Slán abhaile [Safe Home] 2022
Every year I get to the end of the year and I think “Holy shite what just happened?” I don’t think in the last decade I have had a single year where that has not been the case. Life is curious like that, even though there are ebbs and flows of chaos and the mundane, I wander inevitably into a place where I look to the next year and find myself being consumed with thoughts of the wildness that is living a daily, beautiful life. I love the incoming New Year, I love the end of a precious, Previous Year. Sometimes I find people forget, in the plodding way that days unfold, that all of this is limited and we don’t even know by how much. Every day that has left us is a day that won’t get lived again and as I have been reflecting on the cycle of life, death, seasons, the here and not here; I get all weepy and nostalgic and seek out mindful ways to reason with the memories of sufferings past and mitigate fears for the future that surface.
The beginning of 2022 opened, as it has the past five years for us while living in the Midwest, with my husband and I traveling back from sunny California time with family to our snowy, ice-cold home in the unexpectedly beautiful city of South Bend, Indiana. 2023 is the first time this ritual is different. In fact this next year will mark a shift for us unlike any we have experienced before and considering it has been an incredibly tumultuous life thus far of unbearable strife and great joy it is shocking that I have not yet reconciled with what this incoming time will bring. I am a person, with my dear siblings, who came from a childhood of extreme chaos and trauma. For many years I have been living as a survivor who rode the wave of ‘barely functioning adult but make it a comedic character trait’ as my defense mechanism of choice. Even the first year of my marriage life felt spontaneous and adorably unplanned with a dash of irresponsible recklessness. That all changed when we moved to Indiana. Life was different there, winters harder and longer than any I had known before, people hardier and rougher around the edges, and life felt like more of a struggle that I couldn’t avoid by frivolity. After two years it became home through the usual means; community, meaningful work, food that nourished my soul, a running practice that kept my body warm and taught me how to feel gratitude for a different environment and of course the accumulation of fur children. Our last true winter/spring passed by in a blur. I had a season of wonderfully challenging lessons in art school and I produced some of my favourite pieces. I began to learn how to oil paint, a slow process that made me feel like a real artist. We made the decision to act on our opportunity to move for my husband’s work. Grad school was wrapping up for him and he got a dream offer that meant we would uproot once more our entire lives. Winter has always been about rest, reset and burrowing. Spring of 2022 was one of action, appreciation and embracing every moment as the last in our home which we would not see again.
Summer carries the most anticipation of freedom and warmth. Of bike rides and crisp salty air, ice-cream every day and the tangy taste of sweat during a morning run when the pavement is emanating 80 degree heat at 6.30am. Every part of it is such a vivid collection of sensations and colour. Summer brings us home to the child we once were. Our time in the Midwest shaped me into the person I am and gave me the first place I have called home since leaving Irish shores. Summer 2022 found things in our life moving with hasty pursuit to the reckoning of our leaving at the end of July. Every path I walked this summer, every run, every bike ride and mundane drive to work felt oh so precious and as joyful a season of life as I have ever had. Indiana was the place I grew up into myself. It was where I learned how to take responsibility for my choices and my life. This small rust belt city of South Bend has a huge heart for redemption and redefinition and in all the years of living there I found my way through some hard lessons to live a type of life I was proud of and become the kind of person I enjoyed being. Saying goodbye in the vivacity that is summer was impossible yet we did it. Thinking on it now my heart is as full with fresh grief as it is tender nostalgia. Working in the service industry as I did for so many years there, you inevitably move closer to the heartbeat of a place and come to find yourself occupying a tiny role associated with the joy of good food and sweet memories for many of the locals. I felt like a member of the community especially as part of the indomitable and inimitable team of the restaurant Roselily. Leaving my closest friends, who also happened to be my coworkers, has left a path of deep emotion I can’t walk down in my mind because the love and the pain is too raw and fresh and happiness is bound in that usual way tightly to sadness and being a messy, emotional human means that the contradiction of excitement for a new life and resentment for the loss of my old life are as alive to me as can be. Summer is like that. All gooey reds and yellow golden hour dipped leaves, azure blue sky dotted with puffy clouds and lemony green leaves draped over cracked, onyx asphalt. Which you know won’t last. A deep seated warm joy at the glorious freedom and memories of old while feeling a faded, peculiar sadness that the precious times are gone and won’t come back.
In the deeply nourishing season that is the autumn and winter phase I took a number of social media breaks, certainly feels like everyone is doing that these days. However, maybe it’s finally come to that time of life for me and my age group where we are just getting older and are handing over the reigns of shaping ourselves and the world through one cute filtered photo (or cleverly edited short video) at a time, to THE YOUTHS. Truth be told, I don’t have the mental capacity to do it anymore. I’m not going to speak for the rest of my peers but I know I’m just…disenfranchised. I turned thirty one this year and find myself making more and more decisions about my life that 20-ish year old me would find unrecognisable and frankly, abhorrent. Since our move to this beautiful and challenging place life has gone much the way it does when the autumnal shift comes. Stark and wild, breezy and sudden, everything is different and beginning again is really hard. Much like the colour changing leaves of home there has been lots of lovely things in this season-endless beach days, warm water and sunsets in paradise. Yet, like the cyclical challenge of autumn/winter hibernating there has been so much difficulty and bleakness-loneliness, job failure and frustration, lack of community, high cost of living. It has been a daily task to remind myself to hold space for both truths in my mind, just as we can hold space for every season in a year and every year in a life riding the upswings and plodding through the down. After all life is life and death is death.
As we put 2022 to bed, many people globally are filing it under the umbrella category of ‘the endless dumpster fire 2020’s’. I find that each new year that begins to ripen is so exquisite in it’s as of yet lack of identity, it’s potential and for what it shows us, reveals in us and how we just keep going on as steadfast little humans. Every year I embark on a path to try cultivate a deeper and more delicious understanding of the tenacity of people, and try to honour the power of narrative in cultivating both resilience, and reverence for the tough, dark seasons of one’s life. I look forward to seeing what comes my way over the next twelve months and how the earth tells her story. If it’s a wonder or a worry of a year, well I am immeasurably grateful that I get to live it one way or the other.
Here’s to the New Year my loves!
“ We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again.”