2023-2024: Reflections and Intentions
A year in review: writing, teaching, breathing.
Hello friends, and welcome to the first 2024 edition of The Writer’s Log.
We are at the cusp of February. I almost didn’t make my (very arbitrary) deadline, and it took me several weeks to write this essay. Can you say out of practice?
I. Reflections
As is often the case when beginner energy is at play, I crumble while typing these first lines.
I always liked starting my New Year’s with some form of recap, so I repeated last year’s “Reflection and Intentions” exercise.
As I wrote in early 2023,
I compare New Year lists to birthing plans: people can make fun of it and disregard [it], but it’s also a beautiful way to figure out what you want to honor and respect in your life.
I have read many great ins/outs lists since the beginning of 2024. Dan Wang’s 2023 Letter is at the top of my list (part essay, part reflection, part investigation). Another one is this piece by
, “Things on input and output years.”Dore writes about the distinctions and fluctuations between the years. She pressed us to stop thinking about them in terms of productivity, but rather as “ebb and flow”:
An output year might look focused, busy and full, sometimes with our own goals, but sometimes on account of the unexpected things life throws in.
An input year, by contrast, can look more scattered, quiet and empty. It’s a time to fill back up, take it slow and consider the next step without rushing through things.
I didn’t want to build this essay like last year, which was around the distinction between my professional and personal lives.
I realized that this separation was not only arbitrary but also harmful. I “gave it all” and “killed myself” in one while the other was left panting, exhausted, and on the brink of collapse.
Plus if I’m honest, my reality — the practice of my day-to-day life — was completely different last year: the boundaries between what I did “for a living” (what an odd phrase) had longed vanished, leaving me with the bittersweet aftertaste of failure as a “professional,” but also as a mother, wife, writer, human.
I longed to feel whole again. Division was not the way.
Plot Twists
One of the finest changes 2023 brought is a shift in how I narrate my life to myself and others. Without ever fully succeeding, I attempt to be gentler, less brutal and cruel. So far, it’s been a lot of work, but I can sense its soothing effects on how I now perceive things around me.
“Crumbs of Thoughts” was born seven years ago as a complement to Faces of Postpartum, during a season I believed would never end. It was five months after the birth of my first daughter, which had signaled the end of life as I once knew it. I had immigrated to a new country a year prior and left my academic career behind to — what? — I was (and am) not quite sure.
Seven years later, I am still experiencing curveballs on a daily. Some of them are more challenging or annoying than others, especially because I am the primary caregiver of young children. Others are straight-out devastating. Most are just that: curveballs. An occasion to adjust and adapt.
As I keep repeating: change was always the point.
Something else I tell myself (and my children) all the time: discomfort is not dangerous.
It’s uncomfortable. It might feel a bit like a night out gone wrong.
But unlike other things that almost killed me, this sure ain’t it…
Time to reframe.
The Great Collapse
I remind people that 2022 crushed me all the time.
I often wonder if I sound like a broken record, but the truth is that I am still in shock.
2022 was the peak of a very long journey (quest? battle?) with mental illness that would ultimately blast my existence and identity into a million pieces, resulting in a cPTSD diagnosis and a reevaluation of every aspect of my existence.
I thought PTSD was for war veterans. I thought flashbacks manifested themselves glamorously and clearly, preferably late at night while sipping scotch, bathed in an orange haze or fancy neons, much like Martin Sheen’s in Apocalypse Now.
Trauma was for warriors and fighters. I was neither of those things1.
I didn’t know flashbacks could show up one random afternoon in February, after I’d put my underwear into a drawer, on vacation at a cabin in the woods, with my husband’s work friends waiting to start dinner downstairs.
I didn’t know they could alter your vision and stop the air from flowing, turning your lungs and stomach into stones. That they would not stop “after a month” just because you’d decided that it would be so.
I could not foresee that their daily occurrences would push me to reevaluate reality itself: every person I let in (or had to let out), the food I tolerated (or vomited, for no other reason than they brought me back “to that place”); that familiar scents would trigger visual hallucinations, and remind me of stories I believed were just a dream.
That everything, including my birthright, would be called into the witness box.
I did not understand that all my memories would have to be screened, looking for something that no longer existed: answers.
Truth was no more. I didn’t know where to begin to reestablish it.
Losing Track
When I did this exercise last year, I longed for the ability to ask for help and lean on the right people. I begged for (fast) healing and figuring out the proper resources. I promised to choose discomfort over numbness, and, for the most part, I’m proud to say that I kept my promise.
But as I reread the piece, I was still very much stuck in a productivity mindset.
I had started yet another business based on yet another fantastic idea. To be fair with myself and the people I worked with, we followed up, dug deep, researched the shit out of it, and poured our heart and soul into believing that we could make it work.
It didn’t. It happens. I learned a lot and moved on.
I had to acknowledge my delusional ideas of grandeur, my need to feel special, a visionary. Letting go of the big boss's energy was salutary.
I thanked my delusion because it had kept me alive for a long time. Pushed me to keep grinding. And then we parted ways.
It’s hard to admit defeat. It’s even harder to hold that part of us close to our hearts and shower it with love, despite its cringiness, to love oneself unconditionally, perhaps like no one else had before.
So I collapsed.
Everything crumbled.
I put my kids in public school and daycare and spent my days wondering when the next blow would hit. There were days (weeks, months…?) of bewilderment and acute confusion: I was terrified.
I have little to no recollection of my two previous summers. None. Even as we moved into 2023 and I began to rebuild myself, I cannot tell you what I did or how I felt. I can only write these lines today because I sat down every morning to write one paragraph about what I had done the previous day. Mundane items mingled with terrorizing voiceovers. A grocery list of events forgotten as soon as they appeared, holding on by threads of ink.
Some journal pages were left blank because I felt too ill to hold a pen that day.
Entire months, empty, swallowed by time.
But I lived. I survived. A supernova collapsing onto itself: reborn.
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