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:
- The quantity of interesting, creative and lovely people who have entered my life in the last year
- 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
- 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
- Finding spirituality for the first time in my life at a weird intersection between stoicism, buddhism and lacanian psychoanalysis
- 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)
- Taking on the role of literary executor for my mentor, which has helped me make sense of the painful circumstances of her death
- The abundance of wonderful cinema that has been released over the last year, which I struggled to distil into a top ten here
- 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
- 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’”
- 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:
- 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
- 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
- The death of my mentor happening so quickly that I didn’t get the chance to properly say goodbye
- 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
- 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
- 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
- Being utterly careless with the feelings of someone who meant the world to me, destroying our connection in the process
- 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
- The sheer extent of the social suffering I’m surrounded with
- The structural unravelling of higher education in the UK and the strategic impasse which UCU is stuck in
