#39 The year is done
and another year of life begins.
Today is my 27th birthday! Which means the last month of the year has begun - a month where everything is lit up, where people get together most, where we try and try and try to have more hope, more optimism, more faith. I think I was born in this month for a reason - as a reminder that I can have faith, that I can believe in myself and where I am meant to be. I could’ve been born just a couple of days prior and not made it to this month at all. But something about December is always special: it’s a time to think about everything that’s passed and everything that is yet to come.
Being 26 was really difficult for me. I wasn’t exactly sure what I was hoping for, and maybe this was one of the reasons I ended up soul-searching for what felt like the entire year. For what felt like too long to be soul searching. Yet why is it a feeling of “too long”? Why not think of that year as a necessary one? After all, it ended up becoming a year where I had to get a little bit lost again and understand what I am doing in a new way, in a challenging way, in an uncomfortable way. I lived many lives. I worked a thankless service job for the summer. I waitressed for a day to try it out. I abstained from dating - I ended up meeting casual partners in real-life encounters. I kept running off and coming back to finally shut the doors on those old loves, old could’ve beens, old would’ve beens.
I started writing weekly. I started sharing it with the world. I built a new digital space with a partner, a creative project that takes commitment and reciprocity, and honestly, what feels like very little compromise. It makes me think of the nature of relationships, how reciprocity matters, how when you have similar values and similar perspectives on what you love, compromise feels hardly like compromise.
I struggled some months, I lost structure. I procrastinated a schedule of regular exercise and then came back to it only to leave it again. I gained weight. I am watching myself closely; reminding myself my body is a body and that it carries me through everything - how it hugs me and holds me and gives me everything it has, every single day, even when I think of it differently, feel differently about it.
I felt sad, sometimes. I felt the fog of not knowing or really understanding where to go from point A to point B. If you don’t know where point B is, it’s hard to know how to get to it. I remembered someone telling me your 20s are like a big buffet, an opportunity to try everything. And I didn’t even want to try everything, I just wanted to find what I liked without taste-testing more than once or twice. There’s a lot of impatience there, and that was something new, too.
That same impatience made some of my relationships much harder than they could’ve been on their own. Impatience with how things are, impatience with where things stand, impatience with where they should go. Over and over and over again, I reminded myself that acceptance is the only thing that is possible, the only thing that makes being a part of the world bearable. Maybe acceptance is the best way to find a sense of long-lasting peace, or something like it - not in accepting less than what I feel I deserve, but in accepting people as they are; in accepting outcomes as they come; in accepting consequences as they arrive. So much of my grief came from needing to make sense of the world. So much of my sadness came from wanting to justify it.
It was also a year where I faced loss, where I tried to find the gifts in the sadness of losing someone I love. Of trying to understand how we leave our physical bodies, how to hold ourselves in loss, and try to get used to the idea of holding a new, ongoing conversation where I can only think and speak to who I’ve lost. Only try to reach them on my own, only try to talk to them from this place, hoping they can be reached somewhere along the way. Like trying to speak into a phone full of static or full of silence, feeling like all I have is my memory, and imagining what it would be like if I heard a response at all.
I spent today resting more than anything else, just thinking of how relieved I am a year like this one is done. Feeling like it’s almost fictional, the way that I spent my birthday with my family for the first time in eight years.
The year is done. I lay it all down before me; I think of every way I was pulled and molded into different shapes, how perhaps it was all necessary to arrive where I am. Somewhere newer and grander and more hopeful — somewhere where I have faith. In the middle of the darkness of winter, there is always light. If only you search for it. If only you dream of it.