Hello, and happy new year!!
I hope everyone reading this had a restful and restorative holiday. I certainly did! I took two whole weeks off, and it felt amazing. I didn’t think about work at all, forgot what day it was several times, and woke up after 9 am more than once. A beautiful thing!
Now, of course, the holidays are behind us. As is my wont in the first few weeks of any new year, I find myself asking what I need from the next 12 months.
I think the main theme for me last year was settling in and slowing down. After moving to a new home in a new city at the end of 2021, I felt an overwhelming urge in 2022 to stop everything and sit very still. This was likely a reactionary, whiplash-like response to the emotional rollercoaster of the previous two years, but it felt necessary. It also felt pretty boring and frustrating at times. I found myself waiting for something I wasn’t quite sure I could name. I’d know it when I saw it, I told myself; some feeling, sign, or innate knowing I could grasp firmly and use to guide myself forward.
The waiting lasted a long time. I even stopped going to therapy, feeling I had lost the capacity—and perhaps the will—to continue to explore my inner world. During the last few months with my therapist, I found myself retreading the same material over and over. It felt like walking in circles in a room I knew like the back of my hand. There was no surface I didn’t know; no object I hadn’t committed to memory.
If I’m making it sound like a bad year, it wasn’t. While a lot of it felt sort of aimless and amorphous—especially the weekdays I spent working from home alone—2022 also felt like the first year that I wasn’t trying to force my life into some foregone template. As a result, I felt my grip loosen, my self-judgement fade, and my gaze soften, and I guess I needed that.
Near the end of the year, though, I finally felt something kick into gear. As my 34th birthday approached, I felt a familiar panic rise up in me, along with a looping set of questions: what was my life, anyway? And what did I want it to be? It wasn’t the first time I’d asked myself these questions, but this time they came with a sense of urgency I hadn’t felt in a long time.
And so I started to take tiny, gradual steps into new territory. I very slowly wound down my freelance writing practice so that I could set a hard boundary between work and life. I told my girlfriend that I’d love for her to move in with me, but left the ball firmly in her court to decide when that would happen. At the very end of the year, I went to a queer open mic night and played two of my own songs to a small and supportive crowd.
With each of these small steps, I felt a kickback of validation I wasn’t expecting. Quitting freelancing felt like an experiment, then a necessity, then the best decision I’d made all year. Telling my girlfriend that I wanted to live with her felt like taking a final step into a version of my life where I’d granted myself permission to be truly hopeful about the future. Playing my songs for strangers felt, honestly, transcendent!!! I felt a part of myself turn on that I hadn’t felt in, I’m not kidding, half my life (the last time I played anything for an “audience” was 17 whole years ago, and somehow I had let myself forget that it’s something I love doing).
I actually feel very emotional writing this now because I finally feel it; the thing I was waiting for, the pull to let these small steps gain momentum and lead to bigger steps with higher stakes and more interesting outcomes.
I used to feel paralyzed by the idea of the future. Anything could happen. Wasn’t that scary? But that feeling has shifted. Anything can happen, and I don’t have to sit still and watch it happen to me anymore. I can participate. I can influence it. I can set things in motion. Anything can happen. Isn’t that exciting?
Thank you so much for reading this issue of so many words! I know when I relaunched this I said I’d be writing to you every Thursday, and obviously that hasn’t happened. But I’m happy to be back and writing with some degree of regularity and, as always, would love it if you shared this with someone you think might like it.
A final bit of housekeeping: I’d love to base some of my newsletters around reader prompts or questions, so if you have one, please send it here. As for right now, I haven’t really cracked this yet—I actually took so much time between newsletter sends because I was trying to answer someone’s prompt about self-awareness and I just could not for the life of me turn it into anything interesting. But I still want to try! So send me your thoughts and questions, please!
Okay, that’s all for this week! Tell me what you thought of 2022 and how you’re thinking of the year ahead if you want, I’d love to hear it.
oh god this is so beautiful, friend. I am so happy for you.
Love this!! Love the emotions, and I must say I have also taken some EXCELLENT sunset pics in the Walmart parking lot 😏