New Year Reflections

Past selves, potential selves, and lost selves as yearly retrospective

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This post discusses addiction, grief, loss, and suicide.

When I think of New Year’s Eve 2009, I picture the years as a staircase, each stair a different year, and I am a slinky slinking down the stairs, as slinkies do. I tumble from the stair of 2009, having been pitched on the stair journey twenty-nine years before, but instead of landing on the stair of 2010 the stairs start melting like that scene in A Nightmare On Elm Street, when Nancy is trying to run upstairs and her feet keep sinking.

I cannot stop myself from falling (because slinkies cannot stop themselves from falling) and headfirst I topple onto the stair of 2010, which has melted into a gooey void. It swallows me.

I think it was during this past year that I found the mangled slinky part of myself from 2009. It was spat out through some wormhole, back into this dimension. The slinky is no longer a slinky but a melted, gooey mass of hot pink and neon green plastic. All this time I was trying to find that part of myself that fell into the void, and now I’ve found it, but it looks nothing like I thought it would.

Some things aren’t meant to be put back together, but that doesn’t render them useless. Some things can reassembled, but they are never the same.

The creation of a Kintsugi bowl by Myriam GREFF (you can purchase her work by clicking her name) 金継ぎ (kintsugi literally means gold mending)

What I mean is: I had no idea what was coming for me in 2010. My mom’s sickness and her suicide. Leaving my life as a firefighter. The years I lost to grief and panic. The following years of dedication and grit and sheer force of will that got me here, to this moment, as 2023 folds into 2024. I was twenty-nine and now I am forty-three, and it feels like a whole lifetime lives between those two selves, and all the other selves that form me into a whole. If I am ever whole. If any of us are ever whole.

I promise, we are going to get to the current moment, but first I have a story to tell you.

On New Year’s Eve in 2009 I was living in Denver, and I went to a bar with a friend. We kissed at midnight. We went to a house with some guys for an afterparty, but she had to leave soon after. I stayed. I knew at that point that I was moving to Seattle from Denver, where I’d cobbled together a little home and community for the first time in my life. My mom was sick with alcoholism and lying about having terminal cancer. I knew she was lying but I didn’t want to admit it to myself. There were many things I knew but didn’t want to admit to myself.

That night I did lines and lines of cocaine and listened to records in a foreign apartment, a solo traveler amongst a group of people who all knew each other. I knew none of them. At dawn, in the frigid morning resplendent with the shattering golden hued light that snow brings, I walked home. I was wearing flimsy flats and a skirt, and shivering. I was crying, partially from the coke comedown but mostly because I could feel the void. I was right up against it. I passed a man on the street, his straits more dire than mine, and he offered me a cigarette. We smoked together on the sidewalk. He told me about his losses, and I shared mine. I knew we could each be living one another’s lives so easily. He was homeless. I had been homeless. We were not so different.

When I got home I didn’t crawl into bed. Instead, I wrote about the night in my blog, which no one read. When I got to Seattle a week later the job I’d been interviewing for said they couldn’t hire me because they’d read my blog, so I took a night shift as a housekeeper and launderer at a local gym and spent the next few months in a nightmarish haze, trying to figure out what was happening with my mom. I rented a basement room. I woke up from desperate dreams surrounded by the black winter light of gloomy Seattle. Then I left Seattle for a job in Fairbanks, Alaska, where I worked as a firefighter for the Park Service. My mom killed herself four weeks later.

Me in the summer of 2010, in Kennicott, Alaska while working for the Park Service, one month after my mother’s death.

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On this Christmas, in this dimension, I watched the episode of The Crown where Princess Diana dies, and I cried all day remembering that I was seventeen on that day, living at a squat house in Olympia, WA. My mom picked me up for something and when I got into the car she told me Princess Diana had died and we both sobbed together. A month later, I hitch-hiked down to California because I wanted to live in San Francisco. Before I got there a man picked me up and kidnapped me for several days. I escaped, and somehow ended up living on a farm in Mendocino County with several other young people. After a while I wrote my mom a letter. She wrote back begging me me to come home and promising me emancipation. Promising me she’d go to therapy. Apologizing for years of abuse. I went home. Nothing changed.

Except things did change. They changed again and again. And I kept myself alive through all of that, somehow.

On the day I left Seattle for Fairbanks, my mother and I embraced. We were both crying. I still remember the softness of her cheek, feeling our tears intermingle.

I can go months without thinking of any of this, and then a wormhole opens and spits parts of me into my lap. Sometimes I don’t understand what has happened. The part of me feels like a poisonous creature full of venom, or a desperate creature ready to swallow me up. I throw it away. Then, I retrieve it.

I have learned to hold these parts of me against my chest and warm them with my heart until they melt back into me. the venom is part of me. The desperation is part of me. It’s always a painful process.

Sometimes the past feels like Freddy Krueger breaking the peephole window and the stairs are melting while I am trying to climb my way to something.

In those moments I have to stop climbing. Because Freddy is dead. Really dead. And there is nothing to run away from. Not anymore. The parts of me, having survived so many multiple dimensions, are strong, and there are things I can accept now. I accept them and they offer me their strength. My strength.

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Sometimes I get stuck on questions like: why am I here? Why are we all here?

