A Solstice Reflection
Today is the Winter Solstice, the shortest day and the longest night, the deepest dark of the year. It always feels appropriate to reflect on the year at this time, especially this one as it has been one of the more difficult for me in recent memory. Not all bad, not even mostly bad, but very difficult in very complicated ways.
I have lived alone for nearly 365 days now, for the first time in my life. I lived with my family for 20 years and then with Elijah for almost 15, so I never had the experience of curating my own living environment, of settling into the stillness and the abundance of space and time and figuring out how to be by myself. Always there was someone, even if I was alone for a couple of months at a time. Someone to split the bills with, someone to navigate around and include in homemaking decisions, someone to consume media and meals with, someone to live with.
It has been a learning experience, both about how I function on a day to day basis when left to my own devices and about how desperately hard it is to afford to live when mine is the only income. There are good and bad parts to it, as there are to every experience, but I think for me it has been primarily good. I've discovered within myself a reservoir of ability I didn't know I had, because everything has been up to me, from housekeeping to cooking (or at least my version of cooking) to entertaining myself. I have made my house so nice and so tailored to my preferences that I find myself increasingly reluctant to leave it. Why would I? Everything I love is here, and I get to control my own environment, and I don't have to deal with people other than those I choose to allow entry. I'm not sure this is entirely a good thing, because I was already not inclined to go out and socialize much and now I've drawn even farther inward, but the practice of cultivating this physical reprieve for myself has been wonderful.
Friendships have been messy, but in that mess there have been glimmers of such piercing beauty and love that it feels worth it, I think. I have drawn away from some people in ways that were unexpected and painful, but for each of those, I have experienced new or deepening connections with others that have balanced it out. I have learned hard lessons about trust and my inability to determine who deserves it from me, but I have also felt so seen and held and valued. I have received so many gifts, from the monetary to tangible objects I can hold in my hands to homemade treats, and, of course, the intangible emotional gifts. I have been brave and reached out to people I care for in the hope that they would care for me too, and for the most part they have. There have been more offline conversations, more quality time spent with people and less surface communication through social media, more movies watched and laughter shared and plans made to see people in person. It's easy for me to get laser focused on the online world and begin to feel that it's my entire life, and I don't mean to say that it's not real or doesn't matter, but there's something to the direct exchange of energy in shared space that puts it into perspective in a way I think I need.
Between another year of therapy and finding a name that fits and beginning to take some baby steps toward feeling ownership of my body, this has also been a transformative year for my sense of self. I still feel scared and small and overwhelmed and incompetent a lot of the time, but I've discovered this year that I have power. I can do things that positively affect my own life rather than acting as a helpless bystander and allowing things to happen to me. I know who I am and what I want, and, significantly, what I deserve, and I know it's okay to express these things and expect them to be honored. I know my worth, what I have to offer to others, and while I haven't necessarily made big moves to put any of this into practice yet, there's been a shift inside me this year that I can feel even if no one else can. No more devaluing myself, no more allowing other people to devalue me because I believed it was the treatment I deserved, no more staying in relationships that were actively harmful to me as a form of self-punishment for sins I hadn't even committed.
I am terrified of 2025. I can't look directly at it, I can only peek around its edges and try to glimpse some good things in the fog. Politically I don't think we need to talk about it or think about it right now, not here, not yet. Financially is unfortunately tied up with politically, but my hope is that I can continue working to save little bits of money as I go and maybe find some new ways to expand this newsletter, maybe do a full-time professional job, maybe eventually have enough money to escape this house this town this state. Personally I would like to write and submit some new poems, because 2024 was a wasteland where that's concerned, and I would like to meet some friends in person who have only been words on screens and voices on calls, and I would like to go to the dentist and finally see a rheumatologist and continue working on not hating physical movement, and I would like to legally change my name. I would like to dust off my ridiculous obnoxiously bright yellow roller skates and learn to use them, and I would like to bake some bread, and I would like to read some tarot. Maybe grow some plants without killing them? Maybe fall in love with someone who loves me back?
It's a great big world out there. Anything is possible. That's both a blessing and a curse, and probably 2025 will contain both, but right now I'm feeling hopeful that it will be equal amounts of both. Balance in all things. It's winter right now and I still have to survive February and I can feel my soul atrophying from lack of sunlight, but it will be spring again so soon. It will be my birthday so soon, which is a silly thing to hold onto because I don't even care that much about my birthday, but I'll take what I can get in these times. I will get to see Penny and Sparrow again so soon. I'm going to watch Krampus with my mom and Black Christmas with a friend, and I recently watched Gremlins and exchanged gifts with two other friends, and a friend might read me a book, and I'm working through a backlog of unanswered texts from the past couple of weeks when I felt like death and so far everyone has been so kind and gracious about the delay, and people are so good. Not all of them, not even all the ones you believe to be, but a lot of them.
I don't know what the point of this is. I guess just to say that I know, I know things are awful and scary and bleak in the wider world and sometimes in our small personal worlds, but I hope that if you take inventory of your year and your life, as I have done, you'll also find that so much is so good. Even if you have to stretch for it, even if you have to wring meaning out of the seemingly meaningless, even if it's seeing a band you love or a new season of a show releasing or a book you've been excitedly anticipating or a really nice meal. Even if it's that ordinary, I hope this newsletter has been able to impress upon you that all of it matters. All of it counts. All of it is important.
And all of you are important. It's been almost ten months of this and you're still here. Thank you, thank you, thank you. As I step away from more social media and work on deciding how I want to exist digitally, this newsletter feels like the best thing I've done and I hope to keep doing it in the year to come. I hope people will want to keep reading it. I hope it's given you some small measure of comfort or entertainment or hope of your own, as it has given me to write it. Happy holidays, whatever and however you celebrate, and here's to survival.