Closing the books on 2024.

As I lay awake in bed this morning at around 4 a.m., wondering whether it was worth the bother of trying to go back to sleep, I came to the sudden realization that I’m in a period of a lot of flux right now. I’ve been aware of some of it, to some degree, but I hadn’t really noticed that nearly everything in my life is in a moment of big change. No wonder I’ve felt so unsettled.

Family & Home

This is the biggest and most obvious category. So big, in fact, that I’m going to have to break it down into parts.

House

We’re living in Portland full-time now, which is wonderful. Every morning when I take the dog out for his first pee of the day, I look around my neighborhood and feel giddy that I get to live here. I love everything about it.

But we still have our old house, for a few more months at least; and we have a whole house’s-worth of stuff to get rid of. We’re currently in California, spending our last family Christmas in our old family home, after which we’ll embark on the task of dividing up all the possessions still in this house and sending them off to seek their fortunes in the world.

I thought I’d feel more sad, or at least nostalgic, but as much as I love this house—we designed it tandem with our architect, to be exactly what we needed it to be—it doesn’t feel like home anymore. I’m ready to move on to the next stage of my life, and I’m ready to let the house move on to its next stage, too.

And given how much happier I am in Portland, it’s made me wonder—did I ever really like living here? Sure, I loved my house; but I think I merely tolerated everything else about Silicon Valley. For more than twenty years. I always knew that I didn’t feel like I belonged, that I didn’t feel like myself here, that the people were (frequently) annoying and it was too fucking hot for too much of the year. But I don’t think I realized till now how much I didn’t like it. Other than a couple of good friends, there’s nothing about this place that I miss. (Okay, maybe the avocados.)

But that’s okay. Living in a place you don’t like that much isn’t the end of the world. There were good reasons to be here, and I have good memories of raising my kids here, and I’m on the other side of it now. I feel very lucky and very happy to get to spend the next phase in a place that feels so much more comfortable to me.

Kids

Our youngest child started college this year, and though he’s also in Portland, he’s living in the dorms and we’re pretending that we’re not in the same city, so that he can have his independence. (We did get to go watch him perform in a fire spinning show, though, so that was cool.) Our daughter came and stayed with us for a couple of months right at the same time that our son moved out, so we had a little bonus time with a kid in the house, but now she’s back in Cleveland.

I’m not one of those people who laments the empty nest. I’m proud of the adults my kids have grown into, and I’m glad that they’re on their own, even though it’s a struggle for them sometimes. Plus, I spent the last few years preparing for this moment, making sure I knew what I was going to do when they were gone—or, more accurately, who I was going to be.

Like living in Portland, I’m enjoying my new status as “person who only has to worry about herself all day.” When the kids are around, there’s always part of me wondering what they’re up to, if they’re staying up too late, if they’ve eaten, if they’re feeling okay. I hate that part of me, I know it’s not doing any of us any good, but I’ve never managed to silence it. So living without that voice has been peaceful.

It’s a project, though, to learn how to orient your life around a new thing, after twenty years of orienting it around the same thing. I’m not even sure what I’m orienting myself around now. My writing, I guess, with limited success. But also maybe I’m not orienting myself at all anymore, and experimenting with letting myself move through my days without a lot of navigation. More on that later.

Parents

At exactly the same time we were moving to Portland, my parents were also moving, from their house in Vancouver (Washington) to a retirement community in Portland. This was a very exciting move for all of us—they’re less than ten minutes away from me now, instead of 40 (or an hour and a half if it’s rush hour, which is the entirety of any weekday afternoon and evening). The community is amazing and I definitely plan to live there myself someday. They’re surrounded by interesting people and have an array of social events and outings they can take part in.

But—again—good change is still change. We hired someone to help them downsize their belongings, pack what they wanted to keep, and get rid of everything else. It was very expensive, but worth every penny in the fights and exhaustion it prevented. My mom loves to keep things, and I love to get rid of things, and it would have been a nightmare to try to compromise on every single possession they own.

Maybe the hardest part, though, has been being an only child through this process. This should have been something I did with my sister. She should be here so that we can look at each other and laugh every time we unpack another useless thing our mom decided she had to keep. We made the decision on where and when my parents would move shortly before my sister died, and the plan was for my sister and her kids to move into my parents’ house. They’d been living in a comfortable but cramped rental house for years, and the move would have doubled their living space. She was really looking forward to it.

And then she died, and that future is gone. I comfort myself by imagining there is a universe in which she’s alive and they’re all living their best lives in that house. Some other version of me gets to enjoy that universe, and I hope she’s happy, too.

Writing

Phew, we’re only one category down and there are a lot more to go.

This fall, I got a literary agent. I’ve been meaning to write a post about it, but I’m always nervous about even saying “I have an agent” because I’m afraid I’ll jinx it and she’ll decide to drop me for some reason. But, yes—with an assist from my writing teacher, the first agent I queried was the only agent I need to query (I still sent a couple queries out to other agents, because rejection is a rite of passage, and I got one rejection and everyone else ignored me, so yay! I’m a real author now).

I’m very excited about my agent, because when she read my book and gave me feedback, everything she said was something I’d already thought myself. She saw all the same problems with the book that I did, and she had ideas on how to fix them, which is what I needed. Now I’m going through her edits and requests, ironing out wrinkles until we have a version of the book that’s ready for submission. Frequently I come across one of her comments in the margins and laugh to myself, because she caught me out. The note she left is exactly the thing that my nagging inner voice was saying, at the moment that I wrote whatever the note is about, that I chose at the time to ignore.

