The Remains of All I Lost (& Found) in 2023

and a poem: She Comes For Me

My journals are the space where I empty my head out, often alongside my heart. They aren’t the diaries of my 20s, consumed with the world outside me. Or, the online blog of my 30s, full of kids art and raising beautiful children while trying to figure myself out (ha!). Not even close to my writing notebooks of my 40s, the decade in which I declared not giving a damn, but gave a whole lot of damn and drove myself to utter exhaustion trying to prove myself. This decade, the journals next to my desk contain the contents of a woman in serious transition.

Just looking through them might make your eyes bulge.

Black covers. Eighty pages. Never lined. Each page dated. Filled with circled words and half written poems. Sibyls. Highlighted passages. Dreams, sometimes pages and pages from one single night. Glimmers from reading. Automatic writing. Class notes. A mash of thoughts and writing prompts that I never got to. Some personal realizations that surprised me. The sudden appearance of stream of consciousness writing after reading Sandra Cisneros. A never-ending obsession with Elizabeth Barrett Browning. More Sibyls. Story scenes. A half-tackled reading and breakdown of The Waste Land. Tennyson’s Guinevere sparking a bit of pastiche. So much inspo from Poe, Gaiman, Ray Bradbury, and Octavia Butler. Margaret Atwood wrote poetry, what? Piles and piles of black covers. Eighty pages. My brain and soul emptied out into them. Unfiltered.

When I started going through the 600 handwritten pages about two weeks ago, I stared at it all for a long time. Mouth open. I had no idea the annual Remains of Any Given Year review of my journals would produce one of my most remarkable years in review ever.

The Year of Giving Up

Way back in January, I had pretty well given up. My debut novel had not been widely received. I was, to be honest, so filled with shame. I had worked my face off, sacrificed relationships and family time. I struggled so deeply to prove that I could be a certain kind of writer, and I had, in my eyes, failed.

I had already queued myself up publicly to get the second novel in the series done and out this year. Yet, no matter how hard I pushed myself, I found myself spiritually exhausted. My doubts consumed me. My mental health tanked. I couldn’t get back on the horse, as it may be. I abandoned my writing 40,000 words in and started over with a new version that got my sporadic attention.

Then, my parents had a medical crisis and everything stopped in February. I went and stayed with them for a few weeks and did nothing but read and talk and live at their very easy pace. My heart rested for the first time in ages.

I started pulling everything apart and dove into contemplative practices. And, it became clear what needed to happen. I stopped everything that didn’t feel slow and introspective. That meant I stopped writing for everyone else. Oh, the ego. Oh, the shame. Oh, the maybe I am not the writer I thought I wanted to be. I put my pen down and turned my attention to what I came to call wound tending.

And, for a year that I processed outwardly as one of my least productive, my journals told a much different story. As I combed through each page, notation, unfinished vignette, and the endless mind dumps, they revealed a startling change in me. I had “stopped writing” only to find I wrote more in the last twelve months than in any other period of my life.

1. I discovered full drafts of nearly polished fairytale retellings through the lens of my Polish roots. I had completed them in a class at the beginning of 2023. They were the first find and I quickly got to work getting them ready for publication.

2. More than a dozen poems that I never reworked after the first draft dotted two of my journals. Six of them came in the weeks after I attempted to finish T.S. Elliott’s The Waste Land and, honestly, got really irritated. His treatment of the Cumean Sibyl and her lack of agency makes me scream. I wrote a lot about it. Expect some future poetry on this subject.

3. The irony of my Elliott madness is that I spent months and months after this exploring the concept of the waste land in reference to the desert - a central setting in my WIP novel. I discovered the Dessert Ammas of ancient Christianity and my journals from about August to early November are packed with notes and poetry and full novel scenes (that I forgot about) from the desert. I found ten full scenes, about 10,000 words total, that went straight into the novel draft.

4. After the pleasure of meeting Elizabeth Gilbert at the beginning of the year, I began a practice of two-way writing, starting mornings with: Good morning Great Mothers, what will you have me work on today. This writing, for about three months, took up a majority of my journals. Some days, I would write for an hour every morning. For anyone who might doubt the power of this process, it ended up giving me permission to learn different forms of poetry (I even taught myself how to write in Alexandrine meter, badly, sheesh). It is important to note that I have never really loved poetry until this year. I fell hard and have read, no joke, hundreds of volumes of poetry in the last 12 months. I consider this shift in me the most profound. I’ve never felt more comfortable with my own voice than when I am writing poetry.

5. Pile menopause onto all of this. If you know, you know. I will endlessly thank Christine Valters Paintner and Sharon Blackie for saving me from myself. Each, in very different ways, gave me permission to explore the paradox of me as a multi-faceted spiritual person. I learned how absolutely necessary that aspect of my life is in order for me to be whole. I will never neglect it again.

6. They also re-enforced the need for middle-aged female protagonists in stories. I’ll be championing older women as provocative heroines until the end of me.

7. After my oldest and I went to Italy in August, we were both deeply changed. It was like Phoenix burning to ash in the raging summer sun (40C almost every day) only to rise up renewed. She left for school and I grew more quiet and internal than ever. My journals from that time are dominated by a deep dive into the Blessed Virgin Mary, not as a religious figure, but as a gateway. I also pieced together a collection of short mother-daughter travel stories inspired by Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift From The Sea that I plan to finish and hopefully release later this year.

8. I started intense dream work in early October and, well, that transformation is headed full force into 2024. Dreamwork is learning how to cross the veil. So many stories yet to tell.

9. My exploration of my Polish and Celtic roots has risen up as the center point of my storytelling. I read so many Slavic fairytales this year. Polish women need some agency in their own stories. I found so many parts of stories that I will begin to work through in the coming days.

The amount of writing in those books proved astounding. It’s funny, really, how I don’t even remember the act of creating much of it. Each time I placed the pencil down to write, I just let whatever needed to come out do so. And, it transformed me.

Who am I now that I didn’t see yet at the beginning of 2023? I’m not going to proclaim myself a poet or a memoirist or whatever. Clearly, a woman in the midst of serious transition.

More than anything, though, reviewing my journals made me a believer in the power of sitting with the cracks. I was shattered into pieces by my own expectations. And, slowly, every day, I somehow glued myself back together through not trying to accomplish anything outwardly at all. Definitely not in the same form as before. Older. Lumpier. Less colorful. Lots of chips and a few pieces that simply proved irretrievable. But, the cracks somehow filled with gold through the simple, but very painful, act of forcing myself to retreat in order to heal up.

Finally, I finished up this poem tonight. I had written a draft many months ago and then let it disappear between the pages of new thoughts and words. It seems to have been waiting for just the right moment.

May your 2024 give you space to sit with the cracks and discover how they fill with gold.