A Brief Word of Gratitude

Thank you for obliging me

I started a couple of different posts for this week, but none of them felt right. One was something I decided to save for later because it needed more work than I was willing to put in during this blissfully liminal and lazy period between Christmas morning and New Year’s Eve. I considered, of course, a reflection on the past year. My first ever offering here was last December 31st, and so I wrote a year-in-review, partially as a means to introduce the kind of approach I would take in this space but mainly to download and process all my thoughts about what I had watched, read, listened to, or otherwise experienced over the course of those previous twelve months. Since then, though, I have spent every week writing about what I was reading and watching and thinking about, and so that felt like it would be redundant this time around, plus I already summed up the year in newsletters last month. Another option was something of a review of every book/movie/etc. that I had started and/or left unfinished for various reasons this past year, but even that felt like cannibalization - I’ll either get to those things and complete them in time, or I won’t. Either way they are likely to still end up in these pages in some form.

And so I was at something of a loss as to how to unpack this year. It has been a strange one to process. I have enjoyed many personal achievements - I finally got the job that I had been chasing for nearly a decade, I signed my first book contract, I’ve written more in the last twelve months than I have since at least completing my MFA, and maybe even more per capita than I did during the course of earning that degree.

On the health and well-being end of things, I have resumed regular(-ish) exercise and have almost gotten back down to my pre-Covid weight (my own baggage, most assuredly, but I also have middle-aged rising blood pressure numbers to contend with). More importantly, my wife has officially been deemed an oncology graduate, and has been taken off her perp inhibitors and moved to a quarterly screening schedule. A drastic change from a year ago, when we were past chemo but still plagued with the faint and nebulous question of “What if…?”

But this has also been an incredibly difficult year. My family has suffered a crippling loss - my father-in-law passed in March, and my wife has had to navigate the new reality that has been thrust upon her in the wake of that devastation while the world insists that she also resume life as if nothing has changed. She has lost her dad, my son’s have lost their last remaining grandfather, and I have lost the closest thing to a true paternal influence that I have had - even as I lead my own sons into a grim and uncertain next four years during which such guidance will be sorely and deeply missed.

And now we stand politically and societally at the edge of a precarious and irresolute future. I have never been more afraid of what that future might hold - even during COVID lockdowns, the worst I felt was that there was no future. Now we are faced with the potential for something even more debilitating - a future that is openly hostile to ourselves and so many we love, including our children. I fear both the immediate four years and the ensuing world that they may bring about, and which my children will inherit.

I still nevertheless have the warmth and love of the people closest to me even as the world feels like a distinctly colder and more uncaring place than it did a year ago at this time. I have a community. I don’t know if it makes me hopeful - I wonder if hope is actually a detriment in times like these, when what we so desperately need is action even in the face of the possibility that it won’t do any good. We have to be willing to do what we need to do for those we care about, and those who are vulnerable, despite the outcome. Because all we have is the now, and we’ll never get the future we want if we cede the present that we have.

Writing has always been my primary means of processing the world, and figuring out how I feel and what I think about things. And so all I can really say now is thank you to anyone who read even a single word of mine this year. I would like for that process to be one that also invites anyone reading to consider the same, whether they align or agree with or even understand what I feel or am trying to say, or get where I’m even coming from or not.

I’m not going to make any promises about what’s to come - that level of planning goes somewhat against what it is I’m trying to do here. My only promise is consistency.

For better or worse.

Until next year.

-cs