And then I sit outside in the morning and watch an Oriole balancing on a camellia branch so it can pluck the pink petals from a flower’s ovary. Its orange beak halves the tender petals and I wonder: how is there so much beauty in the world? I remember that beauty is not beauty without the intensity of pain, and that the level of pain I’ve felt in my lifetime(s) only makes things more beautiful because I know in my bones that everything is ephemeral and nothing lasts for even a little while. Each moment is change. Each year is transformation. I can rely on that and find solace in that, or I can wish it weren’t true. I choose the former. I make myself soft and gooey. I melt. I am reformed.

The more pain, the more beauty.

With pain, nothing is mundane. Everything that isn’t pain becomes sacred. The pain itself also becomes sacred, because the pain is not separate from the beauty. Nothing is separate from anything. Everything is integrally connected. We would not exist without each other.

I melt into the stairs.

the camellias bloom and fall and bloom and fall and melt into the earth.

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Since graduating with my MFA 2018 I have been moving at least once a year, sometimes several times a year, sometimes internationally. For a while I didn’t have a home at all. The universe swallowed me up and held me in its mouth, chewing me occasionally, breaking me apart and wrapping me in its warmth, its saliva, a healing tincture, stung as it broke me down. It was so dark in there that I didn’t know I was safe.

This time last year, in the middle of the first year of my PhD, I had to move from the second time in five months. Then in August, six months later, I moved again, into a little cottage on a dead end street with a small garden and reasonable rent that I can afford. For the first time in six years, I feel like I have a home. I have realized I am safe; as safe as any creature can be in this world, and I am grateful.

In 2019 I sold my book on proposal. In August of 2020 I sent the editor my first draft and didn’t hear back from her for over a year. Three and a half years later, I am still revising that book, but the urgency that came with deadlines has been lifted and I am working slowly. Diligently. It will be a good book, I know. For the first time, I know this. I know the book will change my life, as this newsletter has changed my life, as the cottage has changed my life, as therapy and my PhD program have changed my life. I soften into that, and then I become rigid again, resisting and fearful. And I soften again. It’s a process.

my sweet cat Edna, who came with me from Seattle to Florida and loves the cottage as much as I do. She is scared of everything but also capable of pure, tenderhearted softness, like me.

The Gregorian new year always happens in winter, after the solstice, in the moments when the days begin to lengthen imperceptibly. I don’t force myself to make resolutions, but I take the time to reflect on my own growth across the span of my entire life and the previous year. I cast spells and immerse myself in ritual for one day, on the 31st of December. I honor myself and what I have survived, and I remind myself that life can be so much more than surviving. I remind myself that being large is beautiful. My large body is beautiful. My soul, so large that it holds the physical vessel of my body and will survive my body’s death, is beautiful. Every single soul— the soul of the mantis and the Oriole and the tender camellia and the child in Gaza and the souls of dead things that power combustible engines are all beautiful, and alive, and they will live beyond all physical deaths, and they are not separate. They are all connected. We are all part of the soul of this planet and what lies beyond this planet. We are all part of this unknowable universe and the universes existing alongside it.

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Somehow, over the past year, this newsletter became a tangible part of the fabric of my life.

This newsletter is part of my soul; not some marketing tool. Like I said, nothing is mundane when we have brushed up against or been swallowed by the void, not even a newsletter. I know there are evil forces in the world, but I refuse to be silenced, and this newsletter will continue being a part of my soul for as long as the universe allows. For several years I wrote here and very few people read my words, but now I know these words will be read. Not only read, but seen. Felt. Heard. Absorbed.

Some of you out there have become paying subscribers, and I do not take that lightly, because the money this newsletter makes (currently $4.8k a year) has a huge impact on my life. Since my mother’s death, and then my father’s two years later, I have said I don’t have family. I have said I don’t have a safety net of financial support to catch me if things go awry. I can’t say that anymore, because I feel your support physically, in my every day life. I open my refrigerator and see healthy, nourishing food. I make my organic tea in the morning. I buy a pair of shoes I would otherwise be unable to afford. I feel an ease in my life that I haven’t felt before, all because of the impact of your paid subscriptions. All because you think that my words are worthy of the money you’ve worked so hard for.

That is truly profound to me. I never believed people would pay me for my writing, and I feel that the word “pay” is useless here. By paying for my writing, you affirm that it’s worth something to you. That it feeds you in some way. And you literally feed in exchange, so I can continue to write in this space. Your comments and thoughts and reflections are also as valuable to me as money, if not more valuable. They move me forward and teach me more about myself. I am supremely grateful for you, whether you have affirmed this space financially, or by engaging, and also if you are one of the many people who read this newsletter often and engage simply through the act of reading. I hope my writing gives you hope, as you give me hope, and help me feel safe in this world.

I want to share my other newsletter with you, which I’ll be working on more in the new year, called Wilderness. Wilderness was my first newsletter on Substack, and it’s dedicated to the subjects of colonization, ecology, fire, and history. The two newsletters are almost like a mashup of my forethcoming book, HOTSHOT, which is a memoir and reported narrative about my time as a wildland firefighter and the history of fire in the United States. That newsletter, like this one, isn’t paywalled, so please feel free to subscribe to both.

Killers of the Flower Moon and Other Misconceptions

At this moment I am sitting outside in the cold, watching a bird sift through pine needles and leaves for insects, and I am grateful. I am excited for the next year, and the following year, when my book will finally be released into the world. What will happen between now and then? It’s impossible to know. Not knowing is magical and terrifying and also a refuge. Things will change, and I will continue writing, and hopefully you will be here with me.

Tell me: how are you? What is on your mind as 2023 drops to the ground and 2024 blooms?