Okay. Let’s talk about it.
2023 is here.
Okay see, acknowledging that another 365 days have gone by in the blink of an eye wasn’t as hard as I thought.
Yeah, that was a lie lol.
In all seriousness, welcome to 2023. For those who are excited for it, I hope it lives up to your expectations. For those who are perplexed at the passing of time, I hope you make sense of it because I sure can’t. And for those who are struggling to grab onto something as life decides to spin you around until you’re dizzy and completely discombobulated, I hope you’re holding on tight.
I thought that the perfect way to welcome in the New Year is to say goodbye to the year before.
I honestly entered 2022 with such great optimism. I remember feeling really great and it’s kind of sad looking back at how refreshed I felt January 2022 and how well, not refreshed I feel in January 2023. 12 months ago, I decided to make January 2022 the month to get my life together. 2020 was an absolute fail, 2021 was learning how to step out in the world again, and so 2022 was going to be the year things got back to normal right?
I made new notion pages and decided that the moment where Diana steps out of the car in her famous black dress was going to be the vibe of the year. In fact, I remember staying up late into the night after the ball dropped New Year’s Day 2022 to paste pictures of that dress into my aesthetic journal. I remember writing 2022 all over it and telling myself that this was going to be the year that I got my revenge for all that life’s thrown at me, including a pandemic upended my entrance into adulthood.
Sadly, I never finished that spread and never once looked back at it until recently when I found the journal hiding behind my desk where it had fallen.
The end of the Winter months and heading into Spring, I had a lot of professional accomplishments. I think it was around March when I found my love for early mornings. I randomly started waking up at 3 a.m or 4 a.m and would spend the morning with a cup of tea, work out (occasionally), read or journal, and just start the day slow and on my terms. It was life changing. I was able to go into work earlier and get a head start on things when it was quiet and that really helped me handle some of the stress that I had been carrying. Of course that didn’t last long lol.
It was towards the end of Spring and heading into the Summer that I started to feel really burnt out. That level of burn out followed me for the rest of the year. But with great anxiety and stress comes great escapist reads and amazing TV shows to get sucked into.
April brought me Season 2 of Bridgerton and at this time of the year, I hadn’t watched the first season yet. Honestly, I had really low expectations for Bridgerton Season 1 because I absolutely hated the book but I knew that if I wanted to watch Season 2 when it released, I needed to watch Season 1. And that’s when my Bridgerton addiction started. I hated the part in Season 1 that I hated in the first book but Daphne was so well done in the show. Phoebe Dynevor is an amazing actress and brought to life a character I didn’t really like in the original source material. Personally though, Season 2 beat Season 1 out of the running for my favorite season. There isn’t a day after I watched Season 2 that I haven’t thought about that Season. Season 2 just felt so rich, captivating, and tense. It had everything I loved and it made me reread the second book in the series 3 times in a span of 6 months.
Summer 2022 was the most memorable season of reading for me. I hauled so many books this season and it was also the first time in my reading life that I’ve bought books the day they came out. I’ll be doing a 2022 reading wrap up later on so I’ll keep it brief but some summer 2022 highlight for me were:
At the end of August, I went on my first vacation with a friend and it was absolutely amazing. I went to this museum that blew my mind and made me fall in love with museums even more. I’m a huge lover of history and if you are to and are in St. Augustine, I highly recommend going to the Lightner Museum. There’s a lot of stuff from The Gilded Age and it was just so beautiful and made me rethink the meaning of life and time. My friend and I spent the first half of the day doing tourist things and the second half sitting at the beach and swimming in the ocean. I read so many books at the beach that I now have a handful of books that are a bit sandy and have ink smudges from the ocean water. It was absolutely an unforgettable moment in my life and it woke up my love for travel.
Coming back to work after that vacation was hard lol. Things started to really pile up and get chaotic. It honestly was becoming a bit too much to handle. The work weeks flew by and I was struggling with this weird whiplash feeling of doing way too much but also at the same time doing way too little and feeling useless, stupid, and unproductive. I wish I can explain how that mess of a situation happened but honestly, it was around October when it became clear to me that I still hadn’t recovered from the burn out from Spring. So naturally, I decided that I’m going to write a book and participate in NaNoWriMo.
For those who don’t know, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. It’s an online worldwide challenge that people take on in November where you write 50,000 words in a month or a book. I had never won a NaNoWriMo and the idea of writing books is a long standing dream but also terrifying.
So clearly, when my life becomes a dumpster fire, why not add more fuel?
I wanted to take on writing and make it a daily habit because I knew that it would be the one thing that would really force me to look inwards. I’m not writing a memoir or anything personal but the idea of writing is inherently personal, or at least for me. It’s personal in the way that it challenges you to look inwards and fight the voice inside your head that cringes at everything you write and look past the plot holes, one dimensional characters, and the mess you’re typing or writing out and just let be. Things in my life were dragging me under and I was losing my sense of control so what better way to fight this lack of control then by learning how to deal with it by writing?
