i am not the word

Disclaimer: I do not care if YOU count things. This isn’t about you, this is about me, and my observations in the world, and I how I view it for myself. Do what brings YOU joy.

Something I always stress in my classes, as a teacher, is quality over quantity. I don’t want them turning in garbage assignments just to get them done to a certain page, word, or paragraph count. I hate having to teach the 5 paragraph essay, because why 5? Why not 4 or 7? I hate when students ask how many words I want them to write, as if you are to write according to this arbitrary number of words I deem it takes to make your point.

More is not always better. In fact, I can often write so much, so easily. But when I have a shorter maximum word count, that is when I find myself being more aware of numbers. Being concise is actually an art form in and of itself. Which is also why I like to have students write the six word memoirs I do in my memoir unit.

But as usual, I digress…

I think it is important to focus less on numbers in so many aspects of our lives. And I have been finding ways to do this myself for awhile now. Here are the ways in which I try to be more aware of the quantifying of things in my life and be more intentional in focusing on the qualifying factors.

Weight

Having to go to the doctors often now, I am weighed almost every single time. Even before cancer, I stopped weighing myself. That number meant nothing to me. And if they weighed me at my yearly check up, I merely looked away and did not bother knowing the number. It isn’t always possible to avoid this number, as it had come up in conversations with doctors over the course of my cancer treatment, but I try to look at my health more so in how I am feeling and moving.

That’s the key right there. I don’t care about how MUCH I weigh. I care about how I FEEL. That is it. I love walking and being active, but I hate working out. I love eating delicious and balanced meals, but I also love my sweets and baked goods here and there. I am not giving up things I enjoy, or forcing myself to do things I don’t just to hit a number on a scale that others deem acceptable.

Do I feel good? Do I have energy? Am I able to accomplish the things I want to? Great!

And on that note, calories can fuck right off as well. It is important to have balanced diets and eat enough protein, iron, etc. But I don’t need to pay specific attention to the numbers. I just make sure I have a balance of things that are high in protein, and other vitamins, in the meals I make, so I don’t have to worry about it. Even when I was in recovery from my stem cell transplant, when my nurses mentioned I should try eating ice cream cause at least it’s high in calories, they didn’t try to give me a number. Just that I needed energy, so get some calories in me. I appreciated that.

Books

I wrote about this before on an instagram post, but I have been thinking about this again as more and more people post about their GoodReads challenge numbers. I think it is great people are giving themselves goals, and surpassing them. I did it a few years ago and it helped me get back into reading more again.

But then I stopped the challenge. I didn’t want to feel bad about myself if I got busy, or just didn’t feel like reading, and fell behind in my goal. I didn’t want to compare myself to others and the amount of books they were reading. As much as I told myself I wouldn’t, I knew there would be times that I wouldn’t be able to read as much, and then I would inevitably feel bad when I saw others reading a lot. To stop myself from caring, I just didn’t make a numeric goal. I just decided I would try to read at least a little bit each day. If I didn’t, so be it. If I did, great.

I didn’t want to look at reading as something I had to do, I wanted it to be something enjoyable and something I did because I wanted to. And when I couldn’t do it during chemo, because my eyes and my focus, it was frustrating. And it made me sad I could barely get through a book in a month, where I used to read one or two a week on average. Taking away the idea of quantifying it made it more enjoyable again.

I still keep track of what I read, write reviews sometimes and post about the books I am reading. I just don’t assign a number to it anymore. It’s freeing.

Countries

I often get asked how many countries I have been to. But I can only truly give you a number of how many countries/continents I have lived in. Country counting is a thing many people do, and I honestly don’t care what others do. Me not doing it, doesn’t mean I care if you do it.

But for me, it also became a comparison game. When my following went up on instagram and I was writing more about travel, I found myself feeling inadequate because I hadn’t been to as many countries as other people. I traveled more than most people I knew back at home, but not as much as the people who became my online community, I was stuck in the in-between. People had assumed I had likely been to more countries than I had, and I felt embarrassed sometimes when I hadn’t. Which is silly, cause even traveling at all is pretty damn amazing. No matter how many times, how long for or where you go.

