I used to write an annual review of the year around New Year’s, but I lost the habit during the Zombie Years and haven’t really been able to re-establish it amidst the chaos of my life for the last several years.  I’d like to rekindle that habit, because it was useful.  It’s very easy for me to lose sight of any progress I’ve made in my life because I’m so hypervigilant about what’s negative or wrong in my life.  Taking time at least once a year to objectively review events of the prior months is important so that I don’t lose sight of what’s positive and right.

That is, in fact, one of my major goals for the upcoming year: to stop focusing so much on what’s wrong or bad and instead focus on what’s right and good.  Not to the exclusion of what’s wrong in the manner of toxic positivity, but what I’m doing amounts to extremely toxic negativity that threatens to undermine the progress I really have made in my life.  I still wear this pair of ‘black lenses’ that inverts and discolors the whole world, rendering it into an image of horror that isn’t true.  I come by those ‘black lenses’ honestly, but it’s time to take them off.

So what was I doing at this time last year?  Well, trying to emotionally recover from a very stressful holiday that saw every member of my family save for my husband either actively or passively fighting every attempt I made to make a nice holiday.  In fact, it was so stressful that I wound up having a manic episode a couple of weeks into the New Year, followed quickly by a nasty crash that saw me dealing with my worst bout of suicidal feelings ever in my life.  We still had no furniture and the living room was full of boxes.  It was our first winter in the Pacific Northwest, and while most of me loved the weather, a part of me was genuinely depressed by the dark, wet, and cold.  Underlying all of this were constant money worries and stressors.

I did have a project to distract me, though.  I was helping my husband run a pagan group at our UU church and decided to spearhead a series of New Moon rituals centered around worshipping the local Trees.  I researched the most common Trees to our part of the Pacific Northwest (of which there were magically 13) and created a base ritual that could be customized each month for a new Tree.  It was a fun project that was a way to familiarize myself with a new environment and also get established into a new community.  Our first New Moon ritual was in January, honoring the Western Hemlock.

March saw things look up a bit.  I splurged on some self-care and had my first haircut in probably a decade, which didn’t do much more than take the bottom six inches of crappy hair off, but it did lighten the weight on my hair, allowing some wave and curl to appear  for the first time in my life.  A nice surprise.  My husband also received a raise that month, easing some of our money troubles, and just in time: our nephew moved back into the house in early March, so we had some extra expenses.  March also saw me feeling more settled in our new home than I had felt before, largely as the result of doing a lot of driving around the state in places I had visited before that made me feel less in limbo.

In April, I took the huge step of quitting cigarettes and switching to vaping.  I had smoked cigarettes off-and-on (mostly on) since my early teens, and now that I was in my early 50s, I could really tell the effect on my body, and it bothered me a lot.  I knew from experience with my mental health that quitting was not an option, not unless I wanted to literally lose my mind, so I dusted off a vape that I bought a few years ago, bought some new liquid, and trained myself to vape instead of smoke.  I discovered that I didn’t like vaping when I first tried it because the liquids I was using were too harsh.  After getting some seriously helpful service at a local vape shop, I was off the smokes, saving my health as well as our credit union account.  I had been spending nearly $450 a month on cigarettes: now I spend less than $75 a month on liquid, coils, and pods.  And I can tell my body is happier, though it would be happier still if I weren’t inhaling anything at all, and I know that.  I have to balance my mental health with my physical health, though.

Springtime also saw me revive a gardening habit that had gone by the wayside years earlier, the victim of my mental health and Central Texas heat.  Now that I lived in a much more hospitable gardening environment, I was inspired to try again by the sight of some primroses and violas on sale at the hardware store.  It was like striking a spark to kindling, and suddenly all I could think about was plants.  I wrote about my year of renewed gardening in my post “Rekindling the Gardening Spirit”.

May was important for me, because I finally paid to file a legal name change.  It didn’t cost that much and I only had to wait a couple of weeks for the official judgment.  It was a huge step towards solidifying my new identity and away from the troubled person of my past.  The sense of being in limbo that I’d had since moving away from Texas abated a bit more.  I felt more ‘here’.

June was also a big month for me, as I was the featured artist of the month at the Unitarian Universalist church that we go to.  I was very nervous about the whole thing, opting out of having an artist’s reception because I didn’t feel comfortable with the thought of answering strangers’ questions.  My social skills are…not great.  I heard about people’s positive feedback through my husband, though, and got a couple of compliments via email.  I was glad I did it and have a lot of ideas for how to make another potential showing go more successfully.  My first one was rather amateurish and it showed.

July was a big month for the whole house in both good ways and bad ways.  My husband received a rather large bonus from work which enabled us to order a lot of the furniture we were missing from IKEA and pick up other items from thrift stores.  We finally got a couch (which actually happened back in April), so we could finally watch tv in the living room instead of the bedroom.  We have a rather large book collection that we refused to leave in Texas that needed shelves.  I had always dreamed of matching bookcases and was able to make that dream come true, covering one wall of the living room in 35 years of collected books.

July was another big step out of limbo for me, too, because I finally got my new driver’s license.  This was important for two reasons: the license was in a new state, and it had my new name on it.  I felt very ‘official’, less in limbo, and more distanced from Texas, which was good.

On the bad side in July, we had to spend a very large chunk of our bonus money to save the life and limb, literally, of an extended family pet that our nephew was very fond of.  James the kitten broke his leg in the course of escaping being chased by a pit bull, resulting in a nasty injury that required repairing if we didn’t want to put him down.  I’m glad we had the money to fix his leg and save his life, or that’s what would have happened, but the entire incident was very angering.  I have very strong opinions about the proper handling of dogs and how owners who fail to do so should be treated.  This was not the dog’s fault, it was its owner’s.  Not to mention we had further life-building plans for that money that had to be scrapped.

