2022 in Retrospect
Do you choose a word of the year? What’s yours?
Hello, hello, you lovely brains! I hope the new year is treating you well. I am no doubt not the only one who is glad 2022 is in the record books.
If you take an honest look back at the year, what were the good, the bad, and the beautiful parts? Have you written them down? If you have an annual reflection practice or ritual, what does that look like? Send along your inspiration! I’d love to celebrate/grieve/relive the last year with you.
As I look forward to what I declare 2023 to be, I want to understand better what 2022 was. So here is my 2022 retrospective.
2022: The Good, the Bad, the Beautiful
Looking back, 2022 was a year of progress and upheaval. We renovated our house—a massively stressful dance that brought with it a lot of mask-wearing in the house, plastic barriers, HEPA filters strategically placed in high-traffic areas, open windows and fans, and lot of anxiety about catching COVID.
The result? I am no longer using the bathroom I readied myself for in high school. The room is transformed. Basic square white tiles on the floor are now wide slate-colored slabs. A gleaming curlicued relief tile replaced the tiny tan plastic cube that was my shower. The footprint of the room is the same—small, but infinitely more adult and definitely less 90s. Instead of treading the much-loathed purple-flecked carpet that smelled faintly of the last homeowners’ cat, my feet now squidge across a plush, comforting cream carpet. Lying on the floor with my feet up the wall is a pleasure, and I feel much more at rest.
I spent a lot of 2022 not feeling well, then beginning to feel better, and then not being able to maintain that feeling as the world got colder and less bright. After my Piper concussion in May, I began to center my health more and more. I learned a great deal about myself and the way my body needs to be nurtured, and I began to really get to the bottom of some stuff that has plagued me for a long time. I felt frustration that there was no easy fix. I felt grief that I may be living with the limitations I found for the rest of my life, even if I learn how to manage them in better ways.
I watched a lot of TikToks to cope. Summary: lots of millennial and cat content.
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I participated in my first art show since college, this time as a creator of two pieces, one of which was acquired by a university. If I’d known that was going to happen, I would have charged a lot more for my piece. Note to self: Don’t undersell yourself next time! The exhibit made the front page of the Salt Lake Tribune and The Daily Herald. I printed and sold my art and rediscovered how much I enjoy scrapbooking, messing around with paints, and stickers. I coedited two issues of Young Ravens Literary Review.
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I learned that I need to spend about half an hour outside grounding each day, and I was able to spend more time outside than I have in years. Christiana and Piper and I went on a lot of walks and outings to the park.
I learned that I need sunlight first thing in the morning in order to maintain a good circadian rhythm. I now have a morning routine I love—getting up and sitting on my front porch smothered in a fuzzy blanket scribbling in a notebook or listening to music. I learned that I must prioritize my sleep, my longtime wrestle, and I made some good progress, getting more sleep than I have in years.
2022 also brought me to neurofeedback, which I’ve looked into for the past six years. Neurofeedback has helped me read books, and I finished 23 books (compared with 10 books in 2021, that’s an enormous improvement), and I gave myself the goal of completing 50 books this year. I participated in two book groups and actually managed to read some of the works beforehand.
And, gosh, my book came out! That feels like it was two years ago. Happy first birthday, The Brain’s Lectionary! Some of my art from the book even appeared in a magazine.
You all said such kind things about the book, bought it as a gift (thank you, Laura and Ash!), and hosted one book club about it (thank you, Camille!). It was fun to see it pop up on people’s end-of-the-year reading lists (thank you, Rachel and Megan!). I’m grateful for each review and note. I was part of several readings, taught a workshop, and led my first solo creative writing class about writing the body. I was on my friend Tracy’s beautiful podcast. I appreciated every invitation to talk more about my story, even though it required recovery afterward.
I started to regain more of my memory (hallelujah! hallelujah!) and struggled with my memory. I processed trauma and spent a good amount of time in the upside down. I felt alienated from God and also found myself drawing closer to God. I found a system of task organization that actually helps me wrangle my executive dysfunction to check items off my to-do list, and then I didn’t use it for a month. I said goodbye to Twitter; I learned about singing bowls, light therapy, book binding, ASMR, and primal tones meditation. I listened to great podcasts and watched a ton of White Collar.
Being able to consider all the different facets of the year in this way is helping me a lot (I had a different essay that I thought I’d write when I sat down to do this, but apparently I needed to get through this first!). If I hadn’t taken a moment to reflect on the year, I would have written the whole thing off as a wash based on negative perceptions of myself, the grind of seeing small improvements with continued effort (spoiler alert: feels demoralizing), and the day-in-day-out rollercoaster of dealing with a body and brain that aren’t working the ways I need them to.
