grief: an exercise in letting go (2024 fin!)

*this essay is a series of thoughts. in no particular order. if it is somewhat disjointed and/ incoherent– then you’ve read it right. if it resonates– then perhaps we both have had a hell of a year. hold yourself gently.

I am very sorry to report that those annoying writers are right. Though what I’ve written this year is not extensive, and predominantly unreleased, I sense that the thoughts I’ve thunked are some of my best thoughts yet and that with a little more marinating, the words that will escape my fingertips next year will be the best I’ve seen in a while.

No, this is not an offering of resilience. I don’t believe my tender heart deserves to be relegated to the ranks of “resilient”. I think of it rather as a series of unnecessary moments that ultimately led to necessary action and a very vicious reminder that the life I hold in my hands is entirely my own and that I can do with it what I will.

I am tired and it is hard and this year has been sad and everything I thought I knew and wanted is not what I know and want a few months later. I am older, and not much wiser. I am as optimistic as I am terrified. I am full of hope and full of doubt all at once. I am non committal to how people want to experience me. I am loyal to showing up as my most fulfilled self.

As 2024 comes to a close, I realise I haven’t written as much as I usually do in a year. Though, that figure in my head is not fixed- I don’t count pages or keep word quotas, there is a certain level of “fullness” I feel in my chest when I know I’ve written “enough”. This year, my chest feels pretty light.

If you were to ask me how I would sum up this year, I would tell you it was a necessary exercise in grief and letting go. So many things happened, so many big, sad things happened, and surprisingly, again, I don’t care much for the details. Rather, I care deeply about how I’ve felt– and despite very big, sad, life-shattering things happening, I’m sitting here on the end of it, steadfast.

For someone who experiences emotions in the extreme– most days, I assumed this revelation would absolutely devastate me, but surprisingly, I am completely neutral to it– indifferent, even. I suspect my reaction is heavily influenced by my decision to challenge myself to put into practice that maddening notion that most writers tell us, “most of writing is thinking”.

As the crowd jeers and sneers and throws tomatoes at the year that was 2024 (myself included), I can’t help but falter in my resolution to hate it. Because yeah, you forced me to completely upend the pretty little world that I created and forced me to craft a new one. But yeah, I crafted a new one– and isn’t that magical?

But this really isn’t a reflection of my capacity to write this year, but more so an exercise in unpacking thunked thoughts that have single-handedly changed me in a way that I’ve never been changed before whilst simultaneously bringing back and embedding within me some of my favourite quirks past versions of me possessed. Somehow I am so very different and also very much the same. What’s that one Corinne Bailey Rae lyric?: “The more things seem to change, the more they stay the same?”

I think part of me is tired of starting over. Tired of the multiple iterations of myself that exist in the minds of people who once knew those particular versions of me. I grow at supersonic speed and it’s exhausting. If I struggle to keep up with the current version of me, then how can I expect that others will maintain reliable narrations of their memories of me? And then, just like that, on a warm spring day, I just decided I don’t care.

It’s beyond turning lemons into lemonade at this point, you know? I had fertile soil that became barren all of a sudden and I nurtured it and planted my lemon trees and my, have they grown and boy, do they bear fruit.