Dear 2024,
Tick, tock, tick, tock. Time is running down on you and I am singing: goodbye goodbye and good riddance. What was it Mark Zuckerberg said about things that move fast and break other things? That was you blasting through my life this year, all speed, muscle and wicked surprise. Yes, 2025 will bring a reset, though likely not without wreaking even more havoc than you did. A new pandemic’s coming, says Bill Gates. So is another ‘08-style economic crash, says Warren Buffett. And God help any American not born a straight, white male Christian with regime-approved political and birthplace credentials. Out of the frying pan, into the fire.
It was non-stop with you even before you became official last January first. First it was that post-Christmas 2023 call about the abnormal test result that would put my life on hold for the next eight months. A day or two later it was word that the contract you thought would continue uninterrupted until March but that had initially been promised as indefinite hadn’t been signed. Approval would come and the contract would be extended—grudgingly—to March. If 2023 was the warning, you were the fulfillment. By the roll of dice I couldn’t see, you took me past everything certain then set me down on the knife’s edge of my own mortality. Now dance, you said. Dance.
You were a sly one masquerading first as a drama queen rather than the unforgiving agent of chaos. It took time to see your real face. And when I did, nothing about you or what you sent my way was ever minor, simple or remotely laughable. Drama queens are just lonely hysterics in search of attention; you were an escapee from an institution for the criminally insane. I prefer my dramas singular and straightforward, like a vodka on the rocks with a splash of grapefruit. But you complicated everything, cramming drama after drama down my throat, sometimes all at once.
Thief and plunderer, you robbed me of time and vitality. What remained never seemed to balance out. When I had one, I nothing left of the other. Everything needed new compromises and a willingness to explore new avenues to accomplish a fraction of what I’d intended. But even that seemed to lead to something I never expected: electronic communion with kin-spirit writers who accepted—even celebrated—who I was and the losses I’d survived.
Hardship wasn’t the way I hoped I’d find them; maybe that’s beside the point. Everyone I met had a story much like mine. If it wasn’t just about grief or brokenness, it was about both these things and more. We cared enough to talk to each other. We cared enough to listen and to worry when one among us wasn’t present to speak their art. Because the one unspoken thing we all knew was this: that—as novelist Alice Walker once said about the act of writing—the life we save is our own.
Fortunately, I can speak in past tense about you because your mayhem has passed and I can breathe again. Now comes the cleanup: from the paperwork blizzard that covered every inch of desk space in my house; from the endless storm of breakages, mishaps and malfunctions. Things are better now and I am fixing things or replacing them. But in a strange, dark decade that began with a pandemic no one expected, stability is fragile. I can just look beyond the life I know to the Middle East, Ukraine, South Korea, France. Pick a place, anyplace and it’s crisis, crisis, crisis.
Yet somehow I can still feel a wary gratitude: not necessarily to you, but more to things I cannot see and do not understand. For all your mess and mishigas, so much more could have gone wrong. Like not finding decent health insurance and the right team of doctors to treat a medical problem no one in my family had ever had. Or being forced to raid every last financial resource and go into the kind of debt from which no recovery is possible. Or not landing the job I needed in just the nick of time.
Good things—like my insurance and the job that came only after hundreds of rejections—didn’t just come my way because you felt like giving them to me. I had to push past crippling fear and fight. Hard and sometimes to exhaustion. This may be another of your mercies, especially as I look ahead—with not a few misgivings—to 2025. I have never taken anything for granted. But neither have I been pressed to battle for what I had. My lesson from you? Appreciating what’s been earned is one thing. Defending it with courage I may not feel is another.
Someday I may see past what you brought enough to offer the thanks I cannot give you now. The best I can do is say this: you broke me and in the breaking, allowed me to remake myself. Maybe that acknowledgement, along with a willingness to move forward into the unknown, is all that’s really needed.