Well, that was a year.

How do you plan for a magical year after a very un-magical year?

Four days into this year, I walked into my house, covered in snot and blood and hospital germs, and crawled into bed with my precious little boy, trying to figure out how I was going to tell him he might never see his dad again.

I could sit here for days and type out all the ways that trauma froze me, how even when the miraculous happened and my little love does have his dad, alive and well, it seeped into every single day of my 2023. About the anger I’ve felt that everyone else seemed to recover so quickly while my brain chose to replay the violence of watching Chris’ friend do CPR on him anytime I closed my eyes for months. About how not a single goal was set, much less completed. About how many times I disappointed myself. About how, at the close of the year, I still feel bitter over having to live that version of 2023.

Instead, as I’m writing this on the last sunset of an excruciatingly painful year, I want to write the two words I’ve said to myself than any others this year:

You survived.

Of course, I did more than survive. Of course, there were highlights – I’m raising the most magical human, I read so many books, I went on tons of walks, I laughed with people I love – and it all mattered so little and it all mattered so much. But when your year starts the way mine did, survival is a really big freakin’ deal.

How do you plan for a magical year after a very un-magical year?

I think the answer is that you decide magic isn’t always what you think it is. It doesn’t always sparkle. It doesn’t always feel magical. It isn’t always pretty.

Sometimes it’s just survival.

So goodbye to a truly terrible year, that was also good, somehow. At the end of it I know:

Literally nothing matters.

Literally everything matters.

I’m alive. You’re alive. We’re alive.

We survived.

And that’s the magic, isn’t it?

Happy 2024. Here’s to more than just surviving the year. Cheers to some magic for the both of us.