It’s New Year’s Day 2018 and I have been successfully, almost professionally, ignoring this little page for just about a year. I don’t have any explanation other than that 2017 was kind of a crazy year, but not just for me, for the world. It was one of those years when it all felt upside down and writing for myself felt a bit frivolous. It was hard to ignore the noise, the collective trauma; to turn down social media and find the sun.

It was also a year in which I learned a whole lot, and mostly by accident.

I didn’t write my book. But I did write two book outlines by taking part in an AMAZING writing mentorship where I made friends and heard their stories and watched us all wrangle with the wild notion of writerly life being a *thing*. As for me, my protagonist lives just outside the margins of my conscious thought and I know one day she’ll come crashing through and I won’t be able to ignore her any longer. She’ll happen, she’s just waiting for the right time.

I started a new job and figured out that it’s really, really important to me that my personal beliefs and my professional pursuits align. It was a risk, and it’s been a rollercoaster, but I regret nothing and know that even in small ways my work has been meaningful to my community and vice versa (actually probably mostly the latter).

I decided to take a leap in closing the chapter of the last decade of my life; this house is going on the market and I am constructing an entirely new one. No one has lived in it, it’s the freshest of fresh starts. Truth be told, ground hasn’t even broken yet so my home is a little patch of cold grass as I type. But I can see it in my mind’s eye and it will be lovingly built with good intention and will be a place where life happens, OUR life happens.

I fell in love again. In two weeks we’ll celebrate a year together and I’ve felt us/me grow in ways I didn’t know I could. I don’t have a crystal ball to tell you where this story goes, but I have a heart that learned to open up again and that’s something. The heart, after all, is a muscle and muscles grow by breaking down a little; by stretching, by being pushed and then getting stronger. It’s amazing the heart’s capacity to rebuild.

I don’t really believe in resolutions anymore, but I do believe in setting good intentions and imagining the future I wish to see for myself, my people, my community, and my nation.

I commit to more writing than last year, to showing up with my time, talent and/or treasure for the things I believe in (2018 election cycle, we are coming for you), to forgiving myself when I stumble and to loving my people the very best way I can.

Happy New Year friends. ❤