Myself and Agency

how my practice of intentionally consuming media is teaching me to shift my mindset

I'm turning 25 at the end of this month, which has had me reflecting a lot on the past year of my life, and what I want my next year to look like. At the same time, I am coming out of an incredibly hard season—just over a year ago I lost the best job I have had to date, and feel like I’ve been scrambling ever since. Especially over the winter, I found myself in one of the deepest pits I have been in, feeling like I had completely lost my sense of self, just falling deeper and deeper into my hole of despair. Slowly though, I have been making my way out.

One of my closest friends recently gave me a tarot reading, and it spelled out basically everything that I have been feeling: lost, unmotivated, stuck, short-sighted, and lacking in confidence. While this still felt like a punch in the gut, I found myself saying, “Okay I know this, but what’s next?” It felt like the deck was just reading me and having a laugh at my misfortune, until it spit out a card that is one of my favorites within tarot: The Magician. A card that represents willpower, skill, creativity, desire, and a reminder that everything you need is already within you. As a creative person, I knew this was a call to stop ignoring my desires and ideas in pursuit of some job that would ultimately not fulfill me. This card was calling me to develop my agency.

While I didn’t have the vocabulary to define how I was feeling until recently, I was existing in a state of low agency. After having my previous endeavor fall apart, I was craving for someone to give me a guide on what to do. With no real direction, goals, or desired outcome, I thought if someone would just give me a map that I didn't care where I ended up—as long as it was somewhere better than my current situation. I thought that if someone laid out a set of steps for me, I could just follow them and miraculously start feeling fulfilled, not even caring if I was following my passions. But how is someone else supposed to know what I would find fulfilling? What I have come to realize is that the only person that knows what’s best for my life is myself.

Since the beginning of the year, one of my goals was to consume media more intentionally. I have been reading more, watching YouTube videos that align with my values and interests, started creating a digital garden, and even founded a book club with my partner and a friend. But for some reason, I had been having the hardest time putting all of these things I had been learning into practice in my own life. The video was the catalyst for me to start shifting my mindset was The Power of Loving Discipline, a Ted talk by Elizabeth Judith. I found this video while doing research for the aforementioned book club—while reading the second chapter of bell hooks’ All About Love, I became fascinated with the idea she posed of loving discipline, and wanted to explore the topic further.

In her talk, Elizabeth speaks of her past experience with self discipline, and how like many others it often included shame and resentment, feelings I am all too familiar with. For a long time, she kept herself from pursuing her dreams, and even when she finally did chase those goals, she was still stuck in the cycle of using shame as a motivator. But when someone said to her that “discipline can give you a beautiful life,” she started her own journey on healing her relationship with discipline. What she found was that the root of the word discipline comes from the Latin word discipulus, which means "to learn, to study." Once she was able to reframe discipline in this way, she allowed herself to grow, to enjoy the process of becoming; the in between of where you are now to where you want to be. I thought to myself that if she was able to shift her mindset halfway through her life, I have the time to change mine, too. In this vein, she cites the work of Carol Dweck, who specializes in the idea of growth and fixed mindsets. So, I decided to go seek out her work next.

"More than anything else, we need to abolish shame." -Elizabeth Judith

What I found was a Ted talk by Dweck, titled The power of believing that you can improve. Her focus in this talk was primarily on young school children, however, the principals can be applied to anyone. While I encourage you to watch this video yourself (especially if like me, you struggle with having a fixed mindset), one of my favorite points that she makes is one she opens the video with, “the power of yet.” By shifting your thinking from “I can’t do that” to “I can’t do that… yet” you open yourself up to the possibility of improvement. Instead of throwing our hands up at a challenge, we are able to see it as a place where real progress, growth, and learning can happen. By adopting a growth mindset, we allow ourselves to try, be wrong, and try again. When we see failure as a part of the process, we can remove ourselves from the shame cycle that tells us being wrong is a moral failure or a flaw within ourselves. Mistakes are just part of the journey.

These ideas had been stewing in my mind for the past couple weeks when, Anna, the host of my favorite podcast Wild Geese released an episode titled How Life Changes When You Realize the Rules are Made Up, which helped me add another piece to the puzzle of how to shift my mindset. This is another video I encourage you to watch if you are facing any of the same struggles as me (and especially as this was what really inspired me to write this essay). In her video, she focuses on the concept of agency, which is what brought me to the realization that I had been living my life in a state of low agency. Before her video, I don’t think I had ever really taken the time to sit and think about my own sense of agency (or what agency even really means), and what I can do to cultivate and live a more agentic life.

Anna always shares plenty of resources in her videos, and one that stuck with me from that particular episode is a Substack article by Tommy Dixon, called Do what you can't. As someone who has perfectionist tendencies, I often find myself doing a lot of research before starting a new task. I want to know everything I can know before starting something, but here's the problem—often times I get so wrapped up in the learning about a thing that I don't actually start the thing. Here's what Tommy has to say about that: "Information abundance is a modern miracle but it's also an impediment to agency. And it happens to be much more fun and freeing to be out in the world just doing stuff, stumping around and humming merrily, expanding my zone of competence, than sitting inside on a screen watching someone else do stuff. Knowledge is rarely the bottleneck. To start almost anything, you need to know nearly nothing." What an idea. That to start something, I don't need to sit down and do hours of research; I can just start trying, learning things "the hard way." Dixon goes on to describe how he used this approach to teach himself photography and woodworking, stating that we usually don't need the top of the line equipment to try out a new hobby; he did his first woodworking project just using a regular knife he had on hand. Start simple, but really, just start.

What does this all add up to? For me, it really has become a new way for me to approach my life. Even just last month, I was struggling daily to see the positive in my life, only being able to focus on the places where I lack. But now, I can see that lack as space to fill with things I love. I am putting more value on my own opinions, wants, and desires. Instead of constantly looking for advice or answers, I can focus on defining what I want out of life, and what I can do to make that my reality.

The people that I aspire to be like didn’t sit and wait for someone to give them a guidebook. They didn’t ask for permission to bring their ideas into the world, they just found a way to do it. And that is the way that I want to live—with such an assured sense of self that even when I face roadblocks, challenges, and push-back from others, that I am able to keep pursuing my own goals and live my life authentically.

This morning, I did another tarot reading for myself. Thinking again about turning 25, I asked about the next year of my life, and what things ahead will look like for me. The first card I pulled: The Magician.

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