In sum, I am proud of the way I put myself out there more for opportunities that were a stretch in some ways but that I grew to meet. I’m proud that I am allowing myself to see and feel my successes, even if they don’t look like I wish they did. I started taking pressure off myself for issues that aren’t in my control. Whatever 2022 looked like for you, you deserve to celebrate all the important and all the small things you did, all the ways you found to survive.
2023 Hopes: Rivers
I don’t always choose a word of the year, but thanks to my friend Luan’s guidance, I brainstormed one that encapsulates how I want to feel in 2023:
River.
I want 2023 to be expressive, relaxed, flowing, and adaptable. I want to ride the rapids and float in the still pools. I want to be open to change, flux, erosion, slow movement, unanticipated otters, and whitewaters. I want to meet them all with equanimity and less turbulence.
Oftentimes days just feel “bad,” but lately I have been trying to experience more nuance within the day. I try to tune into the ebbs and flows of good and bad. Even if I’m having an overall “bad day,” there are still parts that are less agonizing than others. And even “good days” have rivulets and crevices of challenge that encourage me to bring myself back into balance.
Like a Victorian lady receiving doctor’s orders to remove to the seaside for her health, I will be spending as much time as possible at bodies of water. I will continue my nascent practice of Jin Shin Jyutsu flows, try to fine-tune listening to the subtle energy streams of my body, and do my best to receive the quietly pulsing messages she has for me.
I will be going to hear First Aid Kit perform live. I will continue to work on rewiring my brain, calming my nervous system, and moving my body—I anticipate many walks to come. I will try to develop a better daily writing practice, and I would like to publish more. I want to pursue supported routines that allow me to more consistently do work and create a good cognitive rhythm. Putting this down here as an ongoing note to self.
Like a freshwater pearl mussel, I will gather sediment for what I hope will be some fun new projects. I want to start writing poetry more seriously, and I’m enrolled in a course for inspiration. I hope to be able to finish developing the creative brain break planner I am designing and to finish redesigning Kindly Light Prayer Journal to help anyone who wants an easy daily prayer template to draw closer to the divine.
I feel like I might be tempting fate a little by saying that I am ready for what this year has to bring me. But I’m ready. I’m excited.
A poem for the new year
Then the Rain
By Jorie Graham, London Review of Books
after years of virga, after
much almost
& much never again, after
coalescing in dry
lightning & downdrafts & fire,
after taking an alternate
path thru
history & bypassing
us, after the trees,
after the gardens,
after the hard seeds
pushed in as deep as
possible & kept alive on dew,
after the ruts
which it had once cut
filled in with
dust & moulds – & pods
that cannot sprout –
not even the birds
came – & old roads
began to reappear –
after the animals,
after the smallest creatures
in their tunnels & under
their rocks,
after it all went, then,
one day,
out of in-
terference & dis-
continuity, out of in-
congruity,
out of collision
somewhere high above our
burnt lands, out of
chemistry, unknowable
no matter how
quantifiable,
out of the touching of one atom by an
other, out of the
accident of
touch, the rain
came.
We thought it was
more wind. Something tapped
the peeling roof.
We knew it was not
heat ticking, our secret imaginary
birds. We knew it by the smell which filled
the air re-
minding us, what did it
remind us of, that smell,
as if the air turned green,
as if the air were the deep in-
side of the earth
we can never reach
where it reaches out to
those constellations we have not
discovered, not named, & now
never will,
and which are not dead, no –
And it brought memory. But of
what. So long. Where are you my
tenses. The crowns
rattled again, harder, & again we thought
wind. I pressed
the rusted screen door
& stepped out. Was I afraid? Where it hit
dust whirled up
in miles of refusals – stringy, flaring,
as if flames could be dust,
faster with each landing, till it
tamed them & they
lay down again as earth,
and were still,
and took it in
everywhere,
& when I sat on the low wall
it slid over my features,
& my neck held runnels,
as if I were a small book
being carefully perused for
faults, ridges, lapses of
time in my thought –
because I could not recall it –
my skin could not,
my hands could not,
I look at them now
with my eyes full of rain,
and they say hold us up,
you are not dying
yet, we are
alive in the death
of this iteration of
earth, there will be another
in which no creatures like us
walk on this
plateau of years & minutes & grasses &
roads, a place where
no memory can form, no memory of
anything, not again, but for now
the windowpanes shake as the
harder rain hits
and the stiff grasses bend over &
the thing which had been a meadow once
releases a steam,
& if you listen you can hear
a faint pulse in it,
a mirage, a release of seeds into the air
where wind insists, & my heavy
hands which rise now, palms up, shining,
say to me,
touch, touch it all,
start with your face,
put your face in us.