2023 in the rearview

If you would have asked me in 2016 what I thought life might look like in 2023, I might have been optimistic despite the dark years we were heading into. But I’m no great futurist. I’m not able to read the stars or absorb the zeitgeist and spit out predictions.

What I can tell you now is that 2023 has been one of the worst years in the last two decades of my life, both professionally and personally. It’s partly because of 2016 and what that year unleashed on us collectively and partly due to realizations I’ve had about small but noticeable changes within me that I attribute to the work I do daily and what some call the spirit of the age.

January offered an auspicious start to the new year as I participated in Dry January. I did it for no other reason than to see if I could. I don’t particularly need alcohol in my life, though I enjoy it in social settings and as a balancer of emotions high or low. While I found Dry January to be easier than I thought, I was surprised by how much I was able to produce from a creative standpoint. My mindset and energy levels were much higher than normal, and I wrote more in January than I have in years.

Upon re-entry in February, things were already going south in the realm of the everyday. I could sense creative exhaustion creeping up on me, and I fell into a long and dreary dry spell. Thankfully March came along with a restorative and much-needed road trip to Texas with my daughter for my sister’s wedding.

Getting that much alone time with one of your kids while traveling through the West at the end of a winter season is truly a treat we should all treat ourselves to more often. I had a lot of time and many miles to reflect on what was happening in the world around me and what impact that was having on my creative process.

Apathy, it turns out, was burning down my house and coming for my job and everything I held dear.

It wasn’t alone. Imposter syndrome is apathy’s ride-or-die. And when you work in the creative realm, whether that is in words, images, videos, graphics or a combination thereof, imposter syndrome is a death-sentence for productivity.

Creative work is never hard until it is.

I got an inkling of 2023’s bad juju by late spring when things at the 9 to 5 turned political, an unfortunate consequence of both 2016 and the massive social changes brought on by the pandemic. And nothing sucks the joy out of a highly fulfilling job like workplace drama.

You can simultaneously perform better by working from home and descend into a communications shitstorm due to changes the pandemic forced upon all of us, and like the proverbial frog sitting in warming water, you just have no concept of how bad it’s all going to get until you’re looking at it from the “other side.” 

The losses kept adding up as the months rolled by. Some well-aimed criticism from people I respect found its mark, and I rolled up into a ball to try to protect my vital organs, or at least whatever wellspring of creativity still existed unerupted within me.

I spent much of the year in the fetal position mentally, a consequence of too much time in the social media mines where the black lung or at least black thoughts will catch up with you eventually. I have many acquaintances who work in social media who can attest to this. I’ve said for a long time that it’s going to get worse, but 2023 proved, at least to me, that my definition of worse doesn’t hold a candle to whatever dictates worse.   

The country lurched backward 50 years in 2016, and a bunch of monsters and old habits were released from whatever holding cells we devised for them. Then we started debating about these monsters and bad habits trying to justify their existence or decide if hiding them and knowing they’re still there is better than just having them in plain sight where we can hope to someday vanquish them.

Lost in the debate is the fact that humans have been both trying to move past these predilections and continuing to drag them along behind us since our inception as modern humans and likely all the way back through our early human ancestors.

 Something I’ve learned in these low places where I have spent much of the year is that when you’re down, you’re constantly looking up, looking for the light, looking for a way out. While this may constitute looking around, it is in fact a state of panic not likely to yield the results you might want.

My prolonged stay in whatever purgatory 2023 is has made me stop looking for a way out and has instead forced me to look around and finally within.

I think sometimes we want so much to manifest good things, that when we’re sinking into a mental health crisis, a creative crisis, a work crisis or a personal life crisis, we forget that the root cause is something going on within ourselves and not always the circumstances around us.

We cannot control those external forces, we can only control the way we experience those external forces, and even then, that is challenging. So, this is where I found myself in the final week of 2023, wanting desperately to look at 2024 as truly a New Year. I wanted to write about hope and change and forward momentum.

I’ve learned, however, that the timeframe for bad luck, or whatever you want to call these doldrums, does not fit nicely into the Gregorian calendar. And that this state of existence could easily, and in all likelihood, will continue into the new year.

It’s also highly possible things get much, much worse, before they get better from a societal standpoint. And this possibility will have a lot of ramifications for our workplace relationships our mental health and possibly for this way of life we’ve cultivated here in the United States of America.

I let my guard down when life is going well, which has led to the illusion that life is supposed to be good, and that is what we should be striving for. That purposeful stride we take in the bright light of a good day is what we evolved for. The down and out times are just brief sojourns on our true journey to lead a good and purpose-filled life.

If a having a good day and living a good life are the states of being we evolved to achieve, then it ignores all that has ever shaped us, both the good and the bad to put it in the weakest possible terms.

Some writer once hypothesized that some humans probably lived a long and wonderful life on an island somewhere untroubled by predators or storms during a particularly peaceful and stable climate timeframe, while other humans in a different timeframe suffered relentlessly until dying at a relatively young age from violence, malnutrition, stress or a combination of those factors.

Whose existence was better? And by what standards? If one never knew the other was possible, then how can we decide who had it better off and which is the ideal? Both of these hypothetical experiences would’ve shaped who we are today. Our ancestors lived through times of plenty as well as drought.

While I’m not celebrating being stuck in the hole that is 2023, I know that when everything rolls over at midnight on December 31, I do not hold a get out of jail card for this, and that climbing back to some place of wellbeing and wholeness is a journey in and of itself not constrained to some arbitrary calendar our ancestors agreed to use.

Adding to the challenge of finding my way out of this hole is the passage of time in years that we count from our birth and the significance we attach to integers like 50, which is both a real number and a rational number and yet one I’ve not come to terms with though it bears down on me relentlessly, just 18 days into the new year.

I don’t know if Gen Xers have a midlife crisis that looks at all like the ones we’ve laughed at previous generations for or if that silly term can even be used in any proper context as related to the events of this past year, but I do not desire a red, convertible sports car nor a younger partner in life.

I simply wish to thrive.