I debated whether or not I would write an end-of-year letter to you all. I have yet to write much this month outside a few revisions on my book and my requisite morning pages, which I keep in a college-ruled notebook on my night table. Then I read a few other letters and essays from writers I admire that were all remarkably unique (Lisa Olivera, Dana Frost, Emily McDowell, and Katherine North) and thought—why not write one? It doesn't have to look like anything but what it is. And anyway, I've always loved New Year's, even if I've started going to bed by 9:30 on NYE. Yet this year, the celebration feels stranger, more complex. The holidays feel subdued in the face of so much heartbreak and violence.
Oh, I've made magic—don't get me wrong. I'm a mother. Whatever's happening in the world, mothers everywhere make magic for their children, as we always have. It's what we do. We went to the local nursery and purchased the sweetest tree—I wanted the tallest one possible for our living room. I walked up to the rows of trees at the nursery, saw The Tree, and said, that's the one. E tried talking me into the Charlie Brown trees, which were ten dollars less, but I insisted. Now The Tree is browning because it stopped sucking up water, but I won't take it down yet.
I picked four kinds of cookies, and we baked them as a family—gochujang caramel (two words: spicy dessert, enough said), salted chocolate chunk shortbread, Linzer cookies, and at my wife's request, her grammy's sugar cookie recipe. E and I became mesmerized by Instagram videos of professionals icing sugar cookies. So we attempted some of the designs with our kiddo and laughed our asses off because our designs were sorry replicas. We drove around town and dropped cookies off with friends we've made here—all of us have friends to take cookies to, despite moving here during a pandemic and getting a slow start to meeting people.
Christmas snuck up on me this year. I've spent most of my adult life working for myself, and even though I often worked through the holidays as a self-employed person—I was so behind on holiday prep this year. Maybe it's because my job is a nonprofit development director, and I was in charge of the annual appeal—with a cool $50k to fundraise to meet the target goals for the 2023 fiscal year. Or it was because I've been freelancing again while my wife looked for a new job and worked on our last project for our business. I was just fucking exhausted—I had all but stopped taking care of myself in the second half of the year to take care of our family's basic needs. But then it was time to make magic, to rush around buying gifts on Friday and Saturday before the stores closed, to play instrumental Christmas jazz in the car to get in a festive mood, to watch our holiday movies—one on Saturday (Happiest Season, sweetest little gay Christmas love story), one on Christmas Eve (The Holiday, in which we make and eat 'Christmas fettuccine' and have some bubbly, just like in the film), and one on Christmas Day (The Family Stone, which never fails to make me cry at the end), to bake all those cookies, and make the strata I've been making every year since A was a baby, even before E and I got together. We packed it in over Christmas weekend—so much so that we all had to get up early on Christmas morning to wrap our gifts to one another, which felt a little ridiculous (wrapping to unwrap the same day) but mostly fun. My ex-husband, A's dad, came down on Christmas, and I made a vegan lasagna recipe I found on Instagram that's surprisingly tasty (cumin and nutmeg in the cashew-tofu-nooch bechamel, yes, please). He stayed for The Family Stone screening, and then Christmas was over, and I breathed a huge sigh of relief. I could chill on the magic-making.
I was off work this week, and though I worked on an article due to my editor next week, I did very little of anything, which was incredible and just what I needed. I finished rewatching Parks and Rec for the billionth time (again, I always cry at the end), went to a game night with some friends where we ended up singing songs around the piano, read some pages for a fellow writer in one of my writing groups and gave notes, read a little, wrote some letters to old friends, napped, stayed in my PJs and new slippers, drank wine at 4 pm and ate cookies for breakfast.
And then yesterday, after running some errands, shopping for Second Christmas with my folks, sister, and nephew, and taking care of some other important stuff (I've got some big news but can't tell you yet!) I came home and started cleaning and preparing for the new year. I kept the tree up but took down the wooden bead garlands we hung in the library and on the stairs, tucked away the felted advent calendars, vintage brass angel candlesticks with edges so sharp they'll cut ya, reindeer figurine, and the vintage miniature hand-painted sleigh I found at the thrift store recently to add to my meager holiday decor collection (one rule keeps it simple: nothing mass-produced). I felt ready to let go of this year, which has been interesting, to say the least, and move into a new one.
I have typically loved New Year's not so much as a punctuation mark but as a sweet, sentimental mark of time. During the more ambitious, won't stop at anything, I 'have' to prove my worth-to-earn-love-and-approval times of my life, I set resolutions (and achieved them). I'm thankful those days are past me now and that I have worked hard to shake those beliefs from deep inside my bones. In the last few years, I have simply enjoyed the holiday and the excuse to eat copious amounts of shrimp cocktail and listen to Auld Lang Syne (the Mairi Campbell and David Francis version) while wistfully staring at the twinkle lights on the tree, knowing I'll be taking it down in the morning. Yet I have always, as long as I can remember, reflected on my year and thought about my hopes for the year ahead.