Due to the incredible stress of the incident with the kitten’s leg, which necessitated weeks of 24/7 supervised care so that he didn’t injure himself post-surgery, I had another manic episode in August.  This was when I learned that stress in my life causes manic episodes, and so now I assiduously avoid stress whenever possible.  Manic episodes are embarrassing because they can make you do really stupid things.  In my case, it made me dive into bottles of nitrous oxide that were not only expensive, but also did bad things to my brain chemistry, further exacerbating whatever mental effects I already had going on because of the stress.

By the same token, the psychedelic effect of the gas allowed me to process some things from my past that had heretofore proven difficult for me to grasp.  I’m a firm believer in the mental benefits of the various psychedelics, having already benefited from microdosing LSD, and so while the nitrous definitely disaffected my neurochemistry after a time and was a drain on my bank account, I do not wholeheartedly condemn the behavior since I actually got some benefit out of it.  Still, there are lessons to be learned there that I need to pay attention to.

It takes time to recover from a manic episode, depending on its severity.  In my case, two to three months seems to be about right for standard episodes, which means I spent most of Autumn getting my head screwed back on.  By the same token, I have some difficulty in late summer and early fall anyway because it’s the anniversary of my hospitalizations, which were very traumatizing.  This year, that manifested as nighttime panic attacks, which saw me waking up with a tight chest around 4am every night and unable to lay back down until I sat up smoking weed for an hour or two.  That was made worse by trying a new drug for anxiety that had paradoxical effects.  Yay Big Pharma.

All of that nearly ruined Thanksgiving because I was so edgy from the anxiety and lack of sleep, which I fear has weakened my relationship with our nephew.  Things have actually been pretty good with him since he returned to the house last March.  I cannot say what has effected this remarkable shift in his behavior, but I’m not going to question it.  He still has his moments, as do I, but overall, we’re all getting along pretty well for the most part.  Whenever I do something to endanger that, I feel terrible and do everything I can to repair the situation.

Offsetting the stress and drama of Autumn was my establishment of a gardening group at the UU church.  It’s proving to be a nice set of tasks and distractions from the things that usually bother me in life.  We’re planning a seed swap and a plant sale as a fundraiser for the church.  I’m also seeing it as a good opportunity to make sure I get human contact at least once a month and practice for my social skills, which are definitely lacking.

Autumn also saw me revive and restyle my blog right around my birthday, which was admittedly a slightly manic task given how quickly I got it done, but I’m glad I did it.  It helped me solidify this new identity I’m working on and gave me a clearer picture of ‘who I am’.  Augmenting the blog is a new art shop where people can buy my art on a variety of objects or just buy a piece of wall art.  It hasn’t really taken off yet, but I haven’t engaged in much promotion.

So now here we are in late December.  Christmas was a few days ago, and while it wasn’t as stress-free as I wanted, I think it still went well.  I’m enjoying the low energy that comes with the Winter Solstice.  It’s good for tying off the Old Year and preparing for the New Year.  I’m not making any solid plans for the New Year, but I do have goals.  I’ve discovered that I accomplish the most not by making plans, but by setting goals and then living my life in such a way that I am generally pointed in the direction of those goals.  The Path may wander at times, but if I stay true to it, I’ll get to where I want to go.

This is in keeping with a new Taoist spirit that I’m trying to imbue into my life.  Tao and Zen are very similar to one another, but also seem to fill in each other’s gaps very well.  They both speak much of ‘flowing’, and that’s how I try to live my life: in a state of flow.  My best paintings ‘flow’ from my hands.  My best writing ‘flows’ from my fingers and mind.  It’s not something I think about, it’s something I just allow to happen: as though it’s an existing current just waiting to be tapped into.

I learned about Taoism from another new thing I established in my life this year, the spiritual book club that my husband and I attend, also at the UU church.  I started going last year, but didn’t really click with people until this year.  I consider the book group an important part of my life because it keeps me reading, and it keeps me in contact with intelligent people I like.  I feel like I might actually be making (gasp) friends, something that is very hard for people my age.  I read a number of really great books this year because of the group and am looking forward to reading more and learning more in 2024.

While I don’t make plans anymore, I do set goals and try to live my life such that those goals eventually get accomplished.  Taoism calls it “doing by not doing”.  I call it “achieving goals by abandoning plans”.  It doesn’t make sense intellectually, but it works.  My goals for this year include working on my physical health.  I live in a beautiful place that is begging to be hiked and explored, and I can’t do it because I’m so weak after spending the entire decade of my 40s under the influence of debilitating medications or recovering from them.  I used to be very strong, and I want to be again so I don’t feel limited.  I’m not so old that it’s too late to recover my strength and be active, and the sooner I do it, the better and longer I’ll live.

Other goals include a nice garden, more painting, and more cooking of healthy foods.  I also want to be more involved in the community we live in now.  There’s a lot going on in our area that interests us, and we have a tendency to be homebodies.  It’s an old habit leftover from hiding from the Sun in Texas.  We don’t have to do that here.  We believe part of the shift towards a better world is going to involve re-establishing our broken communities, and part of that shift is going to be embodying the changes we wish to see in the world, to use a cliche phrase.  We’re all very cut off from one another in our world, and I feel strongly that rectifying that situation will go a long way towards curing a lot of what ails us from neighborhood to globe.  And that is probably every rational person’s goal in life right now.