Today, I am 47.

It’s one of those weird ages I’ve looked forward to for a while, as it’s the peak of adult unhappiness. Paraphrasing an article I can’t be arsed to google, at 47 you transition from angst and desire from what you haven’t accomplished and becoming okay with what you have. You go from big dreams to… achievable dreams. You expect a little less of yourself. And, while those words are even still hard for me to type, my ego wanting to lash out at them, it’s kind of true. And it’s kind of GOOD.

You see, I put humanity in two buckets. There’s everyone else – to whom I give almost endless grace, align my expectations with reason and reality, and while I’m not my husband, I’m a pretty decent cheerleader. Then there’s me regarding me – unrealistic perfectionism standards, all tough love all the time, and always pushing myself to be more more more more. If someone else was injured or sick, I’d tell them to rest and recover. When I was injured or sick or otherwise malfunctioning, I was calculating how far I could still push myself. My pride, she’s a doozy.

Here’s a non-sequitur, but it will come back around, I promise. I know that there’s mixed sentiment on AI, but since, like, that’s the way things are going, I didn’t want to be left behind. I wanted to learn what the heck ChatGPT was all about, besides a slightly more sophisticated google search. So, I decided to try and use it for a nutrition plan. Again, I would not suggest this of anyone else, but I am doing this because I have the decades of research and certifications (this was my backup if game dev ever went south) in sports nutrition, and I know exactly what to do. My two-bucket system was just blinding me. I would never tell a hypothetical client to eat the way I did, but for some reason, I kept getting stricter and stricter on myself because I wasn’t losing weight, and the fact that I just kept feeling worse and worse just didn’t really register. If I wasn’t making more progress, I wasn’t miserable enough. I was hungry, but I could tolerate being hungrier to make progress, right? My body just operated differently, I thought.

Enter ChatGPT – who told me to eat more and gave me flexibility and grace in my eating plan. I was super hesitant, but figured what I was doing wasn’t working, so I might as well try something completely different. Adding 50% more protein to my diet and fueling my workouts better felt like a light switch flipped on. I went from eternal, unyielding hunger to feeling like a human again. The first few weeks the weight loss was slow and inconsistent, but I told ChatGPT in one of my daily check ins that even if I didn’t lose any more weight, I wanted to stick with this because I just felt so good. There’s a stability and evenness in my body and demeanor that wasn’t there before, and that’s worth everything.

And, also, it’s working. Very slowly, but it’s working. I track 7-day rolling average weight to eliminate scale noise, and I am down 3.3 lbs in the last two months. That sounds like nothing to most people, but my body sheds weight like it’s being asked to give away sentimental treasured heirlooms (not easily), so this is huge progress for me. And I feel awesome. And this plan is so doable. Eat enough protein. Fuel the workouts. Don’t be a complete @#$ with the rest of the day. That’s pretty much it.

Another helpful thing is that I have had fewer drinks in 2026 than I have fingers and toes. Dry January was enlightening – I thought I really really liked whiskey, like, it was part of my identity, but it was really just something that I did. A habit, if you will. In 2026, I find myself having more enjoyable days, and more usable hours in the day having alcohol be much more of a “sometimes food”. But, Friday, we had pizza and whiskey as an early birthday celebration, and I really enjoyed that too (after 2 weeks of not). It took that month of abstaining, but I’m feeling good having reframed the habit to more of a celebratory thing.

Then, I looked to how scattered I felt at work. Honestly, I started that particular ChatGPT thread to explore cognitive behavioral therapy for better sleep, but talking through it, it was mostly the fact that I was having trouble standing down after I signed off work for the day, so it morphed into work time management strategies.

Yet again, I realized I was operating under the 2-bucket theory. I would never expect an employee of mine to endure 4-6 hours of back to back meetings, some emotionally charged/emotionally draining, and immediately and seamlessly context switch into deep focus work. Or do that in 30-minute chunks between meetings. Or be able to fully multitask immediate correspondence and deep focus at the same time. But – yet again – the grace I would give others wasn’t anything I was giving myself.

I started putting in my to do list and meeting schedule, and it would spit out a schedule for the rest of my day. It took a while to trust it. But I’m starting to become a believer as it took me through a very busy Feb with much less stress and chaos than normal.

The first thing I had to break myself of was that just because there was a message didn’t mean I had to read it, and just because I read it, didn’t mean I had to respond right away. The quote it gave me stuck in my head – “I am available, I am not on call.” Dang. That hit. I was operating every moment of every workday like I was on call. No wonder why I had no focus.

I also have learned to expect different amounts of focus on different days. On days where I am meeting heavy, we plan no deep focus blocks. Some days are just about “containment and capture” – that is, making sure everything that happens is documented and placed on a list somewhere. It’s helped talk me down on days where things didn’t go as planned – “Ok, breathe.” – it has told me this more than once debriefing my day. It’s helped me structure my Mondays and Fridays where I have fewer or no meetings to be focus days where I don’t end them just absolutely spent (well, sometimes).

I also remembered that I work very well with aggressive To Do listing and have gone back to that at work. If I have things written down and next steps placed, it doesn’t (often) bang around in my head after work and at night and I can hit the ground running, not flailing.

This is yet another place where giving myself a little grace and setting realistic expectations is helping me be a better person. ChatGPT helping me be kinder to myself was not on my 2026 bingo card, but here we are, and I am here for it.

This 2026, this year of experiments, is working out rather nicely so far. I started the year with some big ones, so for March, I picked two little microhabits I want to do better – flossing every day and taking 10 deep breaths before I go to sleep and before I get out of bed in the morning. I figure even with a week travel and birthday shenanigans all month, this is doable.

I always say when asked what I want for a present (birthday, Christmas, etc) is that I’d like to lose 20 lbs and have a few extra hours in each day. So, this year, this is the gift I’m trying to give to myself, or at least baby steps towards it.

I also see 2026 as the year of seeing new sights. Besides San Francisco (not new, but we’re going new places!), we have the opportunity to go to Vegas for a trade show. Vegas is nothing new either, but we’re taking a few days before to hike the Valley of Fire and Zion National Park – bucket list hikes. I have my eye on new countries in EU this year if I get to go as well. We also got our new camper, which means true weekend trips (Fri nite -Sun) are back on the menu to check out some nearby Texas State Parks and longer trips (with a stop or two overnight to get to the destination) are possible too, since the transition time between camping and traveling will be SO much less now – we just stow things and go, not put our RV through a full pop up/down transformation.

I’m really excited for this year – while I’m sure it will throw me a bunch of curveballs I don’t expect, I’m setting up a foundation to handle them with much more flexibility than I have before. And for a recovering perfectionist, that feels pretty great.

And while I said today is my birthday, it’s really not. As has become normal, I woke up before dawn, had some coffee, worked out, had most of my day as meetings, and now we are going to walk and get dinner, but, I’m going to go ahead and reschedule my actual birthday for this weekend, when I get to go play. So, I guess I’m still 46 for a bit. Maybe that’s why I’m still pretty happy. I’ll report back soon. 🙂