This past November marked one year of existence for Dear Life. (Happy birthday, blog!) 

I meant to write him a tribute, something to sum up everything he’s done in the past year, but life got in the way. It’s been doing that a lot lately.

I started a new clinical job in November that comes with some travel. For Christmas Tommy bought me a new suitcase – a little blue guy that rolls on four wheels and has an intact zipper (modern marvels). I’m not much of a traveler. I get queasy on planes. Lost in traffic. Uncertain about locations for breakfast. Pretty much the only good thing about traveling alone is being able to turn the hotel room thermostat up to 80.

With even more changes looming, life has been as tempestuous as forest leaves on the cusp of winter. November arrives along with a thousand drifting leaves of varying shades of color and crispness. I rake them away, but a week later there are two thousand more, and of increasing wetness and stubbornness. 

It’s an endless struggle against a tide. Work, home, family, responsibilities, goals. Impending changes. Impending uncertainties.   

I started blogging because I was desperate to write and needed a coherent storage space for my thoughts. I continued to blog because I’m stubborn. Then I kept blogging because I was learning something new with each post – about myself, about others, about life. In 2020, I continue writing because sometimes it’s the only thing that will make me stop. 

Do you have those mornings when you have to get up at an ungodly early hour? You feel grumbly and a little sick while you drag a thermos of tea and one open eye to the car and start driving. 

But then there’s mist clinging to the fields. A pale fragment of moon hanging in a purple sky. Trees stirring under a breeze, still heavy beneath the spell of sleep. And you realize – this is exquisitely beautiful. Why don’t I get up early more often? I would do it, just to see the world this way. Just to feel the quiet.

But the next morning comes, along with your foggy mind and the grumbles, and you don’t get up. Outside, the earth shakes off the dew whether or not you’re watching.

Writing is like those mornings for me. There are about a million other things I should or could be doing. A mind at rest wants to stay at rest, and we come up with so many bogus ways of defining it – bills and text messages, tv shows and phone scrolling, shopping lists and sink scrubbing. For me, writing Dear Life is the mechanism that forces me to stop. As Dad would say –  plug in your brain, Elizabeth.  

I’ve always felt that I wanted to write to change others. The grandiose ideal of changing the world with words. Showing a better, brighter way. A life of grace instead of self. But instead I’ve been surprised to find that I was the one who needed changing. I who thought I knew the way only to discover that the map was inside my head but not beneath my feet. 

Each blog post has taught me something new, and I feel the profoundness of that – of subconscious ideas being transcribed onto a page, and once alive, translating themselves into my life. There have been many times over the last year that I’ve found myself discouraged or angry or hurting and recalled my own words. Not exactly mocking me, but certainly incisive. 

Do you remember you said that? Do you really believe it?

Do you actually think God is sufficient, even when you’re in the weeds? 

Is it still better to love and lose, even when the grief never stops?

I don’t hold all of the answers inside of me. I’ve lived a finite life, read a small number of books, went to school but learned about drugs, met only a few people, traveled a bit but not nearly enough to justify an American Airlines upgrade.

I don’t know that I’ve given you anything through Dear Life. Most of the time it’s felt like words in a vacuum, strangely voiceless, without echo or felt reverberation. I don’t know if the words land or if they continue to float. So much of writing is guesswork. I’m left hoping that something, even if it was a single sentence, found its home in you. 

I know the words have changed me. I never knew it could be such a process. 

Learning how to believe the things I already knew.