New Year, New Me? Hopefully. #15
Hey there, welcome back to The BT Lounge! It's been a minute, and in this episode, I'm spilling the tea on my wild ride through 2023. From moving into a place with doors (yes, doors!), celebrating wins on the boards of Haus of Codec and Rising Tide Society, to hitting my ambitious book-reading goal—this year's been a rollercoaster of highs and lows. As we gear up for 2024, I'm craving a fresh start, hoping for more control, and crossing my fingers for fewer "flop era" vibes in my 40s. Trust is my big sexy word of the year, as I bare it all about my struggles and the quest for self-reliance. While the tone might be a tad somber, I'm stoked for the podcast's revamp in the new year, promising more laid-back chats with friends. Massive thanks for sticking around—here's to shutting the door on 2023 and diving into the next chapter of The BT Lounge!
Big, Sexy Word of the Year Exercise https://www.brittannytaylor.com/the-bt-lounge/success-without-a-five-year-plan
https://brittannytaylor.com
https://www.instagram.com/brittanny/
Podcast artwork by Brittany Lizotte https://brittlizo.com
Podcast music by Joshua Van Ness https://www.joshuavanness.com
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[00:00:00] Welcome back to the BT lounge. I hope you're doing well. So it's been a few months since I said that I would be back. I said I was going to release a new episode in October and it's December. It's not even December. It's the end of December. 2024 is right around the corner and let me tell you I am ready.
This year of our Lord 2023 can kick rocks.
It was a sucky year. It was a bland year. It was a somewhat traumatizing year. It was also a great year. I might be being a little generous with saying that it was a great year. Overall there were good moments, but there was definitely a lot that was tough and trying and turbulent and other T words.
It was a tough one. It really was. And I thought 2022 was bad, but oh man, this year really said, hold my beer, just sit and watch. That being said, I am looking forward to 2024 and seeing what it brings.
There are a few things I want to talk about in this episode, but first a recap.
As I adjust myself in my squeaky chair.
[00:01:31] A big thing that happened this year was I moved. I moved into a place that has doors. Now only the people who have lived in a loft understand how excited I am to live in a place that has doors. Actually, there's a surplus of doors. I know there are people out there who do not believe in manifestation, but when I tell you I manifested this place, I did.
My husband and my, how does that, how do you say that?
Me and my husband, my husband and I, but I'm talking about the possessive, uh…
Me and my husband, our last place. Like I said, it was a loft apartment, and thankfully it had one and a half baths. So, those were the only doors that we had, and let's just say there was a lot of hiding in the bathrooms to have any semblance of privacy.
I always said that our next place had to have two bathrooms or else we would break up. I mean, it's true. It's true. But then I realized it's not necessarily the two bathrooms, but again, that helps. It's the fact that we had doors. Those were the only doors that we had. So we would just hide in the bathrooms.
I then moved on to just manifesting a place with doors. I was like, all I want are doors. And Simple pleasures, just simple, simple things your girl wants. I spent a lot of time looking on Zillow for places to live, and that website is a little funky. I went on one day, and it completely just erased my settings, and I saw that there was a place that was very big. Quite big. Like, 2, 400 square feet. That's pretty big. It was definitely out of our price range, but I was like, listen, I need to see what this place looks like.
We go, and I fall in love. Of course. It's out of our budget, but there are two bathrooms and so many doors. So picture when you're in a hotel room and they have the doors inside that lead to another hotel room. This is what this house is like. So let me actually count. There's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.
There's like 10 doors in this place. More or less. It's an excess of doors and I'm obsessed with it because some doors just stay shut. I literally shut the door to my office. I have my own office, y'all. I shut the door to my office to record this episode. I'm living. I'm living. That was a huge highlight of 2023.
So much so that I could not tell you any other highlights of the year.
[00:04:49] Okay. I have a few more. I think I've mentioned in the past that, now I'm trying to reflect on my own podcast episodes of like what I said and what I haven't said. So we all know, I do a lot of things and I talk about the amount of free labor that I do. Let's just say I'm changing my language in 2024.
I'm on the board for Haus of Codec, which is Rhode Island's first LGBTQ+ youth shelter, which is amazing. I'm vice president on that board. And I'm also president-elect of Rising Tide Society which is a national slash international nonprofit that brings independent small business owners together in the spirit of community over competition. I'm the co-leader of the Rhode Island chapter. And once we went rogue as a community earlier in 2023. We became a nonprofit and a board of directors were selected and I was selected as president-elect, which is really awesome and such an honor that people believe in me that much that they want me to be president in two years. It's wild.
[00:06:01] Another plus of this year is I read a shit ton of books, like so many books. As of right now, I've read 74 out of the 75 books I want to read for the year. I am halfway through Down the Drain by Julia Fox and I am about 50 or so pages away from finishing a book. called, I Do Not Sleep, which is Egypt's most scandalous novel from the fifties.
It's taken me months to finish this book and I'm glad that no one else is taking it out from the library because I keep lapsing on it and then reordering the book. It's just so painful to read. Not painful like the writing's bad, but just the story. It's like, oh, girl, it's about this girl, Nadia, who just keeps doing these crimes of passion and ruining everyone's life around her and her own.
It's just so painful. And I see what's coming next. And I'm like, girl, uh, I don't even know if I can finish this book. So, we're going to battle it out to see which book becomes my 75th book of 2023.
