I've been working on a post that adequately sums up 2022--a year that was equally full of the most heartbreaking moments of my life, as well as the most joyful--and also explains every way in which I intend 2023 to be better. To be fair, I didn't intend for 2022 to be so challenging. January of last year, I was also journaling and planning blog posts and getting ready for a busy year of achievements, new hobbies, travel, better habits. But some years are just like that--unexpected avalanches of challenge and grief. I think it would be more fair if these moments were spread out, like mini snow squalls of unhappy things spread over a decade. I guess we have about as much control over that as the actual weather, though.
Amongst everything else, there is something about this year that has felt so solidly grown up, so adult. When something goes wrong, there is no one to tell, no one to get. I can (and do) tell people about it, but there's a big difference between retelling a story and leading with "help!". I also find myself using the word "adult" more than any other adults I know. Somehow, I am constantly looking for the grown-ups, trying to mimic their behavior and walk in their shoes in a way that definitely comes off less cute and more naïve than when actual children do it. I wonder if large, out-of-our-control circumstances is what helps people turn the corner from looking for the grown ups to being looked to. Alongside the anxiety and grief and weight of this year, I've also felt a perverse sense of pride, even of joy, in how we (my husband and I) are able to handle things. An unexpected move and six weeks living apart, my partner's concussion, loosing grandparents, and loosing someone who was basically my brother in law unexpectedly a week into our own honeymoon. The shitty circumstances remained shitty but I am still proud of how we reacted. We took actions, came home early from trips, were reliable and present and made ourselves voice our thoughts. We showed up--dressed appropriately, with tote bags of food and markers for guest books--and stayed afterwards to clean up, like the grown ups we apparently are. Is this really what we were looking forward to all these years?
Because everything about growing up is gray and nuanced, it would be unfair to write bout 2022 and only list the circumstances that were hard. This year also held a jam-packed, adventurous summer, making a lot of art I felt strongly about, moving to a new town and feeling like it is exactly where we wanted to be. This was the year I got to marry the man that stood by me and picked me up and made every hard circumstance of this past year doable. Our wedding was beautiful and fun and very us, and we cried the whole time.
My whole life, I have felt both incredibly excited and incredibly terrified to grow up. I was one of those kids that was always a bit too grown up; prim and proper and obedient, never overly excited and (predictably) too wrapped up in the approval of adults. I never felt like a kid, so imagine my confusion when I hit birthday after after birthday and instead of finally feeling "my age," I started feeling younger and younger. I became somehow more inept and confused, and way less impressed with my own capabilities. I have spent this first half of my 20's feeling remorse for all the ways I wasn't more wild when I was younger, feeling embarrassment for all the ways I haven't felt more grown up, and desperately throwing myself on the hamster wheels of "catching up" and "good enough."
Perhaps this year was a chance to stop and realize that life comes at you too fast to worry so much about being on top of it. Our lives are often messy, chaotic, unsatisfying; sometimes it's our fault, and often it's not. Life is just all the things, constantly. The parts of my life that often feel the most embarrassingly non-grown up didn't affect how I showed up with my family as we were grieving, or how Chris and I planned our wedding and life together. You don't have to be emotionally mature to clean the house, but you definitely do to attend funerals that really shouldn't be happening. Or host a huge party and not yell at anyone.
In the mundanity that's (luckily) filled our lives this fist part of 2023, I'm enjoying a sense of feeling grown up in more gentle ways. Throwing flyers in the recycling instead of on the table when I check the mail. Lighting a candle to make dinner. I am grateful to be enjoying these things. To not be worried if I'm too young or too old, but just to be who I am, where I am, carving out some space for myself amidst the noise.
