The 2023 Lost & Found
A draft on peace, love, and writing
2023 took my shoulders between her thumbs and forefingers and shook me out like a well-loved sheet just pulled from the dryer.
She shook and shook and shook until there was nothing left, but me.
Lost
I completely changed my life mid-2021 “after” COVID and then 2023 said, “Nope, try again.”
I lost my job and my five year lingering will-they-wont-they relationship in January. In both, I had been holding myself in a constant state of anxiety and willing to stay because I was just as unsure of my own worth as my boss and boyfriend were. It turned out I had changed the logistics of my life, my location and my career, but I hadn’t changed the way I held on to the world.
In 2023 I let go.
Well, actually, I cried and screamed “why me?!” while things were taken out of my hands that I should have let go of a long time ago. And then eventually, I loosened my grip, opened my hands to see what was left, and threw the rest out too.
I stopped holding people’s hands, tiptoeing them through a tour of my worth. I let them go and they didn’t look back.
I let go of worrying whether someone I had just hung out with actually liked me or not. I let go of wondering whether I was someone’s third choice instead of first.
I let go of the hate I thought I needed for the parts of myself that I wanted to change.
I let go of a lot of expectations written in handwriting I didn’t recognize.
I let go of should (or I try try tried).
I purged all of the bile I’d accumulated in my stomach from the years of guilt and shame. And then I purged it again. And again.
I let go of blaming other people or “the universe” for my circumstances, or my reactions, or my emotions.
I let go of everything meaning something. I let go of everything that happened meaning something about me.
With so much gone, breath was different, easier maybe. I was carrying less.
But it also felt like too much empty space. I was a cavern. A balloon that might just float away if someone didn’t hold my string.
So I sat down.
If everything outside me didn’t determine who I was? Who did? Me? Me?? How would I know something like that?
Rest
I don’t even think I knew what resting was before 2023. When I lost my job, I took a month and a half totally off. I tried to not even think about what was next.
(I had the extreme privilege of severance pay, a savings account, no debt, and no obligations to anyone but myself. I know that was a gift that not everyone has and I want to make sure I acknowledge. I am grateful I was able to take this time.)
I woke up without an alarm every morning and went on a long walk with Cooper, in search of a treat for me a green space with off leash dogs for him. I chatted with strangers in parks. I went home and wrote. I let myself watch episodes of TV in bed without calling it depression or shaming myself for it. Cooper alternated between napping on my legs and dropping toys on my keyboard. We had only one appointment that month, a daily dog meetup in our old neighborhood at 5pm. Most days we would leave our apartment at 3p and walk the two hours there, up and over San Francisco’s hills, stopping at other parks along the way. Cooper ran along the panhandle, tackling dogs ten times his size while I chatted with my between-5-and-6pm-on-weekdays friends, mostly about our dogs. As the sun set, Cooper curled into my lap on a barstool at my favorite dive bar while I slowly scribbled in my journal, or chatted with the group of 70 year old men that watched Jeopardy on one of the TVs there every evening and told me to “never stop writing”. Then Cooper and I would walk the hills back home through the streetlights.
We went to bed at 9pm most nights that February. Our days were restful, but rest also contained so much actual sleep. I couldn’t believe how many hours I slept every night. Sometimes there were even midday naps. How much sleep debt had I accumulated in my thirty-something years of hustle?
Found
In the quiet of the cavern, I started to hear my own voice again. I started to discover (maybe rediscover) parts of me that had been drowned out by the drone of the TV, that had been pushed past on the way to work, that were fucking terrified of the world I was living in and how much I allowed it to assault me.
So I built a little fire, kindling made from curiosity and light made out of love.
The ambitious part of me jumped up to go and find these other whispering parts, to drag them out so we could all just move the fuck on and get to changing the world already. She tried to scoop up the fire, but it was just the ground.
So she sat down beside me. And we waited.