Another reason I stopped counting is that I didn’t want to avoid going back to a country just to ‘add a country to the list’. I love Thailand. I lived there, and I went back 4 more times to visit. Not only because there was stuff I didn’t see, but also because I wanted to show Nick. I wanted to bring my sister. And I just wanted to be there again and again. Sometimes when we are counting countries, especially when we have limited holiday time allocated in our schedules, and aren’t just traveling all the time, we want to go to a new country every single time. And that is fine if people want to do that.

Sure, I would love to see something new each time, but that can be a new city in a country I’ve been to. A new beach maybe. A new restaurant. A new neighbourhood. You can always find something new in a country you have already been, because let’s be honest, you can travel somewhere for a day, a few days, a week, or a month, hell I have lived places for years, and you will never see everything.

On our way to Niger, we missed our connection in Casablanca and had 24 hours in Morocco. We left the airport, we had a hotel, we wandered around the neighbourhood. But I personally wouldn’t count this as going to the country. What would make this distinction for me, knowing that I can never see everything in one country? I don’t know. But I know it’s not that. And so I don’t count.

I have found that the moment I stopped counting, the better I felt about travel in general. It felt freeing to just not care anymore. I love seeing friends post that they hit their 100th country or their 5th, and that is great for them. But it is just not what I want to focus on in my life.

I want to be more present in making the travels I do about quality. Going to places I really want to be going. Spending my time doing the things I want to do. Going back to places over again, if that is what I want. Seeing new cities and finding new corners of the places I have been.

The privilege I have in coming from a family with money. Being white. Having a Canadian passport. All those are the basis for why I am even able to access the amount of countries that I am. Counting countries when I know this, just feels elitist for me.

I know this will offend some people, I know many who country count, and I do not mean to offend. I truly do not care that you count. If you find yourself hurt by what I choose to do and why, perhaps reflect on that?

Age

Age is such a touchy subject for so many. Birthdays are seen as daunting because you are ‘getting old’. Age is used to discriminate; you’re too young to know better or too old to learn new things. We base a lot of our life goals around age. We want to get married by this age, or have children by another. We want to be at a certain point in our career by another. We want to retire by yet another. Number after number.

When you are diagnosed with cancer, and hear the statistics of how much longer people have with your type of cancer, it gives you a whole new perspective. But one that I was already attuned to, just a little less so, prior to being diagnosed.

Reaching each age is a gift. But also the number is irrelevant if you have done nothing with each year. What’s that quote, “don’t count the years, make the years count”? This is so accurate it hurts.

I wouldn’t trade the life I have lived for guaranteed more years. If you told me I could rewind time, never leave Canada, live a typical life back there, waiting around for a teaching job, etc. and I wouldn’t get cancer, and I would live longer than I likely will now. I wouldn’t do it. Not to knock that life for others who enjoy it, but it’s not for me. Everyone’s idea of a good life is different, and that is great! How boring if we all thought the same about it, hey.

We should be making the most of the years we have. Cancer or no cancer, you have no control over any of it.

What I’m Trying to Say

I could probably keep going with other things we quantify in our lives. How much money we make. How many relationships or sexual partners we have. How many degrees we have. How many years I have been a teacher. How many friends we have.

There are so many ways in which we quantify our lives. And I just don’t see most of it as being purposeful to me.

Numbers are intrinsically comparative; the meaning of a number arises from its relationship to other numbers. Think about a number line, number 2 is number 2 based on its location in relation to the other numbers. If you want to conceptualize a quantity of something, it is meaningless without the comparison to something else. (I made my partner explain this to me in math terms so I could explain it here cause I was tripping on how to write this).

Comparison is the thief of joy. I have spent years trying to rid myself of any unnecessary comparisons. Why choose to quantify things I don’t need to, if it will not bring me joy?

We have more control over the quality of the things in our life, but quantity is out of our control. We can’t control our weight (no matter what those weight loss programs tell you, you can’t). We can’t control how many years we live (so many variables at play for why we can cease to exist in a moment). We can’t control how many countries we go to (money, passport privilege, everything explained above).

We feign a sense of control with so many things we quantify in our lives, when we truly have none at all.

So this, this is why I choose to release myself from the burden of comparison.

I want a life of quality. I want to focus on having a rich, joyous, meaningful life, however long that may be, however much I weigh, however many books I read, and however many countries I travel to. I choose quality over quantity any day.