Tag: New Years Eve

End to Begin

.Reading time 3 minutes.

meyellow

2018…

I took roads never expected to take, leaps I had been afraid to make, and I loved every bleary-eyed, wild, weird and wonderful moment. Even the really horrible ones.

I experienced some of my biggest professional let downs to date alongside some of my most profoundly exciting accomplishments. I decided that every moment will work together for my good no matter how grim it feels as I wade through it.

I taught myself to think differently about almost everything. I let go of a method that was leading me to madness. Depression and anxiety peaked, and I had to learn how to feel and war my way through without going under.

I changed the way I went for my goals, what I believed about the story I was living, what would happen when I set my eyes like flint.

I learned to be quiet.

I learned to take responsibility, forgive, redeem and reward in a new way.

I partnered with my destiny. I partnered with a writing partner. I learned that to be truly successful at either, you must be truly transparent and willing to grow.

I gave myself validation. I believed in my talent. I discovered a new process.

I won every battle — even the ones I lost. Because I was up, doing it, and I was not going to take NO for an answer.

I lived. I took time off from writing. I went on trips and flew first class. I asked for MORE than I’ve ever asked for and I watched it come my way.

In 2018: I learned to be me again.

I can’t tell you how to be you more fully, how to live your big life and what that will look like when you do, if you are. But – never settle. Stop settling. As Nelson Mandela said, “There is no passion to be found playing it small – in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.”

2019 better get ready.

XO,

R

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Cusp

.Reading time 5 minutes.

Everyone gains perspective at the end of a year. This time is tailor-made for reflection, soul-searching sipping chamomile, curled in a sweater, tucked under blankets. When you live in Los Angeles, it looks a little different. It’s sunny, with flip flops and frayed shorts, a chilled glass of bubbly, and a pair of sunglasses slipping down your nose.

The feeling, though, is very much the same.

Every year we are alive, we face new challenges to our way of life. If we are lucky. If we are really living. We make gut-wrenching choices. We take dangerous steps, make bold moves on the living chess board of existence. We do and feel and touch moments we never have before.

2017: I woke a beast.

In January, I broke my knee cap. It was my breaking point. Faced with confinement, I faced off the secret, quiet, creeping feelings my insides had refused to divulge to me until that moment trapped on a bed with a planet for a knee.

There was a certain writhing beast that I had never let loose. It awoke in that quiet place and did not go back to sleep. Not for most of the year. Not until I made a sudden, painful, life-altering choice in the middle of December. Not until, finally, I was brutally honest with myself, unafraid to look away from what I knew I really felt. Only then did the beast bow it’s head, subdued for another season.

2017: I fought for my future.

In November a longtime friend asked me, does Los Angeles feel like home?

No. I said. Nowhere does. Nowhere can.

This is the truth about being restless: you are always, forever, in search. It is not unhappiness, though it feels that way sometimes. It is a quest.

When you believe you are made to do more, you cannot live with anything else. It makes you unbearable. The person in the room that never sits down. The one with a million ideas. The one with a drink in their hand. The one looking out the window, or over a shoulder. It is never about where you are, it is always about where you could be.

For me, the search has to stop. For a moment, at least, I need to be right where I am, living without running. The way to the future is wriggling to life today. I don’t want to miss it.

2017: I let people in.

I wrote a book this year that felt like putting my heart on a page. It felt violent and vulnerable. It revealed me. It contained me. It was me.

I took an acting class that was a stare down with the past. It was me in a room with strangers living for a moment without a shield. It was terrifying and altering.

I fell in love with my friends. Women who saw me and loved me and listened. Women who would not let me settle. Women who are my allies and confidants and partners.

I listened to my son cry and my husband fume as my family leaped toward a new life. I let them be who they needed to be and I learned to live with myself while they did.

2017: I made choices.

Hard ones. Fast ones. Painful ones. I am living with every single one. I am still alive.

Soon we turn over the calendar. We countdown. We sing and cheers and make commitments to next year us. If you asked me what 2017 would look like last year I would have given you a very different answer.

What do we know, then, about our future?

All we know is today.

Therefore:

Live mindfully, with purpose. Let yourself believe in magic. Let others in on the journey.

What about you?IMG_4983

 

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This is the New Year Cry

.Reading time 5 minutes.

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Most years I write a farewell, a tipping of my hat to the year gone by, acknowledging all the brilliant, painful and perplexing things I experienced, speaking to the dreams that thrived, or died, and then finally turning my eyes outward.

This year, I struggled.

In 2015 I saw and did things I never expected to see or do. I struggled with questions I thought I’d already firmly answered. I was thirty. I was without my grandma for the first time ever. I was sojourning in the land of creative confusion, with a long layover in emotional malaise-ville. I watched terror rip through the world with no idea how it would ever quell, but only escalate, only accelerate. I watched my son find his way through kindergarten, to first grade, and me without a clue how he got that big, that fast.

