Last updated on 22 January 2023

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

This year has been a bitch, a proverbial train wreck: A divorce and an aborted business partnership the most epic of failures that marked the year 2022.

This year was even harder than last. Never have I been so glad to turn the page on a year as I am today.

I know I am not alone in reflecting on the previous year. The interweb is full of “best of” and “year in review” essays, Instagram reels, and blog posts. Yet, here I am offering my own. I hope it doesn’t come off as clichéd.

Some of what has happened are of course on me. Taking full responsibility for how one shows up is solely one’s task, isn’t it?

Just as with everything in life, some good-to-great things also came about and I’m trying to appreciate them as a part of the dumpster fire that was my 2022:

-a door has opened to more authentic and closer relationships with my three daughters, and with a few friends;

-healing of deeply embedded and unrealized childhood trauma has begun now that there is space and it has my full attention;

-clarity has surfaced from my darkest corners about who I truly am and what I aspire to be in areas like relationships, career, finances, and health;

-like clarity, my need for simplicity also has become very apparent;

-this year has unveiled some wonderful books and music, which have always been a part of my life and seem more significant this year;

-walking, cycling, and yoga have become my go-to for movement.

First, a few good reads and listens

Each year my goal is to read at least two books a month. I have never eclipsed that goal. But thanks to Audible.com, I’ve been able to blend hard book reading with listening and cruise through more impactful books than ever before.

Books.

Some of my favorites this year have been from the Harry Bosch series by Michael Connelly. These are especially good on Audible because Titus Welliver, who plays Harry Bosch in the Amazon Prime series, often appears as the voice of Bosch. This year I listened to or read six Bosch novels, including 9 Dragons in which Bosch goes up against a Hong Kong triad and risks everything. Connelly is a master crime storyteller and sometimes just getting lost in Bosch’s world made living in mine easier.

Another compelling read this year was Heartbreak, by Florence Williams. Part memoir, part science journal, Williams explores the immense turmoil breakups and divorce cause as she experienced when her husband of 25 years left her. In trying to understand her loss, Williams reveals the best science of why heartbreak hurts emotionally and physically so much, even using herself as a guinea pig to test for biomarkers of grief and loneliness, and challenges what we think we know about the endings of relationships.

Like my most coveted books of last year, The Alchemist by Paulo Coehlo and Allie Larkin’s The People We Keep, another novel stirred me like no other. By far the best book I read this year was A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles. (A previous version of this essay failed to mention Allie Larkin’s wonderful book. My apologies to Ms. Larkin).

Towles tells the story of Count Alexander Rostov, a wealthy aristocrat in pre-revolutionary Russia, who is sentenced to house arrest for life by the Bolsheviks when they take control of the country in 1922. In Towles’ beautiful, erudite prose, Rostov lives a full life within the confines of the Metropol Hotel amid an intriguing and exquisitely-rendered cast of characters. Time and again I had to reread passages of Towles’ incredible turn of phrase. Often it was just a sentence that was so magnificently crafted it stopped me in my tracks. I recommend also listening to this on Audible as Towles’ writing comes alive like nothing you’ve heard.

Runner-up this year is Fredrik Backman’s A Man Called Ove. Another novel worth listening to as well as reading, the story of a surly Swedish man gently unfolds to the most tender of endings. Backman shifts between the past and present in Ove’s life to reveal the events that led him to a potentially tragic denouement.

Music.

If I wasn’t listening to books, some stirring music came out of my Sonos. This was the year I finally got a subscription to Spotify and it deepened my music library. (I know, I’m so late to the game!)

Early in the year, I ran into a piece by double bassist Garth Stevenson. If there was a single song among the many I discovered in 2022, it was Stevenson’s “The Southern Sea.” An iTunes review praises Southern Sea as “the aural equivalent of effortlessly swimming underwater without ever needing to come up for air.”

Here’s the piece on YouTube: 

I have the same love for this piece that I felt the first time I heard Explosions In the Sky’s Your Hand in Mine and Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings and played it on repeat over and over. When I was down, I would light a couple of candles and sit in the near-dark listening. It’s not that the Southern Sea made me feel better as much as feel down to my soul. It was as if I crashing into shoals and then back out to the open sea, alone on some epic journey of self-discovery. There is plenty of good music out there, but rarely has a single piece so captivated me.

Well, until I also ran into this piece by Kin Thiessen on Insight Timer, a meditation and music app that has been like a best friend this year.

This is Kin Thiessen’s Hope. Like The Southern Sea, this also is an instrumental on a stringed instrument (a violin). But unlike Stevenson’s piece, Hope always lifts my mood.

These pieces don’t need lyrics to offer expression. One can feel the message embedded in each note.

I’m not someone who listens only to instrumental music. There are other great tracks I discovered this year, both sad and uplifting songs by an array of artists that were new to me.

Besides rediscovering John Mayer, Coldplay, Moby, and John Klemmer, and adding in Fink and The War on Drugs, I ran into Donovan Woods’ “Being Together,” Girlhouse’s Concussion, Voices by Talos, Elder Islands’ Bamboo, Tidal Wave by Old Sea Brigade, Never Know from Ghostly Kisses and Freya Ridings’ Lost Without You. She does heartbreak.

Clans and circles

The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some diffference that you have lived and lived well.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is said when one door closes, another opens. The past year has meant a re-opening of doors for me to my three daughters. And I’m immensely grateful to reconnect with the young women they’ve become.

The “difference that you have lived” can be felt–and seen–in our children as they become adults. In the years since their mom and I split, I lost track of how I could impact them as their father. To be honest, I could have used a manual on parenting. Now that they are adults and on their own, I can look back to when they were younger and see how I didn’t step into my responsibility to have difficult conversations and hard boundaries. Not to enforce some stupid rules, but to show how much I loved them. My children paid for my incompetence as a parent. For our children, knowing they are loved is our number one job, even when it means choosing the harder, less comfortable path. You can’t play catch up on these moments but that’s exactly what I’m trying to do now.

