The Sunday Letter, Part One
Happy New Year, friends. The day is both bright and grey and the Dog of Doom is prowling the backyard of this house out in the country, getting up-to-date on all of the creatures that prowled around us last night as the old year swept out and the new one came in.
For the last few years—maybe eight or so?—I’ve had a regular reflection practice in the days leading up to January 1. Time spent reflecting on the year that was and readying my hopes and wishes for the year that will be. I began it during a dark time, when I was at my most depressed, and found comfort in how it illuminated the joys of a year gone before when I had completely forgotten them. How the act of sitting down and truly thinking through each month and what it brought gave me memories of love and joy that I had, in the moment, overlooked. As the years went on it became a practice that I preferred over all other New Year’s activities. No parties for Amanda—just a notebook and some quiet, a few reverent hours before tipping the clock into the new and fresh.
After Jess died in 2019 I abandoned the practice. I would think about the year, and turn it over in my head, but I didn’t write anything down. It seemed pointless, somehow—this act of setting intentions in the face of a world that could and often would do whatever it wanted with you. Wreak havoc with your plans. Give you mountains of grief in response to an earnest wish and search for joy. What was the point of setting intentions in the face of that?
I knew that reflecting was still important. I knew, even then, that the grief and the unpredictable nature of the world was trying to teach me something, but the act of sitting with all of it and acting on that sitting still felt like too much.
And then, unexpectedly, I found myself set on a new path. In October of 2021 the world shifted on its axis again—a smaller shift this time, but one that nonetheless had the same kind of seismic impact that that dark day in 2019 did. And for the better part of the last year or so I have been living a different kind of life. One where the changes have been so small and quiet you could say that nothing has changed for me at all. And yet one where those small and quiet changes have been so MANY that I feel like an entirely different person, to the point where I look at the Amanda who existed prior to October 2021 and feel like she’s in a galaxy light-years away. Like I have traveled so far away from her and her anxieties that the distance is too large to comprehend.
2022 was a quiet, glorious, wonderful year for me. It was also a year that held a great deal of grief and sadness. It was a year where I learned to sit with all of those things—the grief and the glory and the quiet wonder in the smallest of things.
In the months after Jess died I remember physically turning away from the anxiety and the pain of her death at times. Insofar as one can actually turn away from death, I tried my best to do so. No, no, no, I could feel myself thinking. I can’t think about this, I can’t sit with this. It is too big. I am not going to do it. I grieved her and I let myself feel the pain of her loss and I swam in those waters as much as I could. But I was also always looking for that thing to lift me out. I was launching a second book and then a third—those books, I knew, would bring me fame and fortune and something to hold onto now that Jess was gone. I knew it was a poor substitute but still I felt as though this substitute would give me some kind of relief. Somehow everything would be worth it even though I knew that nothing would ever be worth it. Somehow I kept on reaching.
When I released The Centaur’s Wife in February of 2021, the cracks in this shoddy foundation of hope started to appear. The book did well enough, but even it ended up in The Book Graveyard eventually. And in the months after its release, leading into the summer, I started to understand that there was no escape from grieving. It was something I’d understood on an intellectual level but had yet to feel in my bones.
I’ve struggled to find words for that feeling, that toe-deep and knee-deep-in-muck feeling of interacting with the world on the level of the body. That feeling where you know that the lessons are reworking you on a cellular level but you can’t express or explain it. This is what has been happening to me through all of 2022. The change has been monumental and also incremental at the same time. The lessons have been so many, and also so few! And the biggest lesson and understanding of them all has been this: sitting with the pain and the glory and the grief and the joy is not only possible, but easy.
I just sit. That is all. That is it. I sit, and I breathe, and when my thoughts go off in wild directions I remind myself that this is what we do, we human beings. We think. Our minds carry us to wonderful and terrible places and this is an unimaginable gift and also an unimaginable sorrow, all of it made possible by this one truth: nothing lasts forever. Not love, not joy, not grief or pain or sorrow. The most terrible feelings I have had over the last three years since Jess’s death, and my grief in the wake of my grandmother’s death in December of this past year—even those most terrible of moments have eventually come to an end and been replaced by something softer. And the joys? Same goes for them. The joys ebb and flow and make way for sadness and anxiety and those things eventually ebb and flow as well. In my darkest moments, sitting with that understanding has been the greatest gift of 2022. It is terrible now, but it will not be terrible forever. You will feel differently—ten minutes from now, an hour, maybe a few days. But you will feel differently. Everything changes. Nothing stays the same.
In the days leading up to 2023, I found myself returning to that practice of “thinking out” the year. But I was also hesitant to do it, precisely because 2022 has been so revolutionary without any of the careful intentions put in place at its outset. I entered 2022 thinking that I just wanted to be mindful of the world and my place in it. That was it. I feel like that’s a good thing to carry forward into this new year as well. If 2023 holds the same quiet joys and small blessed moments of mindfulness as 2022, I’ll consider that a tremendous success.
But I also wanted to see if I could stretch that mindfulness a little—speak intentions into place for the year and then let the year, and life, have its way with me. Is there a way to be both active and passive in your own life in all the best of ways? That’s what I want for 2023. And so I wrote out some intentions and goals for the year, and now I’m going to let them all go. I’m not going to circle back to them continually and mark my progress. I’m not going to beat myself up about falling “short” of my reading goal (what does that even mean?) or about not exercising the exact amount of days per week I set out to do on January 1. None of it matters. And yet all of it matters at the same time. In 2023, I want to be open to letting life happen to me. I want to be an active participant in surrendering to the universe and all of its lessons. I want to sit each day and marvel at how it is indeed possible to sit with the most impossible, heavy, hard feelings and still survive it, still be thankful for it, and in fact understand—in that ineffable, in-your-bones, remaking-your-molecules kind of way—that sitting and breathing with one’s feelings is magic of the highest order.
So here’s to a New Year, and ordinary magic everywhere you look. I hope 2023 holds all of this for you and then some, and that your darkest moments hold all of the blessings that you need.