This year feels different—not only because of the collective heartbreak and fear so many of us are holding but because my life is still transitioning. As much work as I have done to let go of the woman I thought I had to be, I am still waiting for my life to begin—it's like I have one foot in the life I was given and another in the one I want. One in which I am not just making radical decisions to uproot my life (like I did when I traveled) but letting go of the ideas and beliefs that kept me from fully embracing myself and what I most desire. I'm somewhere in the messy middle, though closer than ever before, the last dregs of the life I thought I wanted still slowly pouring out.
My life has felt blurry and directionless for so long. Even before deciding to close my business in May, E and I went back and forth on the decision for years—ever since all that shit went down back in 2018 (easy breezy way of saying trauma that still haunts me). After several years of struggle, we started making a profit—a living wage. We had a shop to work in, albeit too small for Airstream renovations. We changed all the things we talked about changing, back when we realized traveling to our renovations and living on-site with our clients and their trailers was a colossal mistake, back when we were working too many hours for too little money. We did big, scary, hard things to change it up. We restructured our contract and made it so no one could harass, bully, abuse, or assault us (and if they did, the job would end right away, and we'd keep the money they'd paid us). We set boundaries and clear expectations for our clients and worked with great people. We were both in therapy, healing from all that had happened—and all the things that came before it that led us to believe staying and working for someone whose friend assaulted (and nearly killed) E was the 'right' thing to do.
When deciding to close, it wasn't just a question of walking away from something that had become lucrative or given us name recognition, the kinds of things I come across when reading essays about other people closing businesses: we'd overcome the unimaginable. We hadn't let the bastards grind us down. We hadn't let our abuser win. We'd sacrificed more than anyone I knew for their business (all I'm saying is that most people don't nearly die and then get abused and then victimized by a smear campaign and lose their faith in humanity and feelings of safety in the world for their small businesses). How could we overcome all that and walk away?
So we didn't, not for many years. For five years, we fought to save the business and grasp at the life we'd known before it was split into a before and after. I went to therapy to heal my past wounds, but I continued to run the business and do things that, on some level, I knew weren't good for me. And so I got smaller and smaller, and I felt like my life was more constricted than ever. I can see now that I didn't have the capacity or clarity to examine my life in the present while I was so busy excavating the past, but I wish I could have seen it sooner. And even though I needed to take the time to heal, I have put so many desires, dreams, and goals on hold indefinitely while digging into my shadows and past with everything I had. Therapy, healing, and rebuilding took most of my energy in the last five years, but especially in the three-plus years that we have lived in this house, back in the Midwest, away from the deserts, mountains, and sea I love so much and wish to live amongst. And I don't know—I don't. Did I need to come back to the Midwest to do this work? Did things happen in the exact right way they needed to happen? Even as my desire to move out West pulsed daily, not under the surface but bold and urgent and ever-present, as I wrestled my way through bleak, gray, cold Indiana winters that have always taken me to the darkest places, I could see the good that was happening in my body and life. And still, I was not—am not—whole. And as much as I tried to rationalize away or quell my desire, it grew ever bigger and all-encompassing.
Back in May, the haze finally cleared. I had reached the point in my healing where I finally knew what I needed. I didn't want to be who I was when I started my business because even that woman, daring, bold, and adventurous as she was, wasn't living the life she wanted. Once I knew, I didn't wait—I asked E to meet me in the living room, and two minutes later, we decided to close the business. We were both ready. We both knew it was time and that to move fully into our lives, we had to let go of the company—this massive entity that had taken up too much space and sidelined our dreams and humanity. I didn't have to do the practical, lucrative thing. I could walk away from name recognition and being 'known' by tens of thousands of people (and honestly, be happier for it). I didn't have to hold on to a business that has brought more harm into my family's life than good, a business I started when I was a very different person with too much to prove to people who wouldn't ever give me their love and approval. If I was ever going to live my life the way I wanted—to create a life I recognize as mine, to be whole (not happy, but whole), and to, as Joy Sullivan wrote—straight to my soul—' find a home that will hold all of me,' I knew I couldn't hold onto the past, no matter what I'd done to overcome it. I had to walk away fully—and only then could I look desire in the eye. Only then could I make room for her.
As the New Year draws in close, I am thinking about this year—where it started, where it has gone, how sometimes I think I waited too long to close the business and move out West because I became so small and I diluted my desire for so long that I sometimes don't recognize myself. Still, I am trying to find my way back. Even if slow, I am transitioning from what no longer serves me after years of profound, messy transformation.