Peace
Peace was not a word on my radar until 2023. It was just part of a cheesy answer in beauty contests (or maybe that’s only in Miss Congeniality?). I valued ambition. I gravitated towards challenge. I tattooed passion on my body. I was always proving something to someone. If it wasn’t hard, if I wasn’t uncomfortable, it wasn’t worth doing.
Peace blew my mind. I met peace and she introduced me to her friends. Here is calm, here is ease, here is seen, here is right. Here is existing without needing to be or do something. Here is a regulated nervous system. Here is trust.
For me, peace also holds responsibility and agency. It is quiet power. It is knowing that no one else really gets to affect how I feel or act. I was a loud victim of a cruel world before. Now the world roars outside my door and I decide how wide to open it. I am the protector of my own peace.
Love
When I shook off, let go of, ripped away, so many other things, all that empty space filled up with love. 2023 brought big 1970s energy to my mid-thirties. Peace and love, y’all.
I am closer to my friends, I feel and receive their love more fully because I feel and receive my own love. I don’t question their words or their gestures. I lean in because I am not scared of who I am or what they will see.
My love for my family is more pure, more easy, without the guilt and responsibility I had piled on top of it.
I fell in love with a partner in a whole new way. I let myself been seen and helped and held. I was in a canoe on a lake made of glass instead of flipping down white water rapids. I felt safe.
When I write about love, my body tingles. I imagine it’s just all of the parts of me around the table giggling. And that makes it tingle even more.
Writing
In the fall of 2023, barely more than two months ago, I stopped sneaking, stopped whispering when I called myself a writer, wrote this piece, and pushed publish.
Once I was stripped to my core, once I communed with the younger parts of me, once I was soaked in love, I had no other choice but to start honoring my dreams.
The poet came out. She was first, of course she was. She’s the bravest little girl I know. Fear lunged out in front her. Depression crawled in wrapped under her blanket. Once there was space for them, the parts just kept coming.
And we started talking. You can read some of our conversations here. They are some of my most favorite things.
Lost
This all feels a little too clean. Packaging the year up and tying it with a bow feels disingenuous. None of it is untrue, but it feels like a year rounded up in artificial sugar.
It feels like maybe I wrote it just to write something on this “momentous day.” And still, it doesn’t feel big enough for a momentous day or for the new batch of subscribers that I am telling myself are waiting for utter brilliance in their inbox. (Thank you, I am so so glad you’re here. You also terrify me).
I lost a lot of things I needed to this year.
I also lost things that I didn’t want to lose.
I lost new love that I had just found only months before. I lost a person who felt like a revolution. The place where that love lived has reverberated empty echoes throughout this slow end of December week.
Does a new year mean you are really gone? Does everything and everyone lost get tagged with “2023” and tucked into a box labeled “memories”?
New Years Eve has always been my favorite holiday. But it might just be the idea of NYE that I love so much.
Because while the idea of it is all sparkles and intentionality, the reality is sometimes… hollow and lackluster. I find it harder every year to motivate myself to dress up and go to a party. I am less interested in writing off January 1st as a hangover. The sparkles are no longer worth looking at my shoes at midnight. And on this first shiny new day of the year, it’s still cold and the sun still sets at 5pm. Maybe we should start move the midnight sparkle tradition to Vernal Equinox Eve. Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, I suppose.
The last few years I’ve moved out of party mode and into intention mode. I’ve written a list of things I want to leave behind and a list of things I want more of in the new year. I burn the things I want to leave behind in a fire.
But even that doesn’t feel quite right this year.
I have been intentional a lot these last 12 months. There’s not a lot left to burn. There’s not much that I want to get rid of.
There is nothing besides a calendar to say this is the end of something.
I am in the middle of a lot of things. This December 31st doesn’t feel like an end, it feels like the middle. The middle of winter, the middle of healing, the middle of. I don’t want to be a new me. I like the me I’m in the middle of finding and the life in I’m in the middle of building.
And this is maybe the first December 31st that I’ve thought that.
2023 came in like a lion. 2024 can come in peace.