Twenty-twenty-five is here! What a year number. It feel very…Back to the Future…but, like, the future is here…and it’s not like I thought it would be.

I don’t ‘feel’ like a new year has begun. I don’t feel like I want to start new things or ‘resolve’ old things…even though there is a part that wants to review and revise my work/creative schedule, the part only wants to discover how to do everything I was doing before the break, before the ‘new’ year started, and not feel it so harsh-fully (new word alert) in my body. I was writing in my fancy new journal about the chaos of my work life…and then I stopped myself and thought, hold it, if I use the word ‘chaos’ to describe it, isn’t that, like, inviting chaos to the party? What if I didn’t think of it/consider it/feel it in my body as ‘chaos’…but rather, something else?

Journal

Let me first share with you my new journal. I’m very excited to have her in my life. She’s a big girl. A whole-lotta-woman.

She’s a hardcover, blank page journal that’s 13 inches in length and 10 inches in width. My previous journal was half the size, and it took me four months to fill her. I think this lady may take a bit longer to fill. I’ve had this journal for a few years. She’s been sitting patiently under my paper stash in my office. I got her at a Dollarama. They have so many lovely journals there! But, because of her size, I hadn’t chosen her. This year, this 2025 bananas-number year, feels like it wants to be BIG. So, I pulled her from under the pile, duster her off, and of course, added some stickers to her front and back cover, and added stickers to each page inside. My love for stickers will never change. The stickers are the Antiquarian Sticker Collection – Imaginarium. (All the Antiquarian sticker books are utterly divine. Shout out to Charis for gifting me one of these a few Christmases ago. Best gift ever. Like, for real.)

I love writing in my journal. I’ve been doing so for decades. It’s a ritual…a habit…a commitment that I’ll never stop. Over these holidays, I’ve filled pages and pages with thoughts…complaints, fears, reflections, oracle card guidance, stickers and love. And, I experienced the magic of finishing the previous journal on December 31st. Amazing, right? How it worked out that way? Powerful magic, indeed.

Seasons

Perhaps one reason why I’m not necessarily feeling a ‘change’ within me for the new year is because we are still very much in the season of Winter. I’m into seasons and cycles. I’m into following the moon – new, full and all the glorious waxing and wanings in between. I’m also in the female season of change that is peri-and-menopause, and the longer I’m trudging/crawling/weeping/bloating/raging/laughing/hoping through this season, it’s very difficult for me to do anything more than move through it/with it – and somehow, after the rage, understand and accept that this is truly an incredible miracle.

I’ve talked to many women ‘on the other side’, and they are thriving. This part of life – being in my 40s – is proving to be difficult in ways I never anticipated. I’m grateful that many more women are writing about this time of life. That more creatives are doing art and making films that show what it’s like. It’s important that we are aware of this change that happens to half of the population (!), and that we can hold each other in the knowing that it’s part of living, that it is a gift, that it can help with our ability to know ourselves, love more deeply inside and out, and find joy when the blood stops, the hormones subside/balance and then…and then…

We can navigate the place that is a kind-of soft disappearance…Disappearance though, that is more chrysalis than can’t-see-you. I had an experience at the mall wherein I was paying for a meal, and this person TWICE reached over me then bumped into me LIKE I WASN’T EVEN THERE. I was so enraged. And, that was after standing at the counter for minutes longer than the teens around me, and being served by a teen who kept calling me ‘ma’am’. I’m beginning to accept being called ‘ma’am’ and/or ‘lady’, but the experience of being literally moved physically because, clearly, the late-teens-teenager could not see me was appalling. I said, ‘Excuse me!’ very loudly, but still, I was shoved aside and reached over. It was gross.

It is a wild phenomenon ageing. There’s so much going on within the body, that for the body to be ‘ignored’ among other bodies is really something to…I don’t even know what! To experience and then figure out how to navigate. I feel like I’m constantly facing my rage, my feminism, my discomfort, my beliefs, my values, my ‘-isms’ as I shift personally into a space with a new ‘ism’ that I’m shifting into – ageism.

Pausing for Reflection

I’d like to take a moment here to pause because something is happening that I promised myself I’d write about. Perhaps in the writing it out, I will be able to have a different relationship with it. So, as I write about my own challenges, there’s a very loud, very aggressive voice – The Aggressor – saying the following: oh stop complaining. You’re a privileged white woman. You’re educated and middle class. You’re able-bodied and heterosexual. You’re a colonizer and you have no idea what it means to suffer.

This part has been a contender in my mind and moving around in my body since I was blasted and criticized on-line and in my life when I was poet laureate. It’s been nearly three years, and yet this part continues to show up on a daily basis. I don’t feel afraid of it like I did before. I know it can’t hurt me unless I let it. And letting it is the act of allowing it to stop me from creating, from speaking my truth, my sharing my writing.

I let it. I do.

Do you know that each night (almost every), as my body is falling asleep, my head is a chaotic party of voices? The poet likes to strut at this point. Tossing out gorgeous lines and ideas. And I tell myself that if the idea is so great, I’ll remember it in the morning. No, I don’t write the thoughts down. I can’t. My body stops working. But the poet persists and I feel excited and grateful, and I know that I will remember what I need to remember in the morning and write it down…but then this aggressor swoops in and reminds me that it doesn’t matter what the poet offers, if I write it out (ha – good luck with that), then what? You’ll submit it? It won’t get published because what you have to say doesn’t matter.at.all.

