stuff i didn't mean to learn this year

Photo by Yiran Yang on Unsplash

There are years when nothing happens and then there are years like this. Years that that leave you thinking, Who the hell even am I?

No clue, but it’s not the woman I was this time last year.

I laid in bed this morning trying and failing to remember what I was did last new year’s eve, which means I probably hid in my shed with the blinds down, feverishly writing and listening to LCD Sound System on a frantic loop. There are worse ways to muddle through the foothills of a crisis. At least I got a book out of it.

This year has tested me like a jet-lagged toddler in a Michelin-starred restaurant. It’s been an emotional spin cycle and a professional heavyweight title championship fight with no one but myself. I’ve been battered on the ropes and now I’m staggering into 2023 bathed in sweat with a fat-lipped Jack-o-lantern smile.

Here is the biggest, most important thing I’ve learned: You can’t win a fight.

And the rest:

1. When your life pops like a struck windscreen and shatters into a zillion pieces causing you to spin out, jump the guard rail then explode into a fiery, twisted ditch-wreck there will be people who stand and gawp for a moment then shuffle away in silence as if accidents are contagious. There will also be people who run toward you, arms spread wide, then take the opportunity to administer a good hard steel-toed hoofing for reasons you can’t comprehend. At first this will shock you but actually, on careful reflection, it won’t.

2. For every one of the gawping/hoofing people there will be three who devastate you with kindness. Some of these people you will know to the bone and others will be total strangers. They will be men and women, young and old, rich and poor, complicated and simple. Their politics won’t matter. Almost without exception they will share a single common trait: They will understand what it’s like to fall apart. If it hasn’t happened to them it will have happened to someone close to them. These people will become your forever people. They will change you for the better.

3. Talking on the phone is highly underrated.

4. There will be times in your life when you feel old and exhausted, when the pleasures of the body will diminish in the rearview mirror. Magic and adventure will seem frivolous pastimes of your misspent youth. When this happens you will find yourself thinking things like, ‘Thank god that part of my life is over,’ and ‘I could never wear that,’ and ‘Christ I hate this fucking city.’ You will realise the hours you used to spend idly looking up high school exes on Facebook is now spent doing mortgage valuations and price comparisons on real estate sites. You will believe with absolute certainty this this state of affairs will never change. But it can. Then it will. This will be one of the great revelations of your life.

5. If you don’t paint every five or six years your house will look like shit and you will feel vaguely ashamed of it no matter how much you tidy and reorganise.

6. You were right to have children.

7. Your belief that people shouldn't kiss on street corners and the whole world is a bin fire is mostly to do with lack of sleep and a good book.

8. Because you grew up without the internet you will never be capable of truly believing the things that happen there are important or real. This doesn’t make you better or smarter than anyone else. It’s a handicap.

9. Here’s the option you forgot: Do nothing.