I spent the entire October planning in the most pantster (a method of writing where one writes by the seat of their pants or in other words, with no plan, not someone who’s an actual pantster) way for this book. I made so many outlines that the idea of outlining makes me gag. I knew that I needed some plan if I wanted to write 50,000 words in a month but it was becoming too much work and I was adding to my burn out. I knew the reason I was writing was to deal with the lack of control and let be and forcing an outline was counteractive to that.
So in November 2022, I entered the month with a vague outline and veered completely off track… and managed to write 50,000 words!! I honestly don’t know how I did it. It was almost meditative, the idea of having this one thing to come home to after work and just going at it. I have no idea where this story’s going, if I’ll finish it, or anything like that but I knew that I just needed to start something and stick with it so the next time, I can get further and further until I finish something that I like.
Unfortunately, since so much of my time was dedicated to writing, I barely read anything in October or November. That lack of reading carried over into December.
December is my birthday month and it’s also been the first month I really leaned into the Holiday spirit. I didn’t celebrate Christmas growing up so I don’t have the same memories as everyone does for this holiday. But after finishing NaNoWrimo and winning, I wanted to really allow myself to be happy. I distracted myself from the stress, got 50,000 words out of it, a hobby I’m hoping to carry on for the rest of my life, and felt productive and useful. I wanted December to be the month where I allowed myself to feel my feelings, especially in the first two or three weeks before I went home for the holidays.
Holiday season is always a double edged sword because while it’s the time for catchy songs, yummy food, and wholesome movies, it’s also the time of year where a lot of people have to deal with hard feelings, trauma, or issues in establishing boundaries to protect their mental health. I fall into that category and there were a couple of moments through out the past holiday season that made realize some feelings I didn’t know I was experiencing. I was able to put a name to the hurt and otherness I always felt and it was enlightening.
I started off my post work vacation with a close friend. I spent the entire day, night, and the morning after with her and stayed at her place. It felt like a staycation and honestly felt incredibly healing. I’m telling you, there’s something about salt water air and the ocean that’s completely healing. It feels like my nerves each got their individual dose of melatonin, I felt chill. Catching up, doing a ton of shopping and laughing like we were both on something, getting dinner, watching a movie, driving through what felt like a Christmas Light show, and having brunch at the beach was the perfect start for my vacation.
My family and I saw Avatar 2 in the movies and wow. It felt like reading a book and I can’t wait to see it again. My time back in my family home for the holidays was an even mix of wholesome moments like hanging out with friends or catching up with my family and then then terribly stressful things like my house disintegrating from various potentially devastating leaks, AC issues, car issues, and um family members getting heart surgery . It was an interesting time to say the least. So much more happened that really tested my ability of keeping it together.
The last days of the year, I was really exuding toxic positivity and was basically gaslighting myself to stay calm. I felt like I was Ross from Friends and was making it through the last hours of 2022 screaming, “I’M FINE, I’M FINE!”.
Amidst all the chaos though, I managed to sit down and journal a lot. I really wanted to start 2023 off on the right foot. One sad thing that I really hope to fix in 2023 is to journal more. I am a huge journal user and I sadly dropped the habit when I started to get overwhelmed. It’s the first week of January 2023 and I can say that I don’t know how many books I read in 2022 because I haven’t spent any time writing it down in my journal.
I knew that I didn’t want to wait till the first day of January to pick up the habit of writing in my journal so I started the last two weeks of December and I can say that it was the best way to do it. If you’re planning to set a monthly goal or even a weekly goal, start a couple days earlier and ease yourself into the habit. It’ll make things a lot less overwhelming and more practical.
Things didn’t go the way I expected them to this year. I did some amazing things I wouldn’t have dreamed off. I hung out with friends, made memories I’ll never forget, I travelled, I started writing, and I lived. I felt like I truly lived. But I also struggled and just when I thought things were going to get better at the end of year, I started 2023 with a boatload of anxiety and stress that’s somehow even more potent than what I previously was dealing with.
But I wanted to recap all of that because addressing your wins and your lows is important for a fresh start. It’s a bit cathartic to just write it out so that you’re carrying a little less of it inside you.
My word for this year is security. I have four other words that accompany this one that I’ll share maybe another day, but my main goal this year is to feel more secure. I don’t want to feel so out of control with things as I did at the end of 2022. I obviously know that many things in life are out of my control but I want to process things and carry out my life better so that I can live alongside the things out of my control rather than let the things out of control run me.
How was your 2022? What are you some of your wins and if you’re comfortable, your lows? And what’s your word for 2023?