Bree's Back!
- Bree Ford
- 3 days ago
- 5 min read
Bringing back the blog!
Long time no see, Busy Bree… It’s been a minute or two, or maybe six years? It’s like my life has been on fast forward for the past few years in terms of experiences, but it’s been in slow motion in terms of the passage of time. The last time I posted here, I was midway through my final year at UTD, wrapping up my prolonged biochemistry degree while finalizing a divorce and working my fourth year at my first corporate job. Since then, I’ve lived so many chapters of my life and I’m realizing that no matter how many times I feel like I’ve found myself, I’m still figuring out who I am.
What’s been up?
I’ve experienced so many iterations of myself over the past few years. Shortly after the last time I posted on this blog in 2020, I found myself a happily divorced woman in her mid-twenties, who had never dated since high school, who had never lived fully by herself, finally done with her bachelor’s degree, now rekindling old friendships, starting new hobbies, moving up in her career, testing her limits, learning more about the world and herself each day. Life once felt like something I had to endure, the confines of my existence that I had to make the best of, then suddenly I realized I had agency over my life and I started to make it mine.
Equipped with a reinvigorated passion for life, a pen, and paper, created a regimented 14 day plan I called “Bree’s Reset”, with my life mapped out in 15 minute increments to provide a disciplined structure within which I could feel free to explore the different areas in which I wanted to grow: physical and mental health, finances, socializing, creative outlets, career growth, personal philosophy, education, confidence, and home management. I bucketed my hobbies into categories and how they aligned with my goals/ intentions of creating confidence, peace, discipline, self-expression, fun, and continuous growth in my life. If it didn’t help me achieve my goals or help me grow, I cast the hobby aside as it wasn’t serving me. I stuck to my plan for months and I felt I had found the ideal routine for myself. I got in touch with old friends, slowly came out of my shell again, spent more time with family, explored my new hobbies and old passions, and even made new friends.
Of course, there were ups and downs after that but the discipline balanced with fun was the perfect foundation for me to start building the new woman I wanted to become. I continued to explore, eventually lost the discipline to a certain degree, and even lost myself at times, but each experience brought me closer to the person I am today. That’s life though - highs and lows, ebbs and flows, and sometimes the tide washes over and it takes too much of the coast with it. More often than not, I decided to go with the flow rather than fight the tide and I got some great experiences out of it.
Where am I now?
Now, five years later, I’m finding my balance once again. I recently started a new job, a massive step up in my career which has been a fantastic opportunity and I’ve learned so much already - but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel overwhelmed at times, and overworked the rest of the time. I’m often working 12-16 hour days, struggling to even get back to friends’ messages, either too busy working towards a tight deadline or exhausted once the day finally ends with multiple tasks that will just have to wait until tomorrow. I am certain that things will improve within the next month or two, as I’ve been working at creating better systems for managing my work and some of my high-level priorities will come to a close in the next few weeks. But now as I am once again in the self-discovery stage for this new iteration of myself, I feel myself gravitating to philosophy and personal improvement books, disciplined endurance workouts, strict schedules, and a guilty yearning to indulge in my more creative hobbies when/ if time allows.
This brings to mind the idea of self-exploitation discussed in Byung-Chul Han’s book, “The Burnout Society”, where Han discusses how the shift from a disciplinary-based society to an achievement-based society has resulted in a unique situation where individuals become their own oppressors. Since we can achieve anything and the only limit is ourselves, this once-positive notion became an oppressive idea overall, leading us to pressure ourselves to perform until we eventually burn out. I’ve seen this in myself and others so many times, but just didn’t know how to break out of what feels like a continuous cycle of working exceptionally hard for a long period of time, burning out, scaling back and finding a good balance, then getting ambitious and starting the cycle again.
Understandably, as I had started a new job filled with ambition, I wanted to make a great impression and naturally I overextended myself. It started with working an extra hour or two here and there, then I was working upwards of 12-16 hour days for three weeks straight, skipping out on my running workouts so I could squeeze in more work each day. With my first half marathon fast-approaching, this was not the best decision, but proved to be yet another opportunity for me to “prove” my ability to endure difficult things, as I completed the half marathon with barely any training, with a time of 2:21:13… and a stress-fractured cuboid bone in my right foot.
What’s coming up?
With my foot injury and the new year, it feels like an appropriate time to slow down and reassess myself and my goals, and even the concept of goal-setting in general. A couple of weeks ago, I picked up Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s “Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World”, which opened me up to a different perspective on goals and a new approach for establishing habits. In short, the book proposes an approach of utilizing tiny experiments in the form of pacts to yourself (i.e. I will write two blog posts per month, for one month), taking notes as you conduct the “tiny experiment”, and assessing how you want to proceed after the pact is complete (persist with the same pact, pause and take a break from the pact, or pivot to a different pact). This iterative approach to self-exploration makes it easier to identify what works best for you, and I’ve started the year with a few pacts of my own!
2025 was the year I started reading for leisure again, and 2026 is the year I start writing for fun again. I’ve committed to a couple of pacts involving writing short essays and poems this month and I’ll commit now to sharing them (maybe not all, but some) here on the blog. “Tiny Experiments” discusses the value in sharing pacts publicly, and while I have enjoyed a very private life as I withdrew from social media since 2024, I know the only traffic my blog gets is from PCHEM students at UTD referring to my notes, along with a few random people in Singapore, Russia, and Japan, so this feels like a fairly private “public” space for me to do so.
Anyways, I’ve digitally yapped for long enough - TL;DR Bree has been busy for the past few years (see: URL); I’m back on the blog again. Until next time!
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