Happy New Year!
2024 started a couple of days ago, and, for the first time in years, I feel at peace. Not many people know that, for the past four or five Decembers, I felt a black hole in my stomach when the clock struck 12. I tried my best to smile and carry on, but something I didn't quite understand weighed on my chest. I felt utterly alone in my heart, even surrounded by loved ones.
This year, I didn't have a partner by my side, but it didn't tarnish my night. My soul felt unexplainably joyous and calm. Being a highly sensitive person, I hold these little things in great regard. My hand automatically reached my heart with gratitude over an intangible but magical feeling: the hunch that I am about to enter the period for which God was preparing me.
My heart has continued to be full as the days have followed. The first days of January caught me fully relaxed on a long-awaited family vacation. My therapist told me how great I am doing, and I finally returned to DC and the office. Serendipitously, I found a couple of paragraphs I wrote last year on the cusp of my pain but never got to post. In turn, it referenced another paragraph I had found back then.
While cleaning my inbox a couple of days ago, I found a text I wrote in 2015. It started with "lately, I have this strong desire to write, to do it everywhere, even on walls." In that way, we are similar. My present is full of writing, reading, recording, and sharing my current story. I feel much like Jason Mraz in "You & I Both," one of my favorite songs by him: "I'm all about them words. Over numbers, unencumbered, numbered words. Hundreds of pages, pages, pages forward. More words than I had ever heard, and I feel so alive."
However, the 22-year-old who proceeded to describe what she was living is very different from me: she felt like she had it all, and I feel like I am losing it all. That girl felt a bit of emptiness, the one that's been with me for years. Paradoxically, in the present, I have nothing, but I don't feel that sense of longing.
The fact that I found this text in this exact moment reminds me that life is full of ups and downs. It does not cease to shock me how all these things cram together at times in a way that truly makes us ask the world (or God, or whatever/whomever you believe in): "do I deserve this?". And because the two scenarios - where everything's marvelous and where everything's awful- are equally overwhelming, we tend to forget they are both temporary.
On that note and with these hopefully long-lasting feelings, I didn't set any bombastic or overly ambitious resolutions for this year. While I strive to be my best version always, there is nothing I want right now other than enjoying my current life as is: the city I have fought so hard to stay in, the love of my family and friends, the job that gives me so much, the winter I so adore, and the moments of stillness in my little apartment.
I am thankful that the horrible night has ceased, as my country's national anthem references. And I am ready to tackle a year of stillness, softness, self-love, and the perhaps delusional certainty that, right now, I finally have it all.
Comments