What The Year Has Taken, What The Stars Have Returned: A Geography of Becoming.

2024 and beyond

There are different kinds of grief in this world. Some arrive announced, wrapped in black garments and sympathy cards, in awkward hugs and condolences, in the practiced dance of mourning we've all learned to perform. But then there's the other kind – the kind that comes like a thief in the night, stealing not life but living, not breath but breathing. This is the grief I've carried this year, a constant companion whose weight I've learned to bear, whose rhythm I've learned to walk to.

It moves through you like tide water, this grief of Self, this decimation of what you thought you knew. Twelve moons have witnessed the unraveling of primary bonds, each lunar cycle bringing another thread pulled loose from the tapestry of certainty. Even innocence – that delicate thing we think we've lost long ago – reveals itself to have been present all along, if only in its final departure. At this age, who knew there were still drops of it left to lose?

The words that once flowed like river water have become precious things to be held close, kept safe from the well-meaning hands of others. The creative spirit, usually so eager for connection, has sought sanctuary in silence. There's been a turning inward, away from the performance of sharing, away from the careful dance of feedback and growth. Even praise has felt like intrusion. What strange alchemy is this, that makes even gold feel heavy?s to move

The landmarks we once navigated by – accolades, achievements, the familiar territories of industry and identity – have shifted their meaning, their magnetic pull weakening against the force of something else. Something raw and unnamed. Perhaps this is what happens when you transplant yourself across oceans, when you birth not just a child but a new version of yourself, when blood ties prove themselves thinner than water, when death takes our teachers, when love demands reinvention.

Inside every woman lives a girl who remembers. She remembers the first time she learned to make herself smaller, to speak more softly, to doubt the wild wisdom she was born with. She remembers the adults who feared her potential so much they taught her to fear it too. This year has been her resurrection, emerging through catastrophe, through the painful remembering of boundaries never set, voice never used, power never claimed. My grandfather knew something of this – this fierce fidelity to self that outlasts all opinions, all expectations. His passing feels like both loss and legacy, a torch passed in the dark.

But grief, that great teacher, never travels alone. While one hand empties, the other fills. Two new ventures have taken root in fertile soil. A small boy learnthrough water, conquering his fears one splash at a time. New lives have announced themselves in the bodies of loved ones, new homes have opened their doors, new dreams have taken flight. And forty rotations around the sun were marked not by what was lost, but by what was found – chosen family, showing up like constellations in the night sky, their love a map back to center, their presence a reminder that sometimes family is not what we're born into, but what we build, choice by choice, act of love by act of love.

This is how we learn to carry both emptiness and abundance, how we learn to dance with grief while celebrating joy. This is how we grow beyond the boundaries of who we thought we were, into the vast territory of who we're becoming. This is how we learn to mother ourselves while mothering others, to hold space for both endings and beginnings, to recognize that sometimes the greatest act of self-preservation is allowing ourselves to be transformed by what breaks us open.

And in this year of personal unraveling, the world too has shown its broken places. Screens flood with images that should never exist outside of nightmares – babies with empty bellies and hollowed eyes, toddlers carrying siblings who will never wake, small bodies beneath rubble that was once called home. We witness genocide being sanitized as "war," watch as funds stripped from our already thin paychecks fuel the systematic erasure of a people, all while we shout our dissent into what feels like void. The stark hypocrisy of acknowledging one genocide while turning blind eyes to those whose skin matches the night sky – my own people's ongoing decimation swept under the rug of selective memory.

Yet even in this darkness, there have been moments of ancient light. New friendships have bloomed with women whose souls feel like old stars finally realigning – their eyes holding the warmth of a thousand previous lifetimes. How do we explain this magnetism to those who haven't felt it? This instant recognition, this bone-deep knowing that we've danced this dance before, in other bodies, in other times? Words fail to capture the homecoming found in a glance, in a laugh that echoes across centuries. You know who you are, soul-sisters found again in this turning of the wheel.

And perhaps that's what this year has really been – not just a decimation, but a dedication. Not just an ending, but an opening. A reminder that even in our forties, even in our fracturing, even in our collective grief and rage, we are still becoming. Still learning. Still finding new ways to be whole. Still reaching across time and space to find each other again and again.