twenty three things i learned in twenty twenty three
hi. my name is grace. welcome to my first post. hear me when i say THANK YOU for being here, and for reading past the first two sentences. that alone is enough to make my heart swell. i love writing, and i love sharing it, and i love you, truly, and even now as i piece these words together i am warm with gratitude.
hear me also when i say i don't know how we’re supposed to go about doing this… (this being writing something outside the manila margins of my journals… to be read indefinitely by eyes other than future versions of myself… to be perceived, analyzed, remembered, even)…
…THIS, of course, being new years reflection, because that’s what this post is about, obviously. a global tradition that, like many traditions, divide us. some of us skip the reflection, preferring to anoint the new beginning with bright lights and loud sounds (what better to celebrate our construct of time?). some of us err on the side of treating it like any normal day. others fall into the trap that last year could not have possibly been Good Enough, and we resolve to do Different, do Better. some of us, like the man who by 10pm had drunk himself into a slumber at the Rainforest Cafe themed party i attended, seem to forget about it all together.
i, as a woman, an enneagram four, and chronic Recorder of Moments, write lists.
you may have read elsewhere on my site that i rarely will have answers for you, but i often will have good questions. i have been asking an obscene amount of questions since i could talk. fact check that with my mom. she’ll roll her eyes and laugh, good natured and honest, because it drove her crazy. but she’ll tell you it’s the truth.
i can’t answer the question of what traditions are valuable, or how to reflect on years past, because i don’t know if my tradition is even reflecting so much as it is trying to make sense of the seemingly distant pinpricks of the stories and wounds and summits and surges that make up each passing year. instead, i’ll tell you what i like to ask. the question i pose to myself leading up to every new years eve is this: what have i learned? how am i different? what can i do to grasp what’s been taken from and given to me in the past twelve months?
when i was sixteen, i posted a photo that megan stevens took of me by some plants outside of the soft pretzel shop down the road from my high school (if you’re in chicagoland, pay gnarly knotts a visit). the first line of the caption reads “sixteen things the year of 2016 has taught me”. i have done this every year since - seventeen things in 2017 and so forth. it is a beautiful and arduous process, and it is mine. for that it is one of my most sacred practices. the pinprick stars of what happens in a twelve month block of time are what cast light on the black slate of each passing year, and these lists are the pictures i draw to connect the parts i can’t understand. they are my constellations - how i make sense of the glowing white holes in the inevitably closing night. i am still learning from all of them.
like this one from 2016: '“one - it is better to have one friend that you can talk to about what keeps you up at night than a hundred friends who haven’t thought about if you’re sleeping okay.”
or this from 2020: “seven - a lot of my strength comes from solitude. more than i thought for a long time.”
my lists connect me to myself. as i look back, or maybe as i look forward, their timelines and teachings start to overlap like in (spoiler) murph’s bedroom in nolan’s interstellar. they integrate grace at sixteen with grace at twenty three. this reminds me of a haiku i found on tumblr years ago: “i can’t abandon / the person i used to be / so i carry her.” but the author has got it backwards. my sixteen year old self is not dead weight on my back. she is the one that cannot abandon me. she holds me up. she stays. she lets me retrace her steps.
the bible says that children are great in the kingdom of heaven. i only wish i had lists of what i was learning when i was five, or eight, or eleven. because through my lists, i get to see the maps of constellations that guided me in any given year. and i get to walk in those treads when i need to, even now. especially now.
like this one from 2017: “ten - it’s okay to give yourself permission to wait for a love that doesn’t feel mediocre.”
or, from 2022: “fifteen - keeping my own boundaries means protecting myself from the impulses of different emotional states because… sixteen - feelings are just feelings. they are reactions to my circumstances, not my circumstances themselves. truth is transcendent of feelings and as such, i need to make sure i act on truth, not on my feelings.”
this practice is mine, and i am protective of that. but it can be yours, too, and i think that’s sort of the point. instead of dividing, this is a tradition that connects me to you even when i don’t know how to go about doing that. these lists, eight of them now, exist out in the world, being perceived, analyzed, even remembered. i’ve had people tell me that they wait for the list to go up every year. i’ve had friends write and share their own lists. i know this isn’t an original idea, and i don’t think that my lists are particularly profound in any way. but i do think that at the end of the day, deep down, maybe we’re all learning the same things, like some weird heavenly common core curriculum that manifests in specialized ways in all of our stories and lives, in the ways god knows we need to see them. maybe.
number one of my list from 2022 was “in the same way that beavers chew because their teeth itch, i write because i need to.” and that need extends beyond an annual list. i am calling this newsletter, this project, this collection of questions, this community (if i’m lucky), tender things - because it will be soft and precious, and it will also be raw and a little sore to the touch from time to time. i want to be clear i’m doing that on purpose. there’s a reason we use the word probing in association with questions. among other parts of the body, probes are used for exploring wounds. you can expect a little something from me once a week or so. (but go easy on me if i miss one.)
so, welcome to tender things - i want you to know this is your space as much as it is mine. i’d love to hear from you and talk about the questions you’re asking, too. i think that’s sort of the point. and if this post made you feel something, i’d love if you’d share it with someone who might feel similarly.
[edit, april 2025: i’ve changed the title to bright light & black wings, pulled from dorianne lux’s dust, a work that has marked my life. more on that in later posts.]
if you’d like to retrace my steps, you can find my yearly lists below. tell sixteen year old grace i love her.