I'm listening to the audiobook of Down the Drain and, oh, let me tell you, I don't know how that girl is still alive. Truly. And I, she's like 18 at the point where I'm at now. Like, she hasn't even met Kanye West yet.
Like, oh my god, how old is she anyway? Hmm, wait, let me look up. How old is Julia Fox? She's 33. Girl, why did I think she was like 25?
I'm doing a book club for Down the Drain and when it's done we're gonna have a dinner party and eat Italian food and dress like Julia Fox and it's gonna be fabulous.
[00:07:45] I celebrated my one year anniversary of marriage to my husband. That's a wild thing to say a year past. It definitely feels like a year past. This year was long. It felt long. Of course, time went by so quickly, but there were moments of this year that just felt so excruciatingly long.
Like I said before, there were good moments thrown in here and there, but it was a tough year. It was mentally, it was tough physically, emotionally, spiritually. All things. It just felt really hard.
So I'm glad to shut the door on 2023 and I'm looking forward to what 2024 holds for me and for the rest of us.
[00:08:32] The tarot card for 2024 is Strength. Card number 8. The card for 2023 was card number 7. The Chariot. I always like to say that the chariot is the let's fucking go card. Let's just steam ahead. Let's get stuff done. Let's handle our business. But it felt like the wheels fell off and we were just flying down a hill with no control over the chariot. I'm hoping for the year of strength to bring back that feeling of control over our lives, over what we want to do, and not feel like we're just flying by the seat of our pants. I didn't feel like I had a lot of control in 2023.
I realized the other night that I'm in my flop era. So my definition of a flop era is like you think of a musician and they come out with a new album and maybe they're trying something different and it just doesn't land like their stuff usually does. That's what I feel like. Like I'm still trying, but nothing is hitting the way that I would like. And I'm having a really hard time crawling out of this space. I feel like I'm in a rut.
The language that I'm using isn't really helping like my free labor because of that. It feels like a lot of work hasn't been coming my way, but a lot of volunteer opportunities definitely have been knocking at my door I felt disenchanted with my business, and I don't know what I want to do anymore. I love photography, but I don't know if that is going to be the thing that is going to sustain me for the rest of my life.
I'm 40 years old, and I'm considering getting a 9 to 5 job for really the first time in my life. I'm scared. I don't know what my future holds. I honestly could never see myself to be this age, so I never had a plan. I'm hoping for the strength for myself to hold myself up and keep myself going. There were a lot of times that I didn't feel like trying. It didn't feel like it was worth it. But I'm ready to start again.
I love the start of a new year. I don't do resolutions or big goal setting or intention setting. I just want that clean slate. I want to be able to shut the door on this past year and have the opportunity to start anew.
So Lord give me the strength. I know I need it. And I think the rest of us do too.
[00:11:20] You may have heard one of my earlier episodes talking about making your big sexy word of the year. And if you haven't, I'm definitely going to link that in the show notes. So please give it a listen to figure out what your big sexy word of the year is.
I'd love to tell you mine. It's trust. I don't have a lot of trust in myself. I break promises to myself every single day, multiple times a day. Down to the simplest thing of telling myself that I'm going to drink enough water today and then I don't. Or I'm going to do yoga when I wake up and then I don't. And it's not even like I'm doing like a 60-minute class at home. I'm just rolling around on my mat for 10, 15 minutes. And I can't even pull that off. I tell myself that I'm going to make myself breakfast to eat. And then I don't. If I can't trust myself to do the little things that just take care of me, how can I trust myself to do the bigger things?
Trust. Trust sounds really sexy right now.
I want to trust that I will do what I said I'm gonna do. The lack of trust in myself is what's making me worry about the future. It's making me worry about the business I started. I'm tired of breaking promises to myself. Because the more I think about it, the sadder I get. And I don't want to feel that way anymore. I don't deserve to feel that way.
This episode's pretty depressing, isn't it? Ah, well, that's how I've been feeling lately. I've been depressed and it's okay to say it.
[00:13:05] I'm looking forward to bringing this podcast back in the new year. I may not have an episode coming out next week at this time, but I just wanted to drop in a little something before the end of the year to say, Hey, I'm still here. This podcast is still alive. It's not going anywhere. And I'm excited to do something different with this podcast.
Part of one of my slumps this past year was feeling like I had nothing left to say. Not that I'm this most intelligent, brilliant person. I mean, I might be, but I kind of been drawing a blank on what to say. I used to write these long captions that like would really resonate with people and it meant a lot to me. But then when I think about writing, I'm like, uh, what are words? I don't know words.
I have to say while recording this episode, I haven't stopped that much. Usually, I try to make sure I'm saying the words as perfectly as I can. And I kind of, I kind of just don't care. Yeah, I don't really care. The whole point of this podcast was not to have this polished production. It's supposed to be me talking to you like you came over to hang out.
That's what's going to be happening on this podcast in the near future. You're going to hear me talking with friends. Not like an interview, but just a conversation that I would have with anyone who came over to hang out. And I'm really excited for that because I have some really cool friends and we have some dope conversations. So I want to record them. I Want to be able to look back on The relationships I have with people and I want to introduce you to some of those people as well
[00:14:57] Thank you so much for sticking around. I really really appreciate it. I hope you enjoyed this special episode of the BT lounge And I'll see you around here Next time.
