly getting back to twice weekly1 runs to maintain my base before I start training for races again in the fall.
My son turned 3 in July, and I spent a lot of time preparing for a party that included a lot of food and a dozen toddlers in our apartment.
I’m resetting my sleep schedule and trying to stick to my bedtime and have started leaving my phone on the charger for the first 60-90 minutes of my day (game-changing, btw).
These small habits are taking time. It’s also clear that these are the current ways I need to choose myself. My energy levels have been a bit all over the place — sometimes mental energy is high and physical energy is low; sometimes I want to walk 20k steps a day and lift all the heavy things but my brain needs a break. But overall, I think I’ve needed to choose to reset my energy to protect my creativity. Maybe that also means big things are coming, and I intuitively know what needs my focus, even if my ego struggles.
While this was all happening, I’ve noticed myself pulling away from social media in general, including Substack. Unintentional, but I think it was a break I needed.
When I think about what it means to Be Cringe, the ‘big’ and ‘loud’ thing often comes to the forefront. Reaching out to people, starting a new initiative, putting myself out there. And when I look at this year so far, I see a lot of that.
So for me, I think choosing myself this month was more introspective, a little ‘quieter’, and more about looking at my needs and routines under a microscope. It was about returning to me, making sure I’m getting what I need at a base level, so that I can continue to jump in and be my most authentic, true self.
Perhaps if I’d done this specific part of the challenge at another time, the output would’ve been different. Reaching out will come, but before I get too busy, I think my subconscious knew I needed to prioritize different things so that if and when I do get more work, the baseline systems will already be in place.
That’s all to say that choosing ourselves can absolutely be about defying the expectations others have and holding firm on our boundaries, but it can also be about pushing back against ourselves. Sometimes, our egos dictate what we think we should be doing. The lesson I learned this month was the importance of pushing back against my ego, and how that version of choosing myself was the most true to what I needed in this moment.
Month 8: Be Cringe About Being Bad at Something
So far this year, we’ve shown up, we’ve wanted, we’ve tried, we’ve been seen. We figured out why we want what we want, what’s blocking us, and we’ve chosen ourselves. When we put all of that together, a clear picture emerges. Oh shit, we’re doing it. I didn’t mean to trick you! But maybe I did?
But I’m not ready, you may be thinking. But I’m not good enough at this, I need more time to practice, and I don’t know what I’m doing.
My response to that? Good. Be bad. Do it anyway.
This is the exact advice I used to get through writing this draft. For some reason, I really resisted it. The ideas weren’t flowing, and I let some negative self-talk get in my way, despite being really excited about this theme for a long time (more on that below). Now that it’s here, I noticed myself putting pressure to make this essay a bit too perfect, which made the writing process stressful and not enjoyable.