A New Year’s Blessing: 2023

You’ve made it. Once again, in an era too likely to be in history books, here at the beginning, here at the end, you’ve made it through another year. Not without struggle, not without loss, not without the sacrifice of things you’d held dear. No one is making it through another year easily anymore, but here you are.

I’m proud of you. I hope someone else has told you that recently, that the phrase rings familiar instead of acting as a shock to the system. I hope you know that your survival was never guaranteed and that what you’ve done is nothing short of heroic. It doesn’t matter if it was a struggle. It doesn’t matter how heavily you leaned on something or someone else. It doesn’t matter if you burst into the new year panting and weeping, praying for better. You still made it, and I’m proud of you.

Rest here with me for a moment. Put down your resolutions, your lists, your worries and think for a moment on everything you went through this year. None of it was easy. Trying to survive right now, just trying to get through the day, is a trial of endurance. Just keeping a job while the world seems to collapse around you a little more every day is a feat in and of itself. Even if all you did was go to work and come home, you did it with the weight of the world’s grief and chaos on your back. That’s not easy. None of this is easy.

None of us were built to see death on this scale. We certainly weren’t built to keep doing our jobs through that kind of tragedy, or to then have to ignore those risks and go about life like nothing happened. This is hard. It’s heartbreaking. You’re allowed to struggle. More than that, you’re allowed to give yourself a break.

This year, don’t ask too much of yourself. Acknowledge that you’re only human, and that you’re allowed to flounder, to not know what to do, to struggle to find purpose in a time that feels so much larger than any one of us. When you’re ready, when you have the energy, and your head is in just the right place, start looking for a way to contribute. Look into what’s available in your community. Find causes that are meaningful for you and do what you can. If what you find are resources you need, then accept them.

Accept that you are small. Accept that this burden is too big for any one of us to handle on our own. And then find something you can do that feels meaningful. Find a way to make an impact for your neighbors, not the world at large. Do what you can. Undertake the work that feels important. Just remember to give yourself a break, too.
You survived this year, and I’m so proud of you. Take a moment to sit with me, take a moment to grieve, take a moment to assess what you can do and what you want to do, then act in ways that are important and possible for you.

I’m not asking this of you because you didn’t do enough this year. God knows you did. I’m asking you to consider how and where you can lend a hand because helping each other on a local level is how we all survive this together. It’s how you feel rooted in your values and in your community. It’s how we build something back more beautiful than anything we had before.

You deserve more than surviving your job every day and then dropping into restless sleep. Being part of something is a way to have that. I want so desperately for you to reach out and grab that for yourself.

I love you. I’m proud of you. I see how hard you’ve struggled and how much you’ve grown. You shouldn’t have to be, but you are still so much stronger than you’ve given yourself credit for. You don’t have to keep fighting alone. We can fight for the future we deserve together. You just have to reach out and become part of it.

Happy New Year.