Choosing yourself in earnest.
At the stroke of midnight, fireworks sound. Corellas scream. Dogs bark.
Some people charge their glasses and cheer, others sleep.
Meanwhile, in the deliciously warm midnight air, I write.
2024 was the year I invested in someone else.
Swept up in the swell of a well-mannered, even keeled, tall, dark, and handsome man, I moved across the country in hopes that he was the beginning of the rest of my life.
To make a long and loving story short, it wasn’t to be.
On the 22nd of December, we officially broke up. I say officially because, really, we broke up a couple of weeks earlier, but the split was as amicable as you could dream of, and we wanted to glean whatever we could from two last weeks together. Ultimately, I understood his choice to stay put for the next three years and agreed that it was the right decision for him. I’m not sure that he agreed with my choice not to stay, but I knew that it was right decision for me, and he understood it none the less.
It would be easy for someone to think that 2024 was, therefore, a year of wasted time, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. I learned so much about myself. I moved back to the town where I grew up under entirely new circumstances, and got to experience the ever-curious timeline parallel of being 27 where I was last 17 (I think 17 year old me would be extraordinarily proud). And I got to spend the year loving someone, which (despite the challenges that won out) is one of life’s greatest privileges.
So, I will start 2025 with a breakup at a time society says I should be panicking to find someone (I turn 29 in the new year). It’s the start of a lot of rom-coms. In fact, it’s not terribly dissimilar to the rom-com that I will write this year. But it’s cliché for a reason: breakups are universal, the perfect instance of endings and new beginnings being undeniably intertwined.
In the fifth set of my mental tennis match of torment, going back and forth over whether or not I should leave my partner, it was the words of other women (usually unbeknownst to them) that reinforced what I knew was the right decision—women who have grown up through a lot, who have forced themselves to smile, who have loved and lost, found and created love in themselves, their work, and their friends again after all. Women who know the value of another woman’s soul.
Now, I write—inspired by and dedicated to those women, listening to waves breaking on the ocean (there are worse places to run home to), in the exact same spot I was one year ago hoping I’d found the love of my life—ready to pour that hope and love into myself and my writing.
2024 was the year I invested in someone else.
2025 is the year I will invest in myself.
I will go on submission for my first novel, write the next two, and produce all the poetry and short stories and essays I want to to keep my creative cup overflowing. I will attend a formal six-month writing program (I’m so excited!), international writing retreats, and launch my website and social media platforms. I will paint, and sing, and dance, and learn to video edit. I will make new lifelong friends, see a lot more of my family, and even travel the world for a month or two. I will put myself out there over and over again, uncaring if I stumble or fall. I will give and give and give, because the giving feels like receiving (as Mary Oliver so tremendously describes the ‘witchery of life’ in her poem, To Begin With, the Sweet Grass).
What are you doing, if anything, to invest in and choose yourself in 2025? Or perhaps to invest in others—which is certainly not a bad thing by any means? Where are you striking your balance? Does the giving yet feel like receiving?
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Happy New Years. Now, get out there and make art, friends, and good choices.
Liana xx
*And if you don’t, at least come back with a glass bottle and a good story to tell.
