April, No Fool(ing)

I kind of hate the whole April Fool’s Day thing. It left me on edge as a kid—would I wake up to find the classic plastic wrap over the toilet bowl, or would it be a booby-trapped-bedroom-door year?—and now, as an adult, I find little humour in the surge of joke-adjacent promotional emails that flood my inbox as the many companies whose mailing lists I really should unsubscribe from take advantage of the opportunity to profit from yet another non-holiday. (I just took a thirty-minute writing break to do a mass unsubscribe. Joke’s on you, capitalism!)

April 1, then, leaves me grumpy from the prank perspective. It makes me happy, though, in the way the beginning of every month does. Indeed, I delight in my ritual of looking back at the goals I set for myself four weeks before and setting new ones for the month to come. There’s something soothing and grounding about it. Something satisfying and motivating.

It hasn’t always been this way. This very task used to be a masochistic exercise; self-flagellation in the form of a bullet-form list of twenty-plus goals that no human, let alone a neurologically and physically compromised one, could possibly accomplish in the space of thirty-one (or twenty-eight or thirty) days. Write a novel? Definitely, I’ll get right on that; I’m sure I can sneak enough quality work sessions into my few perky hours between waking and falling back into an anticonvulsant-forced sleep! Take up the piano again and learn an advanced piece and plan a recital for my family and friends and stage my triumphant return to an instrument I haven’t touched in any meaningful way since I was an undergraduate student? Just as soon as I dig my electric piano out of the inner bowels of my storage locker and wishful-think my contracted fingers into loosening up!

I’ve learned through trial and much error, though, that, contrary to that oft-quoted saying, I don’t usually land among the stars when I shoot for the moon. More often than not, in fact, the moon-bound rocket holding my good intentions and overly lofty ambitions bursts into flames and crashes to the earth below. By reining myself in and being more realistic about my abilities and priorities—staying on firm ground to begin with—I miss out on the glory and excitement of takeoff but avoid the death-via-spacecraft-accident part. A good compromise, I’d say.

Of course, I remain the same person, and old habits die hard, etc., so my monthly self-review inevitably reveals that I’ve once again overestimated my capacity to miraculously become a healthy and productive work machine for the purposes of achieving all I’d set out to. Now, however, I approach this task in a more self-compassionate and constructive manner. First, I highlight (in purple, my happy colour) the few gimmes I 100% accomplished. Next, I highlight (in blue, my “I can be at peace with this” colour) the goals I made reasonable progress toward. Only then do I look at the miserable failures, considering—with as little judgement I can and with more pragmatism than I used to ever manage—why I failed and asking myself if I want to carry the goal over to my next list or if it would make more sense to let it go either temporarily or permanently.

This process is kind of empowering. Rather than darting to an extreme (i.e., giving up or doubling down), I’m choosing the middle path, which, stunningly, seems to be my way more and more these days. Here I am, ceasing and desisting with pulling a higher-stakes version of the plastic-wrap-over-the-toilet stunt, a prank whose sole victims are my happiness and sense of self-worth. No longer am I passively allowing myself to be my own fool.