Our Big New Dreams

...and how to keep them from becoming shame-monsters on our heads

Hello, readers! I’m writer Heather Lanier, and this is my very occasional newsletter, inviting us to lean into what makes us feel more human. Think of The Slow Take as the opposite of a boob-implant billboard or an AI-generated “thank you” note. There are only real thank you’s here. Welcome! And thanks for reading.

---

Happy New Year, friends! It’s January, which means there’s a lot of Big New Dream/Goal/Vision Energy floating around. I like that energy. Especially when it feels fun and engaging.

But when Big New Dream/Goal/Vision Energy becomes an oppressive Mt. Everest to scale, or when it convinces me that I’m not already enough, I want to kick all its glittery mania into the clouds and watch Queer Eye.

What do we do with our Big New Dreams/Goals/Visions? How do we foster the joy and hope they bring, without letting them trail in the shame or defeat like dead leaves from the front yard?

As I write this, it’s literally January 1, and I have some thoughts. I’m reading Martha Beck’s Finding Your Own North Star. In it, she describes how she dreaded writing her PhD dissertation. The dissertation felt so insurmountable that she just ignored it. She describes it as an “invisible, bloated monster” that sat on her head day and night, getting heavier and heavier.

Around that same time, she took her two-year-old son Adam, who has Down syndrome, to his occupational therapist. The OT wanted to help Adam potty-train. The OT explained that she would break down the task of potty-training into many micro-sized tasks.

“Like, one day we work on Number One,” Beck asked, “and the next day we work on Number Two?”

The OT smiled. She said no. They spent the first session teaching Adam “how to pinch the front waistband of his training pants… with the fingers of his right hand.” That’s all. Then he went home and practiced that.

A week later, they worked on his ability to grab the backside of his underpants with his other hand. Because that task was harder, it would take longer.

In other words, several weeks in, Adam wasn’t even sitting his tush on a toilet. He was working on pulling down pants.

If you’ve ever parented or supported a kid with fine motor disabilities in these endeavors, you’re nodding. You know all those incremental tasks, the ones that parents of typical kids take for granted, and you know they’re actually major victories that eventually add up to a major milestone. (You also know how difficult that back reach is!)

But I’m not really writing about occupational therapy. Not today. As a failing dissertation writer, Martha Beck was inspired. She decided she needed to break down her dissertation into similarly micro-sized tasks. She asked herself, how much time a day would she be willing to work on it? Six hours? Three? One? No and no and no. Her inner compass said she could stand… fifteen minutes.

What could a person possibly get done in fifteen minutes? A lot more than no minutes at all.

“I spent my first fifteen-minute workday just hauling out all my notes and glancing at them,” she writes. “Then, true to my plan, I punched the clock and took a nap. It certainly wasn’t much, but it was more work that I’d been able to make myself do for weeks. The next day, I wrote a single sentence. The following day, I managed a whole page.”

That’s how she finished the whole freaking dissertation. In fifteen minutes a day.

“Some days I’d write several paragraphs,” Beck writes. “Some days I would get inspired and finish two or three whole pages. Other days, the most I could do was look up the phone number of an adviser and place it near the telephone. But as long as I didn’t bite off more than my essential self could chew, I kept inching forward toward my goal.”

I find this deeply inspiring, especially as we ring in the new year.

Sometimes we set big goals, or have big dreams, and then we get overwhelmed. We think maybe those dreams aren’t really ours if they become massive monsters on our heads. But maybe we just need to embrace the micro-sized next step. And maybe those steps are far tinier than we ever imagined.

Do you have a Big New Dream this year? Do you avoid even making one because you’re too afraid of its potential monstrosity? I hope you take a chance, dream up something thrilling to you—something that makes your “essential self” (as Beck says) sing “yes,” and then boil it down to the absolute smallest next step. And I hop you enjoy yourself along the way!

Happy new year, friends! Let me know your thoughts below.