Reflections on 2024
Hello, dear readers—we've done it! We've made it to the last day of 2024. While I am not exactly eager to see what's coming in 2025, given the political situation in the US and globally, I am feeling particularly ready to leave this year behind. I am still figuring out how personal I want to get with this blog, but as 2024 comes to a close, I'm feeling like it's a good time to share some of what this wild year has held and what it's taught me.
This year has objectively been one of the hardest years of my life. My parents were in a terrible accident while vacationing in Florida at the end of February that left my Mom with a significant traumatic brain injury, the consequences of which will impact her for the rest of her life. When we finally got my parents back to Minnesota in April, I hurt my knee while walking the dog, and was walking with a heavy-duty knee brace and a cane for a couple of weeks, which meant I couldn't be as hands-on helpful as I wanted to be with getting their house ready for them to come back to. In July, my in-laws had their own medical crises, and my partner leapt in to help them while I held things down at home. In August, my partner and I went on our annual trip to a songwriting camp in Colorado, where we were unexpectedly thrust into caregiving roles for another camp attendee who hadn't fully anticipated what their care needs would be that week; on the way home, we came down with Covid for the first time. In October, I ran headlong into some unexpected triggers in a class I was taking, which resulted in me dropping the class. The outcome of the election in November, while not surprising to me, was still traumatic. And earlier this month, my partner had a major medical scare. On top of all of this, I worked full-time (minus the four weeks following my parents' accident, when I took a medical leave so that I could help them full-time instead), was in school part-time, and started my spiritual direction practicum.
So yes, it was a hard year. And yet, this year I have been the most emotionally regulated I've ever been in my life. Every single one of my coping strategies was stress-tested this year, and while I wouldn't wish that experience on anyone else, I was pleased to find that most of them were, in fact, load-bearing. All of the work I've put into therapy and my own healing over the past decade and beyond has paid off in such tangible ways this year. I managed to maintain straight-A's in school, even during the spring semester when life was incredibly chaotic in the wake of my parents' accident. My spiritual direction practicum has been such a rewarding experience—I have the coolest clients, and the work feels so directly connected to my sense of purpose. The year was also marked by deepening and strengthening of old friendships as well as the forging of new ones—I finally found a local D&D group that feels like a really wonderful fit, with a community that is already supporting each other in big and small ways. I managed to fit in three trips to Chicago to visit dear friends, and made a conscious effort to sustain many of those friendships outside of those trips—one of my favorite developments from this effort is that I've started co-working virtually with one of those friends every week.
My therapist and I were talking a couple of weeks ago about resilience. Both of us have historically had a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to the term—it so often gets tossed around in a toxic positivity space that refuses to acknowledge that the process of getting to the point of being resilient really sucks. But she recently heard someone outline the difference between resilience and grit, and it helped to re-frame resilience for her (and, consequently, for me):
- Grit is toughing it out, white-knuckling it through hard situations, getting through it.
- Resilience is not just getting through things, but processing those things as they happen, and growing through and beyond them.
By that definition, 2024 has been a year of incredible resilience for me. And I am learning to believe that I can trust that resilience—that whatever horrors may be coming down the line in 2025, I am as well-equipped to handle them as I could be. Anything I'm not currently equipped to handle, I can learn. As much as I sometimes want to resist the hard lessons, I never want to stop learning.
If all goes according to plan, I'll be graduating in April. Before then, I have a lot that needs to get done—in addition to practicum hours, I am working on my capstone project for my degree, and I'll be taking an asynchronous class (to make up for the class I had to withdraw from in the fall)...all on top of working 40 hours a week at my regular job. Part of me feels like I should be panicking about this. But most of me knows that this is all within my capacity. It'll be challenging, yes, and I will likely need to re-prioritize things regularly to get it all done. But I can do it.
And I can do it not just because I am resilient, but because I am surrounded by other people who are also resilient, who are doing their own healing work, who I care deeply about and who care deeply about me. I keep reminding myself, and I will remind you now: the antidote to fear is connection.
I wish you all a gentle end to 2024, and may 2025 begin as you wish it to go on.