Full Circle.

Hello 2023. I know we’re technically still in 2022, but mentally I’ve already crossed over to the new year. This time of year I always feel a gentle breeze more so than a wind beneath my sails, a whisper from God saying ‘let’s try again’, and I always stand up, dust down my mat and prepare to walk through this journey called life another year. A friend of mine asked me to give her a word for how this year went for me, and I chewed my lip for a bit thinking and trying to work out how I could accurately depict a year that felt like i had experienced it at the speed of a blink of an eye. Finally I settled on ‘Hurdles’. Hurdles? – she said with an eyebrow raised. Hurdles – I replied, and I threw back my head and laughed and we laughed together. It’s a nice feeling to be able to laugh now, but imagine standing on a running track, it’s a warm and humid day, uncomfortably so – but only just. In front of you are a series of stark white steel hurdles that begin to rise in height more sharply than you know they should. You are nervously looking around and realise that every seat surrounding the track is full to the brim with faces you can’t make out at all. You hear a gun go off in the background and your legs start moving from underneath you – seemingly of their own accord. You jump and fly over the first hurdle with relative ease, you run a little and find yourself over the second with more difficulty, the third you notice – the horizontal bar is blood red this time. You try to jump and buckle, crumpling into a timid pile. The crowd erupts into a fizzing orb of jeers and you try to stand up but your legs are hurt. You drag yourself up and make a beeline for the next hurdle, anxious not to make the crowd spill onto you, but you clumsily fall again, this time harder and the shouts from the crowd are so loud that you can almost feel their collective hot angry  breath electric on your skin. You are sweating and tears fall down your face, your knees are scraped clean to the flesh and little dots of blood begin to appear between the brown. The air around you smells like a mixture of salt and iron. You have failed. This year was a series of hurdles I failed to overcome. Instead of jumping over them, I stumbled, I fell, at times I even just walked around them, but I kept following the track. Some days I’d clear the hurdles with ease, others I’d simply walk around the track in silence blocking out the noise. Regardless, I kept going.

So when pondering on what my word for the year would be for 2023 I thought – Discipline. Usually when faced with hurdles, I try my hardest to avoid having to jump over them and will do a 180 in order to keep my peace. Surprisingly this year I kept going with dirt and blood covered knees even though I kept hitting the hurdles. So maybe this year was the foundation training necessary for growth the new year? I’ve found I’ve been far more receptive to breaking down bad habits to their simplest form, analysing my behaviours, listening to well meaning advice and critiques, forcing myself to sit through discomfort for the sake of gaining peace and much more. Like a blank canvas, it feels like I was stripped to my bare bones, bleached and left to reform under the heat of a restorative sun. So now we work on adding flesh to these tired bones. Another quiet year ahead, but maybe this one will consist less of washing dirt from my wounds and more leaning into shaping the clay I’ve been sitting with all this time. I’m not aiming for Michelangelo’s David, but I just want to create something, anything.

What I’ve learned this year is that discomfort can either be a catalyst for destruction or a pathway to some of the most life changing growth you will ever experience. One of the most pivotal moments for me was the feeling I had within me after waking up one morning after a rough nights sleep. I had been tossing and turning throughout the night worrying about my performance in my new role and now i was standing in front of my bathroom mirror at 6:35am trying to concealer-away the last physical traces of my stress levels. As my train rolled into Shoreditch High Street, I felt like a different woman. On my journey in I had made the choice to let this perceived discomfort by way of steep learning curves be the stretching of the wine skins I needed. It wasn’t easy, I found myself cringing when I made mistakes or didn’t understand something, but I kept reminding myself that 1) If I was so terrible at my job I’d have been fired and 2) The more settled I become, the more I’ll learn which will allow me to become more confident within my role. And so I stopped taking critiques of my work as a personal attack and began to treat them as something truly necessary for improvement. Learning how to – emphasis on learning, to shelve my emotions is key. Pushing past the temporal emotive responses and working through the deeper meaning.

Learning to lean into the quiet seasons this year has been hard. Probably one of the harder challenges that I’m still trying to work on. I thought living alone would have me in my Carrie Bradshaw era but instead I found that I started to lean inwards with the passing of each month, and by December when I looked at my inbound and outbound call list from the last few months, I saw only the names of my parents and my sisters. Somehow, without trying to, I had fallen away from quite a lot of the world. It became too easy to say no to meeting up, too easy to just stay at home and in bed – quiet, cosy, safety. It became too easy to start to see doing anything other than going to work and coming home as tiring. It became too easy to see that I would have to fight off this new brand of depression that living alone had presented me with. In a way, buying my place and ‘settling down’ was all I ever wanted, but deep in the darkest pockets of my mind was a niggling thought growing larger  and larger day by day. It felt like this was the large black bow signalling the end of my life as it were. This would be ‘it‘- Just me, myself and I, and the thought terrified me. I’ve always swung between accepting my fate in life and trying to follow the stoic path, or blindly pushing forwards with faith and hope. I’m still not sure which path I should be following, perhaps a mixture of both. In any case, I’m working on making the most of my alone time, trying to slot in pockets of ‘doing stuff’ in between the long stretches of silence. I’m hoping to get the majority of my DIY kitchen renovation done before the beginning of spring, with the bedroom to follow and the bathroom to be done before the end of Autumn. I’m also hoping to lose some of the social anxiety that has crept in as a result of spending a little too much time alone. To tackle this I’ve been trying out Bumble BFF which has been so good!

So, whilst 2022 was what I can only describe as a reclusive, and in parts a regenerative year, I’m hoping with discipline, 2023 can be… restorative.

Happy New Year friends. May this be your best year yet.