She’s a little late, and hopefully fashionably so:
My end-of-2023 reflections.
I’m actually glad I dragged my feet on this one. For if I had written this post even a week or so before the end of the year, it might have read very differently.
I might have expressed sentiments to the effect of…
this year was not one of my better ones.
One that would have been a forgettable chapter in the proverbial books.
In fact, that it was almost entirely a write-off.
At least, according to the usual metrics I use to judge the quality of my life-in-years. How much I’ve done, completed, achieved. How much novelty and new experiences there were. How shiny my highlight reel were to look (if I were the kind of person to bother making those). How much I shook up my own status quo, kept everyone guessing (including me), really sucked the marrow out of every moment and harboured no regrets.
This time, my whole recount was close to being tainted with considerable regret. Regret that I — far from living every moment in my main character energy along my heroine’s journey — spent most of 2023 on the floor, literally and figuratively, more of a passive witness than active participant as dust settled around my weary form and tears flowed onto the grimy kitchen tiles.
Regret that I felt as though I'd squandered a handful of opportunities out of indecision and relentless fatigue – or they were squandered for me as I chanced moving (perhaps a little too slowly) to act on them.
Regret that, if you were to have glimpsed me at the beginning of 2023 and the end, it would not appear as though much had changed. If anything, it might have looked as though I had less going on.
Not for the first time in my life, I have felt a deep resonance with trees. On the surface, they stand and sway gently in the breeze and might appear unchanged for long periods of time. Below the ground, however, a whole mycelium network is vibrantly alive and perpetually in motion, delivering all kinds of nutrients through the roots and giving life — even where life looks unmoved.
In a way, this has been a year of simply sustaining life; not unlike the mycelium to the trees.
Some — those trapped in war zones, trying to outlast terminal diseases, grieving the loss of loved ones — might consider that notion miraculous. Others (like me) struggle with it, still under the illusion that one should do more than merely survive in order to justify taking up space on this beautiful planet.
I’ve spent most of my years to date busting my butt trying to “earn my keep,” not entirely convinced that my one-in-400-trillion breath and pulse and heartbeat and tangle of veins and neural pathways are enough to fully claim the “being” aspect of my humanness, to expend precious resources that keep my brain and body pumping along.
Continually offering atonement for my right to simply be in this world is exhausting business. (That’s probably what put me on the floor in burnout for the better part of a year.)
As a result, I’ve not much to show externally for the 525,600 minutes of 2023 — probably a little less than a third of those spent asleep, another third listless and lethargic and bawling my eyes out for reasons I still don’t entirely understand; the moon and planets, perhaps, or a mind/body/spirit union that’s thrown in the towel on this arduous work of operating a high-functioning human.
Much less work and fewer meaningful projects this year than in 2022, as most of my client base mysteriously fell away (to my bemused astonishment). Much less travel, as my funds were fast drying up and I lost motivation to move about; in fact, I had a trip to the States planned that I cancelled and subsequently forfeited hundreds of dollars on my flights – an act of sacrilege to my 20-something year-old self.
Out with the old, in with the new — or so I hoped. And yet, despite the adage, nothing discernible rushed to fill in the gaps.
I really seemed to just be…purging. And purging. And purging.
As the lyrics to “Sigourney Weaver” by The Smith Street Band say,
There’s something inside of me trying to get out,
there’s something inside of me trying to get out.
My joints ached for months. I cried uncontrollably like clockwork around every full moon (and sometimes new moons too, for good measure. And most days ending with Y). I poked holes in the fabric of my relationship — which was truly about the only solid netting I had beneath me — because I convinced myself I was fucking it all up and didn’t deserve it, nor desired to take someone else down with me. A couple of months ago, my skin began to break out like a teenager going through puberty, and hasn’t stopped; hell, I never broke out like this even as a teenager.
So much shame and confusion! So much fog! So much stopping and starting and stopping again! So many emotionally-charged inner child and shadow-self rampages running the show, while my prefrontal cortex looked on in exasperation like, What the actual fuck?! and tried to regain control of a vessel that was falling apart like Howl’s Moving Castle.
None of this makes for a sexy end-of-year summary. And, until the sneaky midnight clock strike and swiftly-poured tequila shots of 2024, I thought this was all I had to offer. I considered not writing anything at all and letting my silence sweep my failures under the rug; nobody would suspect a thing.
And yet — while I don’t believe anything much more than a symbolic shift happens when a new year begins — some of my inner fog and confusion cleared up over the last month. My perception seems sharper, and the seeds of wisdom and lessons buried in this latent time are at last beginning to sprout.
Enough egoic bullshit has been purged (I hope) that I am able to refocus my attention onto the hands — literal and metaphorical — that reached down and lifted me up off the floor along the way; undeniable little miracles, like green shoots, that rose through the wreckage.
My end-of-year summary is bittersweet. There were simultaneous collapses and signs of new life from the undergrowth, only noticeable from the humbling level at which I lay. Until 2023, I really was moving at too fast a pace to really pay much attention.
I sat for psychedelic-assisted therapy for the first time back in August. After regurgitating everything I’ve described here, my three guides — truly loving matriarchal figures — gently suggested that none of this was accidental.
As someone with lifelong avoidance patterns and internalised shame around both having feelings and the audacity to express them, I spent 33 years stuffing them down with breathless doing, achieving, striving, proving, running, numbing.
I moved houses and changed countries and left jobs and signed up for overpriced self-development courses and started new projects without finishing them — and then turned to food and substances and unrequited relationships when all the rest didn’t make the ache of inadequacy go away.
Not even the promise of van life and an aligned relationship (two major manifestations I had been chipping away at for years) could get it at. Far from taking me out of my pain, they instead proved to be the catalysts for sinking deeper into it.