This round of revision is perhaps the hardest one yet—even harder than the massive overhaul that turns a first draft into something resembling the final story. Or maybe it just feels harder because of everything else that’s going on.

Health

I started a new medication recently that frequently makes me queasy, or sick in other ways. I think the results of the medication are worth it, but the jury’s still out. I keep hoping maybe my body will adjust and the side effects will go away, but it’s been three months. Am I willing to feel like this for the rest of my life, in order to have the benefits of the medicine (which are life-enhancing, but not necessary)? Only time will tell, I guess.

Having my appetite impacted by nausea, etc, has made it really hard to eat healthily. I’m not interested in food, so I’m not interested in preparing food, and I’m only willing to eat something if it’s going to taste really good and I don’t have to make it, which means I’ve been eating too much takeout and comfort food, and not enough protein or fiber. That negatively impacts my fatigue, pain levels, and general well-being.

I think this is surmountable, if I put some time into planning around it. But I haven’t done that yet.

Making

Earlier this year, I decided that I would open an Etsy shop to sell crochet items. I didn’t want to crochet in order to sell, but I needed a way to get rid of the things that I wanted to make but didn’t want to wear. I make things because I enjoy the process of making them, not because I necessarily want the finished product. So I’d sell the things, and maybe make back my material costs, or at least and supplement my yarn budget.

Then I got my literary agent and realized that oh, writing needs to be my real job now. Plus I kept hearing about how Etsy is a terrible place to sell now, and the whole thing started to look like way more trouble than it was worth.

So I scrapped that plan, but that meant I had all these scarves and things to get rid of. I let my friends take what the wanted, and donated the rest. Then I went through all my works-in-progress and planned projects, and decided what I really wanted to make and what I didn’t, and got rid of about three quarters of my yarn stash. I had to shut down the Etsy storefront I’d created, and close the bank account I’d set up (which actually I still need to do).

I hate to be the person who starts a project, all excited, and then doesn’t follow through. It’s embarrassing. I pride myself on being a pragmatic person. The things I plan to do make sense; they’re reasonable, they’re attainable. Giving up on something makes me feel like I wasn’t being pragmatic when I initially decided to do it. I hate that!

But in this case, the pragmatic thing to do—given that the situation had shifted—was to change course, and it was a relief once I decided to let it go.

Life Management

As I think I’ve probably mentioned, I’ve been bullet journaling for years. I’ve always been a minimalist bujo-er, because I don’t draw, and the purpose of my journal was to organize my time and keep me from forgetting things. For years it was my lifeline in a world where I felt constantly overwhelmed, and morally at fault for being overwhelmed.

Then I got adequately medicated for my anxiety, and I no longer felt the pressing need to achieve maximum productivity every single day to prove that I deserved to live. I started using my journal less; but I also started forgetting things, which is inconvenient and annoying (though no longer the life-or-death situation I used to imagine it was).

I’ve been investigating my relationship to my journal, trying to figure out how to make it work with this new version of my brain, and that has involved getting a little more creative with it. I still don’t draw, but I use stamps and stickers. I got into watching bujo content on YouTube (Jashii Corrin is my favorite) and started to explore other things I could use a journal for than just managing my to-dos. Managing my sewing and crochet projects? Keeping track of my reading? All the things that most bullet journalers have been doing the whole time, with their decorative spreads tracking every aspect of their lives.

But I began to have a sneaking feeling that I don’t want to track every aspect of my life. I’ve been monitoring myself so closely for so long, because I was afraid that making a single mistake would result in the world discovering that I’m actually a terrible person. I had to maintain my facade of competent person who has her shit together at all costs. And I’ve come to resent it.

Maybe I don’t need to improve? Maybe I’m actually doing fine?

I don’t want to give up my journal completely, though. It does save me a lot of stress, because I don’t have to try to remember everything I’m supposed to do if it’s written down. It gives me a place to brainstorm projects, and record the names of patterns I want to sew. But the more I thought about it, the less I felt like a paper journal was really the most logical place to do that. Wouldn’t digital be better, where it would carry on year after year and be searchable and shareable, etc etc etc?

I’ve been using Evernote for years, but it doesn’t feel robust enough to replace my bullet journal. So now I’ve gone down the Notion rabbit hole.

Weltschmerz

I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge all the shit that’s going on in the world, and the fact that all of us in the US are now in a period of transition, and that for roughly half of us (at least, half of us that voted) that transition is into something we actively hate and fear. It’s just that I don’t want to talk about it.

Blog

Last and also probably least, I’m in the middle of changing blogging platforms! I’ve done absolutely nothing on it in the last couple of months, so at the time of this writing the blog consists of, like, five Veronica Mars posts, and all the other things I’ve written for it are currently not available on the internet. I refuse to let this be another project I gave up on, so I’m going to start devoting more time to it. First of all, I’m not going to let the fact that I haven’t gotten all my back posts re-posted stop me from writing new posts. Second, I’m going to get all those back posts re-posted, darnit. Someday people might actually seek out what I have to say on the internet! I need to be prepared.

That’s a lot. I thought I’d feel better after writing it all out, but actually I just feel tired. Maybe because I woke up at 4 a.m.

Farewell, 2024. You brought many changes, most of them good, all of them a tad bit draining. Here's to 2025—may the good changes continue, and the bad ones go to hell, and in between changes may I get some rest.