Ruhee Dewji

Retro #9: January

Man, January felt a trillion weeks long, didn’t it?

My friend Dan McQuade passed away at the end of January. I wrote about him, but I’ve obviously been thinking about him a lot still. I have this tendency, when someone passes, to justify or contextualize sadness about them—I say things like “We were friends, but we weren’t close friends,” as if to say, don’t use all your limited condolences on me, someone else deserves them more. As if sorriness about the loss of this delightful person is a limited resource, or as if I’m stealing valour by being sadder than I should (obviously an objective measure).

I think it’s an internet cynicism thing, like I’m afraid someone will accuse me of claiming closeness so that people feel sorry for me. (Did all millennials grow up with those stories of people faking cancer in forums and FB groups?)

Dan and I were friends. His death hit me really hard, even harder than I’d have guessed it would if I’d thought about it—and, maybe a testament to his optimism, I hadn’t really thought about it. I know none of us need to earn our grief, and the man truly had so many friends, but it is funny to imagine him up there like “damn some of these sad people could have bothered texting me back once in awhile”.

I always struggle with consistency. As a recovering perfectionist I used to really subscribe to the streak mentality—every single day forever, no breaks, or you weren’t trying. But as Mandy Brown writes,

The theory behind a streak is that by making that break into a penalty, you will be less likely to take it. Fair enough. But you will take a break someday, because a body needs breaks. A habit isn’t built on successive days or weeks, enumerated and enumerable. A habit is built on the movement of return. It’s coming back to something, again and again, in precise rhythms or otherwise, that transforms an effort into a habit, an act of will into an act of way.

Casey Johnston wrote, similarly, in her recent newsletter that consistency is “what you did more often than not,” and by that I was pretty consistent this month:

Notebook with some days crossed off in January for ear training and mobility

The mobility stuff is about where I’d hoped it would be: I aimed for 2-3 times a week and got roughly that. The ear training is a bit lower than I’d like—almost daily would be ideal!—but I’m happiest about continually returning to the habit after missing a day or two or three. I still kept going. That’s consistent!

Also, on the work front:

Bluesky post by me: got a shoutout at all hands for shipping a feature that directly makes us more money. at that very moment, I was handling an incident I caused which took down our entire backend for a chunk of time, losing us money. ⚖️

Comme ci, comme ça.

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