I gave in on things and I refused to budge on others. I cried. I panicked. I did YouTube. I went to Comic-Con and was the recipient of the magical power of fandom. I became an aunt, again. I was paid my first real money for writing. I decided to say no, and yes, and go to hell, and I love you when it was true and not just when it was appropriate. I fought. I conceded. I won.

2015 can’t simply be summed up, and so much of it is still too hard for me to put into words and then give to the world. It can’t be reflected because it is alive in me, and even though the year is ending, so very much of what it started continues to beat on like my own heartbeat in my chest, my own blood pounding through my veins. A new year is nothing but a chance to say goodbye to a number, a version living, and hello to another, made new by experience. We begin again all the time. We stop and start. We throw fits and offer ultimatums, and always, hopefully, are living like it’s our last chance to try.

A New Year is nothing but a chance to do something different. To be changed for the better, the worse, to get a start on that forgotten dream, or to move on to the one you’d been putting off for tomorrow. A New Year is a moment in time that will pass without impact if you let it.

We resolve to make this one better, more peaceful, less ugly, but then we forget. We get busy. We get selfish and anxious and we lose our way when it’s no longer new, but just life, again, like always. And then we get soggy-eyed, we get grumpy, and that resolution is buried beneath the dirty laundry and broken promises.

I will not lie to you and promise you a better tomorrow. No one can do that, not really, so there is not point me trying. Tomorrow might not be better. Tonight might still be hit by terror and violence, by goodness and hope, by mediocrity and pettiness. But I will encourage you to believe in the present.

This moment where you have hope, hold onto it.

The kiss from your son, the cuddle from your daughter.

The gleam in your husband’s eyes when he thinks your hair looks pretty the way it falls like that over your shoulder, your neck, into your eyes which crinkle more right now than yesterday.

The laughter of friends talking stories and making plans, plans they can’t guarantee, but need to make all the same.

The dog on your lap. The book in your hand, in your fingertips, in your spirit.

This is all we are given, this brief moment in time. This is all that we need, to be here for each other, for the world. For today.

It’s the End of the Year as We Know it

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I’ve been quiet these last couple weeks, not from a self-imposed vow, but a life and holidays and I-have-too-much-other-shit-going-on-to-sit-down-and-blog hiatus that turned into It-feels-good-to-keep-my-thoughts-to-myself siesta. As a writer who blogs, the goal of getting a post up can overshadow the need to communicate well. The world inside the internet is very small. You can touch the life of a person in Israel from a computer in North Texas. This is humbling, and so it also is sobering.

So, with my thoughts all a jumble over the holidays anyway, and my brain split in three different directions by noisy characters with big personalities, the desire to blog with purpose took up residence on back burner number one. (Right next to housework and hairstyle maintenance.) (Really, my hair currently resembles Bellatrix LaStrange.)

bellatrix-lestrange

I considered writing a thoughtful post sometime before Christmas about not getting lost in the hustle and bustle of the holidays. I decided that would be a false representation of my current state-of-mind, was basically total bullshit because the hustle and bustle of the holidays is what makes them the holidays, and a message of survival of the fittest mingled with let’s just get this overwiths might garner some Grinch comparisons.

I read instead. In fact, when I wasn’t sure I could cope with the way I was actually feeling (which was an unattractive shade of gray-brown) the book in my hand became my stiff drink. (I also had a few stiff drinks, but I am resolving to talk less about my drinking habits in 2014. It’s a less noble goal than actually drinking less.) Books became council, and books have always been friends.

There were moments where I sat up straight, book in hand, glee in heart, grateful for the life of a reader in the midst of a perilous time of year for many. And in that euphoria, I considered writing a blog post about it.

Then I didn’t. Because it wasn’t a story I wanted to try to tell. Not right then, when it was so special, and the book was still hot on my fingertips and soaring through my imagination. As a writer, your whole life becomes source material. Your every experience gets picked apart for the sake of your characters, your followers, your quest for honest storytelling in a world where honesty is hard-won.

In the age of Twitter, boiling down your thoughts into quippy, 140-character posts and cleverly hashtagging feels like art. In the time of Pinterest and Instagram and Facebook friends, the content of our lives becomes a marketing gimmick for all to see. I won’t even say I’m guilty of this, because I am also proud of this. As a person pursuing publishing, utilizing the fabulous portal of the internet to talk to someone halfway around the world about words and books, is essential and heartening and affirming.

But sometimes our lives need to be lived off the grid. Sometimes our hashtagging batteries need to be recharged. Sometimes the feels created by Sarah Rees Brennan, or Cristin Terrill, or Rainbow Rowell deserve to live only in your brain and body and hair. Sometimes, just not saying anything at all is saying everything.

It’s the end of 2013, and I should post a comprehensive list of all the books I read this year that I think you need to read (and I will, but not today). It’s the end of the year, and all I really want to say is thank you. It’s been a long year, but not any longer than the year before. It’s been 365 days of writing, and crying, and fighting, and wishing, hoping and dreaming.

We don’t start over on January 1st 2014, we just start again.