I’m working on being more present, more thoughtful, and more of what I think I should be as a father to my daughters. Wish me luck.

I’m working on being more present, more thoughtful, and more of what I think I should be as a father to my daughters. Wish me luck.

As I’ve aged, my circle has become tighter. I’m discerning the difference between friends and acquaintances. Nothing against having lots of acquaintances. We are built, after all, for connections. But over the past year, as I leaned on them for counsel and support, some friendships have become more aligned and more important. None of us gets out of here alive and science correlates longevity with one’s sociability. Meaning, those of us who have more and stronger friendships live longest.

People talk about dysfunctional families; I’ve never seen any other kind.

Sue Grafton

The Ties That Bind

In my latest podcast on Interesting Humans, my friend Gordon Darr speaks of a horrible incident as a college student that forever changed the trajectory of his life. He never understood just how big an impact until he faced the trauma the incident created and did the work to heal.

The shattering of my marriage over the past year triggered something similar in me. I’m still mining my subconscious for the memories of the emotional landscape created by my parents. I’ve cataloged hundreds of hours with my therapist recounting the violence and anger my father rained down on my sister and me–mostly my sister–and my mother’s emotional absence due to prolonged bouts of headaches and depression. I’ve shared with my therapist some particularly violent episodes with my father that reverberate even five decades later.

This is my trauma. It affected how I approached personal and professional relationships my entire adult life. With my girlfriends, wives, and even my daughters. The dichotomy is that the unearthing of this trauma was a reaction to my marriage breaking up and it contributed to its ending.

We all had some difficult times as children. And certainly, there were good times in my childhood. I’ve accepted that my parents mostly did the best they could.

This is not that. This is watching your father beat the crap out of your sister when you were 12 and not being able to do a thing about it because, well, you are still a kid. This is your parents not ever addressing the horror you just witnessed. This is holding your Mom’s hand as she died of cancer when you were 22 and your family evaporating because she was the glue.

I carried this into my parenting and have dumped tons of my unhealed shit onto my kids because of it. They will have their own trauma to unravel because I didn’t before their mom and I became parents.

I carried this into my parenting and have dumped tons of my unhealed shit onto my kids. They will have their own trauma to unravel because I didn’t before their mom and I became parents.

Our behavior, including our responses under duress, is rooted in our childhood, particularly in our relationships with our parents. If we didn’t feel safe, as I didn’t, we can carry behaviors into adulthood that interfere with our ability to connect in healthy ways. This is true across the spectrum of relationships, from personal to professional.

This is trauma with a little “t”, versus the big “T” trauma of violence, sexual abuse, assault, and racism, Though you could argue Big T trauma’s impact is much greater, psychologists say trauma is trauma: when situations overwhelm our nervous systems’ ability to cope, that is trauma. It’s my own stuff to deal with, but we don’t talk enough about the stuff breaks us..When someone speaks of trauma from childhood, we don’t need to judge them. We need to listen.

Peeling back the veil.

Despite 2022 being among the most difficult years of my life, I’m learning to see the truths the Universe is dropping on me, truths that I ignored for decades. I’m still a work in progress but I’m discarding activities, efforts, old habits, and ideas that don’t serve the me I aspire to be.

This includes spending less time worrying about what people think. And I’m learning to question the shitty first thoughts which come the most automatically. I’m turning off the autopilot. With as off the rails as life has gone, I need to do things differently. It starts with how I think.

All that we are is the result of what we have thought.

Buddha

I’ve looked back and noted when it felt as if the ground fell away or as if I was a child among adults. Through therapy, I’ve come to see there is a version of me, whom I call Attach, often reacting out of a need for safety that was created when he, or rather I, was young.

Processing both the events of the past year and my childhood has created a kind of heightened desire for feeling safe, what I call my “fragility radar.” My therapist explains this reaction is common with people who live with childhood trauma.

To cope, I’m simplifying my life by building routines. Once someone who winged almost everything, I have created routines for my days to combat the noise in my head. I’ve drawn inward this past year as protection. I’m less social and more likely to spend days in solitude. This also is one way people with trauma react.

When we don’t speak plainly of the darker parts of our histories, our fears, our hangups, or our fuckups, we trivialize ourselves.

I am not sharing this deeply personal portrait to garner your sympathy, When we don’t speak plainly of the darker parts of our histories, our fears, our hangups, or our fuckups, we trivialize ourselves. Maybe out of some sense of propriety. Society expects us to buck up, pull up our own bootstraps, quit whining, and move on. Not draw too much attention to ourselves.

This has been my most difficult year ever. I own my fuckups. But I hope by being this transparent, this vulnerable, someone might see some of themselves in my challenges. And might be moved to action. Whether that is calling a friend, going to therapy, journaling, or something else that leads to taking some action and responsibility for one’s own well-being.

As someone who has spent too much time in their own head their entire life, believe me, taking action is what leads to feeling better.

No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.

Buddha

This could have been a simple review of books and music for 2022. But that would not have been my truth. As Ghandi said, “Silence becomes cowardice when occasion demands speaking out the whole truth and acting accordingly.”

My truth is my divorce. It is my aborted business partnership. It is processing my childhood trauma. It is also drawing closer to my daughters and some good friends. My truth is that through something falling apart I’m working on allowing something else in that I hope helps me grow into a better, more whole person.

If the word for 2022 was “fucktastrophy”* the word for this year is “Appreciation.” As in, where I’ve been, who I am, and the journey that is my life.

Until soon.

*fucktastrophy: this is not my invention. I’ve borrowed it from a friend who borrowed it from a friend….