Here is some of what I remember from this year: I swam in the warm pool at the Y in the early morning last winter while my wife did laps in the cold pool, gently and slowly, letting my weakened body move without too much effort. I became #sportsmom when my kiddo joined the swim team and cheered from the bleachers wearing the school colors at every meet. I cried when they decided to swim the 400-meter race, despite their fear, and come in first place. I became a mother to a teenager in January, which is just another level of parenthood altogether. It’s wild. I started running again this summer, though my lungs may never be the same after Covid—and then stopped running when life got busy. I started a writing group with a friend when I wasn't fully ready for it, left the group to focus on what was before me, and returned when I was ready. Bolstered by the women in the group and their remarkable encouragement and notes, I began making serious headway on my memoir revisions, rewriting entire sections and honing in on my through-line, finally finding my prologue and ending (still no title). I faced my driving anxiety by getting in the car and driving. I bought a new Subaru a few weeks ago, and the circle is complete—I'm officially a Birkenstock-wearin', Subaru-drivin' lesbian. I turned 38 in Canada while in a weeks-long dissociative state so intense I thought I wasn't real, but I decided to go water-skiing anyway. When I let go of the rope after a loop around the bay and swam back to the dock, my wife jumped in, fully clothed, and held me in the water, and I shook and shook, coming back into the present, into my body.
I watched a lot of Netflix and read fewer books than in years past (my ‘fewer books’ is probably still a lot of books). I started taking walks by myself in the woods. I was asked to write an article or two for a new magazine but had an idea to turn it into a column. I put myself out there for the first time in what seems like forever, got the gig, and now I'm not only a paid writer but my name will be listed on the masthead as a contributing editor. I stood outside in the elements as much as possible—electrified air before tornadoes in late spring, rainstorms at the lake, autumn mist, northern winds blowing in winter. I literally ran out of a meeting a few weeks ago to stand in a snow squall, squealing with glee.
I posted less and less to Instagram this year, and lately, I've been thinking about how I've been on social media for half my life, nearly the same length of time I have known my wife. I've shared so much of myself with so many people, most strangers. I've shared my home(s), travels, thoughts, and marriage (I have never once regretted my decision to keep my child's life as private as possible). I don’t know that I regret sharing, but I do know that I don't want to share my life as much as I once did. I want to keep much of my life private and sacred. I definitely don't want to think about how to post my life on Instagram to make it look exciting, engaging, inspiring, and aspirational. I don't have to—or want to—prove my worth to anyone, let alone strangers on the internet. I don't know what that means yet—will I post again someday? Maybe. Maybe not. That said, I am letting my Substack be whatever it’s gonna be for me, moment to moment, not committing to a certain number of posts, not trying to grow my subscriber list, not attempting to find consistency with a specific style of writing, boxing myself into a niche, or worrying about building my platform as an author, but simply showing up as authentically as possible in a way that feels doable for me.
I've leaned into being supported by people in my life, moved away from things that hurt or compress too much, sworn less, drank less, and pressured myself less. I lost a friendship that was important to me and the grief has nearly swallowed me whole, and other friendships deepened, and new ones began and I’m building them slowly, intentionally. I had a million little moments this year that were lost, whether to anxiety or dissociation or merely my fallible human brain. I'm learning to hold many emotions and truths at once, especially joy and heartache, and lately, thinking about how empathy and compassion differ, what repair looks like in an increasingly broken, divided world—and where I need to offer compassion (as action) and repair the relationships where I have caused hurt or pain and what that looks like.
As the year ends, I am celebrating, albeit quietly and softly. I am embracing what I remember of this year with kindness and reverence. I am in awe of what I have waded through, sad about some of the choices I made when I was hurting, sick, and afraid, and grateful for what I have learned and (some of) what I experienced. I am hopeful for what's to come. I'm not rushing toward the end of the year or hurrying to make resolutions, though I am thinking about what I want. There are a few things I hope to make room for in the coming year—more writing time and time to take care of and move my body in ways that are good for my mental and physical health. I want to work on accepting my (aging, changing) body and facing my fears around money and finances. I want to keep considering how I might show up more compassionately and move toward repair and rebuilding. I am leaving binary thinking in the past (good/bad, right/wrong, black/white), and want to continue to move away from smallness and tightness and toward expansiveness, openness, and wholeness.
More than anything, I want to find myself in all of this again. To give myself over to desire. To stand in the desert, wearing my white cotton dress and turquoise touchstone, screaming into the wind, letting it all go, and embracing what is to come.
Happy New Year, all.
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One again you've spoken directly to my soul. Thank you for these beautiful words.
Grateful for you and your words 💛