Vortex

On the first days of the new year.

To me, New Year’s Day has this feeling of total suspension. If New Year’s Eve is a vortex, then New Year’s Day is what’s on the other side. I can feel it, tangibly in the first hours of the new year. I don’t buy into big resolutions all that much, but I do love any opportunity to start over and make something new. The beginning of the new year is a great time to refocus, and I find the energy of everyone’s reflection refreshing. 

On this most recent New Year’s Eve, I unexpectedly spent the day mourning the first part of 2024. In looking back at old photos, and trying to chart a path forward through the year to come, I reckoned with how I started 2024 from a place of desperation. I was far from myself, far from the things I wanted. It felt like I had taken a wrong turn in a funhouse, and found myself in a room full of trick mirrors. Who I was as a person was still there, but I couldn’t see her. My image of self had been distorted by burnout, depression, severe anxiety, and a sense of hopelessness I couldn’t quite grasp. 

One of my favorite things about myself is that I can decide to leap. I can do things scared. So at the beginning of 2024, thanks to the gentle support of my husband, I decided to change things. I made big decisions, and I jumped off a hypothetical cliff. I admitted to myself that I was deeply unhappy. I started crying more often with my friends. I said things out loud to people I trusted that I never thought I’d be able to. I had hard conversations with my parents. I put in my notice at my job and started my freelance career. I started figuring out a plan to become unstuck. I began writing this very newsletter and inviting you, dear readers, to pay to subscribe (which was maybe the scariest thing of all!) and slowly, I began finding myself again. 

I didn’t expect the mourning that New Year’s Eve brought this year, but even still I let it out. I cried a lot, and I lit some candles, and I tried my best to sit with the girl I had been one year prior. I wish so badly I could show her where we are now, and show her that everything was going to work out, but now as I type this I have to imagine she knew. 

We are one week into a new year now, fully on the other side of the vortex. Whatever goals, resolutions, or intentions you may have set for yourself have likely begun to lose their sheen. That’s normal, good even. How you react to the dulling of those endeavors will either make or break their incorporation into your actual life.

The lessons you will learn when you don’t want to do the thing (go on the walk, get up early to write your 1000 little words a day, press publish, eat at home) are the lessons that will sustain you moving forward. 

I don’t love the idea that you can be made fully new by a day on a calendar, but I do love the notion that you can be changed by your own hand, through small incremental decisions. I do love the idea of transformation, of waking up and deciding to find yourself or new parts of yourself. 

I learned last year that you can unearth yourself if you’re willing to dig.

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