2022 was mid.
I don’t really mind that it has been mid personally, because when I break it down - copywriting, editing, strategising, planning, lecturing, mentoring, mostly mid feature writing, some good and some mid columns, a small book that is mid; separation, hostel living, haemorrhaging money, moving in with (very nice) strangers, death, more death, “unprovoked” panic attacks, and a really hard think about personal health - it has also been full. full by necessity, full without choice, but thankfully full with opportunity to keep me afloat too. I’m still in the game, and hopefully I can make things less mid next year.
I feel like the vast majority of the media industry had a mid year. Mid because it’s caught between a pandemic and a recession, mid because we’re waiting for stories to untangle themselves out of self-isolation (still), perhaps. But all the same, a lot of mid on the timeline, in the papers, on the websites, in my inbox which solely exists to collate newsletters (a not-so mid tip for you all).
Will it change for the better next year? Can any of us be fucking bothered to do anything but keep surviving? If we have internal resources to be motivated, can we find the external ones (see: cash and time) to make the things we want to happen, happen?
I have no idea, though I suppose I’ll hope for more quality and good. To not have to stick to pure necessity, to get creative again, to feel ambitious. To feel like I’m ten, riding down a hill on my bike, and my bike is going so fast that it’s shaking, and I’m thinking I could crash, and I am thrilled. Next year I want to be shaking with my feet on the peddles, not peddling, just daring to let gravity suck me into the gravel. I want to be doing that, instead of being on the straight peddling at full pace, against the friction of deflated tires, almost running late. Almost being late is the worst way to exist: You’re on time in person, but you’re taking a few minutes to slow the heart-rate down, to recompose yourself, which causes you to sweat, which causes you to feel you look dishevelled, which all adds to the fatigue of racing to even be on time. This letter is about to get very mid, so we’ll leave it at that. I’m looking forward to a new year, and this time for the first time in a while, it does feel like a new passage of time is about to come.
Maybe this letter will become something not as mid for me to write (you don’t have to read it). Next time I’ll collate some good things, to balance the grump of this one.
The hope keeps you alive, they say.
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This was in part, a test to see if this letter still works, but if you’ve read it cheers all the same, and as you got this far, I’ll add that I fucking sucked at riding a bike. I crashed a lot when I rode as a kid: I have had my right eyebrow butterfly stitched back up because I fell, my glasses snapped and carved their way into my stupid head. And the last time I rode a bike that actually moved (I like a spinclass still) I fractured my elbow in two places. That was New Year’s Day, 2018. Which, now that I’m thinking about it, makes that whole paragraph about wanting to freewheel down a hill fast, reckless.