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10 highs and 10 lows of 2023

This has been a strange year. Utterly horrific in some respects yet deeply formative and quite beautiful in others. Here’s an attempt to summarise in a tradition I’ll repeat next year and beyond:

10 highs of 2023:

  1. The quantity of interesting, creative and lovely people who have entered my life in the last year
  2. The first week I spent with my cat after her terminal diagnosis, agonising but also one of the most beautiful and formative experiences of my life
  3. Discovering what I’ll be spending the next decade of my life exploring, initiated through writing the first draft of a book in the space of a few months
  4. Finding spirituality for the first time in my life at a weird intersection between stoicism, buddhism and lacanian psychoanalysis
  5. Enjoying a sense of exuberant physical mastery through lifting weights, swimming and walking (even if it didn’t last very long, as I explain below)
  6. Taking on the role of literary executor for my mentor, which has helped me make sense of the painful circumstances of her death
  7. The abundance of wonderful cinema that has been released over the last year, which I struggled to distil into a top ten here
  8. Finally getting my divorce confirmed by the clogged up court system, bringing this protracted story to a close and helping me move onto the next chapter
  9. Looking death squarely in the face for the first time in my life and coming out of it a vastly stronger person: “looked the devil in his face like ‘motherfucker do your worst’”
  10. Becoming deeply confident in my own intellectual and organisational capabilities, as well as the necessity of the (fallibly) reparative life this makes possible

10 lows of 2023:

  1. The death of my cat after living with her for almost fifteen years, particularly the final few days which were the most painful experience of my life
  2. Waking up after the cat I got in my early 20s died at the age of fifteen, suddenly realising I was in the early stages of middle age
  3. The death of my mentor happening so quickly that I didn’t get the chance to properly say goodbye
  4. Bringing the story of my marriage to a close and being forced to accept that living a reparative life necessitates a willingness to recognise what cannot be repaired
  5. My emotional unavailability for significant periods of this year as I’ve been grappling with 1-4 and how that’s hindered the renewal of old friendships and the cementing of new ones
  6. Tearing my rotor cuff after a idiotic day in which I added 20kg to my bench press and swam a mile, entirely short-circuiting the aforementioned exuberant physical mastery
  7. Being utterly careless with the feelings of someone who meant the world to me, destroying our connection in the process
  8. Grappling with the black pill I reluctantly starting engaging with during the pandemic, struggling to find a way to combine a realistic appraisal of how fucked the world is with my deep instinct to sustain hopefulness in response to it
  9. The sheer extent of the social suffering I’m surrounded with
  10. The structural unravelling of higher education in the UK and the strategic impasse which UCU is stuck in