I don’t try and attempt a New Year’s resolution every year. I’ve picked up on the habit more recently, in an effort to inspire my creative side. I used to collect quotes- specifically the best I’d heard all day. I did monthly digital art pieces. I also attempted to expand my musical catalogue by listening to a new song a day for a full year.

What did that all teach me? I’m not sure, but I probably shouldn’t have attempted to do all three of those within the same year. No wonder most of my 2018 is a blur…

Honestly, just looking at this makes me want to pick up my drawing tablet again.

Which is a good start! However, I have to contend with what I’ve dubbed “The Cloud.” It’s been looming over my head since I attempted a year’s worth of those monthly digital draws. By the way, I was not successful in that endeavor. My last “draw” of the year looked something like this:

Think of The Cloud as a metaphor for the fear of burning out. I’m afraid that, with whatever shred of inspiration sees fit to fly my way, it’ll disappear into the ether as quickly as it came. I’ll clarify- this doesn’t apply exclusively to digital art, or to New Year’s resolutions. Picking up a passion and keeping it lit for an extended period of time has proven to be a challenge for me. At any given time, you can pore through dozens of boxes of attempted creative endeavors across my home. Some, successful. Most- incomplete.

So how do you combat the omnipresent dread of failure?

Just before the New Year- on a whim- I decided to give failure a shot.

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December was a difficult month for growth. Without getting into specifics, I came face-to-face with a host of issues that I’d been bottling up for decades. And in doing so, I had to reevaluate my relationships with my slew of coping mechanisms.

The biggest culprit? Screen time. I know that if I plop down in bed to watch a single video on YouTube, it’ll turn into a dozen more. Most of them I don’t even pay attention to. I treat them like background noise while mindlessly scrolling through Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. And TikTok? Forget about it. My dependency on entertainment through that app got to the point where I had to set up a time limit every time I open it. Good news- it’s very effective!

But some of you might be wondering: could I flat-out delete all these apps and quit cold turkey? Sure, if I didn’t use them for work. As much as they’ve come under scrutiny in recent years, social media apps are still instrumental in both gathering and relaying information. According to the Pew Research Center, about 20% of Americans digest their news through social media- 31% of whom get it through Facebook. On the news side of things, social media posts from police departments and government agencies are sometimes the only source that we may have to report a current event.

“Alright, that’s fine,” you might say. “But what about the rest of your waking hours? There’s no way you’re immersed in the news sphere 24/7.”

This is where I found that my priorities needed to be recalibrated. I’d like you consider the following- not as an excuse, but as a generational perspective. The early days of the internet coincided with my first milestones: learning how to crawl, my first tooth, etc. By the time I went into high school, news stations were just starting to report on the dangers of MySpace. I chose to tempt fate and signed up for Facebook, thinking it was the “safer” option. I didn’t spend much time on it at first, but as more of my friends created their own accounts, it became a digital gathering spot.

So it makes sense when, over a decade later, social media platforms remain my preferred way to keep in contact with friends and family. It became the cool thing to do in an effort to tune out “the real world.” And now… for some, the line between the real and digital world is significantly blurred.

As I mentioned earlier, I still use social media for work. Quitting cold turkey simply isn’t an option. But what if there was a better way to utilize my time in front of a screen?

I don’t know why I decided to redownload DuoLingo after years of inactivity. But there I was, days before the start of 2023, trying to test my way out of the entire Spanish language (and failing).

Again, for context: Ukrainian is my native language. I tested out of all those lessons, no sweat. There were still some new words and grammar to brush up on, so I still give it some practice at least once every few days. I took Spanish throughout middle and high school. Knowing two languages before adding on a third made learning it even easier. Along the way, pronouncing words in other languages (mostly for choral purposes) became less daunting, too.

I get a good chuckle every time I open up my DuoLingo profile. When I first signed up, I decided to see how many new languages I could learn while my manager took a lunch break. The results:

I think I had just started to attempt Welsh when she came back from lunch. Most of those attempted languages remain at 15 experience points to this day (meaning I’ve maybe understood basic greetings and identifiers, or characters in some cases). And yes, the temptation to add more to this list is daunting.

Here’s a fun secret from your local bilingual morning news anchor: the best way to retain your language knowledge is by practicing it. Sounds obvious, but let’s consider the following: I haven’t taken a Spanish class since my junior year of high school. Since then, I’ve only run into a handful of situations where I needed to speak the language in a real-life setting. Meanwhile, I speak Ukrainian just about every day. I grew up in a home where it was spoken, and I was often around other Ukrainians in our community who spoke the language with me. So despite what the numbers above may indicate, it’s much easier for me to practically navigate one language over the other. Also, for your consideration: there are over 200 Spanish units to learn through the app, while Ukrainian caps out at 33.

Somehow, through trial and error (and plenty of frustrating redo’s), I managed to keep a 30-day learning streak for the first time.

I also managed to beat my timed record for a Ukrainian lesson. Yes, folks, that is a sub-30 second timestamp you see here:

And in this time… boy, I’ve messed up a lot of perfectly good Spanish.

I tried, in vain, to jump ahead. DuoLingo told me that I had left off on unit 35 when I reinstalled the app, so I tried to test out and jump all the way to unit 207. That was unsuccessful. Trying to skip to unit 150 also failed. As did my efforts to get to unit 100. Unit 50 didn’t want me, either. I couldn’t get past unit 35, which was talking about vocabulary concepts that I was already familiar with. Why do I need to bother going through them again? Part of me felt stupid for failing to draw back on knowledge I haven’t touched in about a decade.

It occurred to me: my Ukrainian isn’t perfect, either. DuoLingo has taught me a few new words that I’d never thought about using. I can always strive to do better. So I head back and go over vocab, grammar, and conjugation in Ukrainian. I’ll pop over to Spanish, and test my syntax skills. And then, if I’m still hungry for more… maybe I’ll pick up one of the many languages that I left in a box back in 2016. There’s no wrong way to learn, so long as you’re willing to absorb the unfamiliar.