Ann Friedman - Our collective 2022

This collective reflection is usually my favorite newsletter of the year, and 2022 is no exception. Hundreds of you submitted details about your past 12 months! You made me feel more connected to the world and to the complexities of the human experience. In gratitude, I made you this scroll-able list of the books we read and loved.

Next week, another collective edition about everything we want more of—and less of—in 2023. Then we'll be back to regular programming.

Turns out that stress is cumulative. Our bodies were screaming SLOW DOWN!!! We left social media en masse. We unsubscribed and deleted. We abandoned cities and vices and decades-long marriages. And jobs. Oh boy, did we leave jobs. We switched careers. We set boundaries. We retired and had a lot more time for scuba diving. We went from hosting dinner parties in our own amazing apartment to income-less in our mom's condo. We lost creative momentum but gained some peace. We started thinking of ourselves as a human being, not a human doing.

We debated whether or not to have a kid. We grew a baby in our body. We tried to get pregnant but didn't. We took steps to not ever become pregnant by supporting our partner's vasectomy. We froze our eggs. We had two abortions, which took a physical and emotional toll we didn’t expect. We really accepted being a "good enough mother" instead of a "good mother." We raised a newborn while going through chemo, surgery, 16 rounds of radiation. We became our tween nephew's primary guardian. We had a wrenching best-friend breakup and wondered when and how the chasm between child-free and child-having women gets too wide to bridge. We worked on forgiving our parents.

Covid finally came for us. We understood loneliness in a new way. We eased back into the world, and could finally travel to meet our partner’s family, could finally see our beloved friends after years apart. We felt abandoned by everyone who gave up on pandemic precautions. We struggled to get to know our mind and body again after long Covid. "In sickness and in health" really means something to us now. We were there in the room when our partner’s dad died. Everything and everyone we thought was strong is actually quite frail. How little control we have over these bags of bones!

We let the grief move through us. There were beautiful people who didn't love us back. We fell head over heels into our most secure and silly and affectionate relationship ever. We were single for the first time, and wow was it liberating. We watched our loneliness dissolve. We stopped trying to make ourselves smaller.
 
We scrambled to get our parents out of Kyiv and had to figure out how to deal with photos of our elementary school being bombed. We got involved in union organizing. We phonebanked.

Our younger sibling actually took our advice?! We remembered how important it is to go out and dance. We got bangs and it was… a lot. We took fancy pictures with our cats. We experimented with hair removal techniques and foam rollers and water aerobics. We microdosed LSD and popped weed gummies and stopped drinking. We picked up a snake—a big one! (Not a euphemism.) We finally admitted we are lactose intolerant. We lathered, rinsed, repeated.

We learned that leading a fulfilling life in your 20s sometimes requires sacrificing stability. We turned 30, and travelled internationally alone, and it was scary and thrilling and fun. We realized that being deep in our 30s is so fucking delicious. We turned 40, and felt the midlife push to spend our limited time with the people and things that are most meaningful to us. We turned 50, and it's a VERY strange feeling knowing that there are more years behind than ahead.

If it's not a "hell yes," we realized, it's "no." We are tired. We somehow we ended up in the same place as the end of last year, and are also somehow a completely new person. In our notes app, “2022 Intentions” is still blank. We’re ok with that. We were surprised by what happened when we pointed ourselves in a direction and then let go. We started to think about how to return to the sea.

“You’re doing your best,” we said quietly to ourselves. "You're doing your best."

PSA.