‘tis the season for year-end wrap-ups (fa la la la la, la la la la). i must admit: here, at the very end of 2023, i’m fucking tired. you might also be feeling the exhaustion; most people i know are wrung out from the year. to paraphrase one of our favorite youtubers, 2023 was a good year that sucked. this was truly the first “back to normal” year for most people—when they finally put the (still ongoing, for many people) pandemic of the last 2 years behind them—and i think we can see very clearly the effects and consequences of slingshotting from years of terror-inducing isolation in which many of our foundational systems were rocked back to a collective delusion of normal that, for individuals, groups, and institutions, no longer exists outside of various forms of propaganda.
i’m not here to write about that, i have to remember. i don’t want screeds and diatribes and opinions. the world has more than enough of that already.
if i had to summarize my 2023 in a paradox, it’d be: motion/stagnancy.
i ran over 300 miles in 2023, and walked another hundred at least. my job was in a frenzy from january to july, and then i moved to another agency, another disease state, another team for the second half of the year, which also went a little crazy. matthew was driving to and from la crosse and then to and from middleton for three quarters of the year, and september through december included travel and/or holidays every single month. we have chased after doctors and contractors and jobs and friends and family. it was our first full year in sun prairie and in madison, and we got out, for us, a considerable amount.
but there was so much sitting, waiting, holding our breaths, so much doing the same things over and over again, driving the same roads over and over again, confronting the same issues over and over again. i cannot lie and tell you that my second full year in a corporate 9-5 job did not feel suffocating and claustrophobic most of the time. despite so much motion, we have been stuck in many holding patterns this year, stuck in a way that feels like quicksand, where you aren’t aware how deep in you are because of how slowly the sludge pulls you under. there’s a palpable difference between relaxing in place and being held still.
in a lot of ways, 2023 flew by precisely because of how fast large swaths of it flew by versus how slowly some of it creeped. the pandemic has truly warped my general sense of time—it feels so elastic now, so nonlinear, calendars feel meaningless—or maybe that’s age. this year, matthew and i celebrated our 10th anniversary of meeting, our 9th anniversary of being partners, and our 6th anniversary of being married—all that time has felt like a single drop in a huge bucket i want to keep filling, whereas my 2.5 years in pharmaceutical advertising feels like an enormous rain barrel i have to keep finding ways to drag a little further.
enough about 2023. enough. i’ll be glad to put this year to bed. looking ahead, in 2024 i want to try to cultivate a positive paradox instead of discovering one at the end of the year, and i want 2024 to be the year of grounding/floating.
i want to find more ways to ground myself in 2024, more ways to feel connected to where i am and who i’m with. i want to dig deeper, root deeper, discover more of what’s in my earth’s core and embrace it, honor it. i want to feel solid in 2024, i want to be happy toes wiggling in the dirt, i want to feel steady on my bare feet. i want to lay low and put my ear to the ground and listen for the subtle rumblings of what’s to come.
but i also want to find more ways to go with the flow, float down the river, feel the ease and weightlessness of buoyancy. i want to be carried, cradled, supported. i want to aim a little higher and think a little bigger and dream a little harder. i want some things to look forward to, to float towards. i want to hold my head a little higher and fall easier, recover faster when i get knocked down. i want to let things go, let things slide through my fingers, watch the ripples extend outward and eventually dissipate back into the body of water they came from.
earth and water; fire and air—maybe paradox wasn’t the right word to use at the top of this, maybe dichotomy would have been better. double-edged things. dependent things. yins and yangs. i’ve always been dichotomous, though i’m starting to think that a truer way to be. more on this idea later.
if you feel like it, i’d love to hear from you about your 2023 or what you hope for your 2024.
i’m also thinking about trying to do some more conscious newsletter writing in 2024, including potentially sticking to a regular but small-scale schedule. it might look something like a short latelies email, where i focus solely on media recommendations, an email like this one where i write about something personal and/or something on my mind, and maybe a third thing i haven’t determined yet. if there’s anything you especially like getting to read about from me, or anything you wish i’d do more of (or less of! i won’t be offended), or something else you’d like to see (an advice column?? in-depth book reviews?? fiction??), let me know.