Even as I write this, the part is standing so strongly, proud and powerful, on my heart that there’s an ache. In fact, my heart aches a lot. I think grief is there too, for who I was at that time, for the me that created in what feels like a totally different realm – the Before. Being called incapable, silly, less than, racist, and a slew of other daggers, changed my interior relationship with my creative self. I can’t really explain in words the devastating impact it had on my body and mind and heart…

Over time, I was able to write again. To trust the poet/writer inside me. To trust my body and be grateful that it was able to uphold its dignity and remain in its integrity throughout the devastation…but the experience I’m having now is that I don’t know if I can write poetry again with the freedom I’d experienced Before. Or write anything – and share it – like I’d been doing up to that point. I’d like to assert that when I wrote Before, I did so with all the empathy, awareness, and intentions for kindness and love that I could. Up to that point, I felt…safe and surrounded by people who created with the same intentions. But then…that landscape shifted. Or maybe, it was the same as it always was…and I’d been thrust under a new/different judgement.

And the Aggressor smiles and says: Welcome to our world.

And I nod and put my hand on my heart and sigh. And my parts, the writer and the poet feel very, very tired. Perhaps a bit ashamed, though my other parts assert there is nothing to be ashamed about. I used to blog with such purity, now it seems the filters anchor my thoughts enough that I keep many in silence. I want to express a solidarity with humanity, its emotions, its vast and voluminous bodily experiences…but I am still afraid enough to hold back or to quiet my voice…

I am a body that erupts in paradox.

If I ask myself why I continue to share, to blog, to write poems and stories and submit them – because I do despite all the words I’ve just shared – I have to go allll the wayyyy down to the deeps…beneath all the parts, beyond my actual body, to the energy that I firmly believe unites us all…come on, we can say it together: love. And I wish it was as simple as trusting each other for exchanges in kind intention…but it’s not, is it? (And I’m denying the part that’s telling me to delete this entire section…)

The internet is a colosseum that frightens me even though I know it is full of more love than hate…I feel teeny-tiny inside of it. And when I think about shifting my size within it, knowing that much of it has to do with algorithm, timing, luck and more luck…I fear I don’t know what I’d do if faced with sizing up.

And so….

Inside this soul, a body that is abuzz with paradox, with wobbly-bits and poems and words and emotions that gurgle like my guts before a reading. My insides are in constant motion and I wonder why I’m always so tired. Add to everything I’ve written in this section, the reality that my hormones are in mighty flux, that my literal cells are changing and soon I will end the cycle of body-for-the-miracle-of-childbirth to…something else.

Surrender

I can surrender to the worry and the anxiety and the Aggressor and the rejections and the past and the future and the grief and the fear and anger and the rage and the and the and the… I can surrender in a way that is ecstatic. That is like how I feel in a great big orgasm – so utterly in my body that I feel my dazzle and star shine, and shudder in throes of a body that is able to feel so damn much.

I can surrender to the parts and their individuality. I can surrender to the things the say, the opinions they have, and the rate and sound with which they communicate. I can surrender to the worry that someone is reading this and judging me, rolling eyes, denying my grief/suffering in a comparative storm.

I can surrender to comparative suffering which is the constant ache in my thudding heart – the human phenomenon that makes me feel alien.

I can surrender to death, which I think, is probably the leader of all the parts who function in fear.

I can surrender to how I look and to what that means to those around me, to how they treat me, to what they think they know about me.

I can surrender to the extraordinary fact that there are millions of damn extraordinary writers in the world today. When I read, I feel ecstatic. I am so grateful to be reading and to be part of a story or a poem as a companion. Even when at the same time a part tells me to stop writing because this book is so damn perfect. A part says why write? What you love already exists to give you ecstasy. Even when that Aggressor pounces on my heart and says I am not allowed write this story, quit now.

What happens when I surrender is orgasmic. Hilarious. Star-dazzled. Wonderfully hysterical.

What happens when I surrender is a my internal collective: bones, veins, cells, parts – all vibrate at the same time in unconditional love.

What happens when I surrender is everyone is at the same table, sharing a meal. All my parts are invited to be in attendance, and oh, it much easier to love them when they are invited instead of denied entrance.

What happens when I surrender is that I don’t have to understand. I don’t have to understand the whys of other people’s actions or words. I don’t have to understand thousands of years of human suffering. I don’t have to understand war, famine, weather, money, technology – it all coexists in my cells whether or not I understand how or why.

When I surrender I am giving myself permission to feel alive and to accept the body I am alive in, and to wink at death, steady and ready nearby, and say: not today, thank you, I have more loving to do.

Mind you…I will forget how to surrender. I will forget a thousand times a day.

But good goddess, it’s in me to remember. So I’ll do my best to remember.

‘Tis the season for a beautiful journal, a continuation of seasonal change, and a devotion to surrendering ecstatically and remembering with patience….for surrendering to chaos and twirling in the orgasm within it.