Through my guides' counsel, I began to put pieces together:
- My jam-packed self-employed life, while rewarding and exhilarating, kept me in the vortex of almost non-stop workaholism (the pervasive underlying fear being, If I don’t do this, it doesn’t get done) that hijacked my mental bandwidth.
- My client base and financial portals inexplicably dried up, and a small inheritance from my dead grandparents came in at almost exactly the same time – presumably so I could be kept afloat, however feebly, through the looming year of inertia.
- Committing to a relationship – while truly beautiful and supportive and what I have craved for a very long time – nevertheless landed me back in Brisbane (which I have long considered my personal samsara; a place of “aimless drifting, wandering or mundane existence”) in a stable and predictable (read: mundane. Read again: safe) home in the suburbs…where, in absence of all the vitality and happenings and external excitement and distractions of my life-until-now, long-forgotten feelings and shadows now had room to rise. With a vengeance.
- Life can be as euphoric as we dream it and literally drenched in magic, they told me (or words to that effect)…but only in proportion to what you’re willing to surrender to the darkness. Until that point, I was willing to surrender next to nothing — even though I had long been warned of the perils of suffocating my pain in this way.
- Therefore, my only job right now — why almost all previous life as I knew it fell away — is to fully feel my whole human experience as it arises; all its unbearable blows after 33 years of being locked away, until it’s had its way with me…and then integrate better coping mechanisms in the future so I’m better able to receive all the good stuff wanting to come through.
Fuck.
The day after the therapy, I was given a sound piece of advice: “First the Universe sends you feathers. Then bricks. Then a semi-trailer.” Meaning, pay attention to the "feathers" – the gentler signs from the Universe that something ain't right – before you get hit.
Soon after, I heard a more elaborate variation of this sentiment from the mouth of Elizabeth Gilbert, quoting her friend Stephen Mitchell:
“First, they pull the rug out from under your feet, then they pull the floor out from under the rug, then they pull the ground out from under the floor and now you’re getting somewhere in terms of understanding how unpredictable and frightening life on earth can feel.”
Until this weekend just gone (19th-21st January, 2024), I believed that, while I’d reached a new “low” during a whole year in which nothing much happened and I achieved nothing worth bragging about, I hadn’t exactly hit ground level yet. Maybe I’ve avoided the semi-trailer king-hit; that losing the ground out from under the floor.
Then — at last — ayahuasca happened.
(A teaser for what’s to be unpacked in part two of this post — because this one is already becoming a beast on its own. For now, I’ll just say: My wavering trust in that everything is happening for a reason, that renewed capacity for wisdom and joy and hope and appreciation lies just on the other side of the range, that what goes down inevitably rises back up again — like the green shoots through rubble — has been strengthened, beyond a shadow of a doubt.)
So. Going into 2024, I’m giving thanks for the bitter medicine that was forced down my throat. It wasn’t what I wanted, and unquestionably showed me what I needed. There has already been more magic in facing my fear of mundanity than I ever could have imagined.
This year, I’m endeavouring to make like a tree and…not have to assert or prove myself to the landscape in which I by happenstance grow, because I am simply here sustaining life, in itself unfathomably powerful. There is so much more happening when we feel into our roots; if we dare to go deep enough, we tap into the steady, unifying pulse of Nature that will hold and outbeat all our current human incarnations.
For a moment after writing that, I wondered: How can I compare myself to a tree? A tree provides oxygen that literally gives breath to all of Life…and what the hell do I do?
And to that, I calmly respond:
One tree alone does not generate that much oxygen; it provides, as one part of a collective, a service we rarely remember they provide. Their tireless, generous giving of oxygen goes largely unnoticed and begets little validation for doing so, nor asks for it.
Humankind is not unlike a collective of trees, and our actions the metaphorical mycelium network that delivers the goods necessary for life. My existence is but one link in that chain — and as one mere part of this energetic network, I might rarely, or never, be validated with external results; it’s a privilege when that happens. My, and your, being here might be nourishing the collective in ways beyond our capacity to see or measure.
Nature moves at her magnificently slow and intentional pace, and no one life-form within her embrace takes the lead (though our metrics for determining success make it seem that way). She is random; she does not choose inherent winners or losers, and evolution simply happens, one way or another.
The way we can better facilitate this growth is surrender to the pace she provides for us; one far closer to her natural pulse (7.83Hz, in case you were wondering) than our productivity-washed brains and strung-out primitive bodies can comprehend.
Closer to the pace of what I, and many others before and after me, have found in nothingness; in complete absence of answers, without — as Báyò Akómoláfé might put it — “the tyranny of coordinates”*.
So, friends – go gently into this fertile new year of problems and possibilities. Let them absorb you and know there is light just on the other side of the range — and yet more dark cascading into the valleys beyond that. Both are bewildering and beautiful and boundless and necessary.
To wrap up with further words from Báyò:
“You see, something happened on my way — and I lost my coordinates, my map, my directives. Now the whole journey is the destination — and each point, each barren point, just as noble as the final dot.
Every splotch of ink is become to me a fresco of wisdom, a beehive of honey, a lovely place — and every aching voice a heavenly choir. The world is no longer desolate and empty and exclusive; she is now a wispy spirit, whose fingers flirt through the wind — a million roads where only one once lay. And I need not be certain about the road traveled — since I arrived the self-same moment I set out.”
Part two coming soon**. In the meantime, let me know your thoughts. How was 2023 for you? What did you learn? What deep questions are you asking yourself? To what will you surrender control? All questions and comments welcome.
* Extracted from the full phrase in the footer of his website: “Falling might very well be flying — without the tyranny of coordinates.”
** 2025 update: Hmmmmm...still yet to write this, haven't I? Oops.
