It’s so hard to be a person. I used to feel like an alien trying to approximate human speech when I communicated with people, as though the words in my head transformed on their way to my mouth and came out sounding not remotely the way I intended them to. I blamed myself for this failure to make myself understood, spent hours dissecting it in therapy and desperately asking myself and my therapist why I was so fundamentally lacking. What was the missing thing in me that would make me whole, make me real, make me a person other people would love? Because to me, being understood, communicating on a shared wavelength, was what being loved meant. It still is, a little bit.

Once I began a poem fragment with the line, “What is a body but a collection of traumas?” I never finished it, and now I’m glad because while I vividly remember the feeling I was attempting to channel, I wouldn’t like to have that particular record of it to look back on now. I believed that my body was an inconvenience both to me and to anyone else who had to interact with it, that it was something to be tolerated, a burden to bear. The concept of loving my body was not only foreign to me, but actively repulsive. What was there to love? I didn’t even want to coexist with my physical self. That C.S. Lewis quote about not being a body, but being a soul who had a body resonated with me so deeply because it offered me a way to think of my body as a separate entity, not an integral part of who and how I was in the world.

Something I repeated often during this period of my life was that if I were someone else, I wouldn’t be friends with me.

When my doctor tried to impress upon me the seriousness of my physical health issues, I felt a vague, disembodied dread that I couldn’t tap into in any useful way, and I always found myself thinking, wow, that’s terrible for whoever she’s talking about, a person who is certainly not me.

I could go on, could list many more examples of ways in which I removed myself from myself, ways I found to estrange myself from my body, ways I punished myself for the sin of being human. But that’s not what this is about, or at least it’s not the part of the story I currently occupy and the deep sadness I feel for that version of myself is not something I want to roll around in right now.

The point is that lately I’ve been trying to connect with myself as a physical being, to learn my terrain and map my way to bodylove. I think I’m currently at body neutrality, and that feels like the place where I’m going to make my home for a good long while, and I’ve had to accept that it’s okay. It’s okay if I can’t take part in body positivity for myself right now, and it’s okay if I can’t love my physical self the way I’ve come to love my mental and emotional selves, and it’s okay if I rest in the space of just not hating myself. And here is why.

Because it’s so hard to be a person, and one of the ways I’ve found to cope with it is to care for my body. Not to love it, perhaps, but to view it as a small, scared, needy creature, to ask what it needs, what would make it feel safe and soothed and tended to, and to do those things. There is no shame or judgment when I’m asking these questions and carrying out the subsequent tasks, only kindness. Only gentleness. Only understanding, because there’s never enough understanding to make me feel seen, so I’m learning to give it to myself. I feel emotionally disregulated and I put on my favorite Moroccan rose body butter. I feel anxious or stressed and I massage nail strengthener into my nails and cuticles, even though it has yet to have a noticeable effect. I want to cry from exhaustion and I take a long hot shower, which is something I used to hate and dread and has now become a treat I give to myself. I feel hungry and I ask myself if it’s genuine hunger or if it’s boredom, or loneliness, or sadness, and if it is genuine hunger, I feed myself things I like and feel good about eating, which doesn’t have to mean healthy but does have to mean that I won’t feel worse for having eaten them. I feel angry or frustrated and I move my body about it, channel it into the tension release of my feet hitting the ground and my breath coming faster and my heart rate increasing.

It’s not a perfect system. It’s not the solution to all my problems and it hasn’t led me to a place where I love my body. But what it gives me is peace about living in a body, living with a body. What it gives me is the feeling that my body and I are on the same team, working toward the same ultimate goal. What it gives me is a sense of being rooted in my body, of no longer hovering outside of it waiting to be let in or sent away. I feel calmer, more grounded when I treat my body as something worthy of care, something worthy of tenderness and soft touch, something that isn’t a shameful burden to hide and avoid, but rather something alive in the world that deserves good things.

It’s so hard to be a person, and I don’t need to be a force working against myself to make it even harder. I sit in the sun on a perfect day, feel it shining on my face, feel my soul exhaling in relief, I put on a dress that makes me feel like a version of myself I only get to be on my best days, I run a brush through my hair until it falls soft and heavy on my shoulders, I stretch in the morning before I get out of bed. I do all these things and I think, this is being alive. This is physicality without strings. This is why I was made. This is what I deserve.

This is what I deserve.

I am sitting here in the quiet of my living room with a cat on my lap, waiting for Italian food to get to me, and I’m thinking, I wish you were here.

It’s a bittersweet feeling, missing people. The bitter is obvious, the lack of a presence you crave, the empty space next to you, the undisturbed air, your empty hand. The sweet is more elusive, but I’ve come to find it beautiful in its way. There’s something lovely in the knowledge that you value someone so much that you want them to be near you, so much that you feel a tangible difference when they’re not. It’s so nice to know people who have burrowed their way so deeply into your heart that they live there even when their bodies are far away. It’s so nice to sit and sigh and think of a day in the future when a person not currently here will be here again. How that will feel, the texture of the happiness it will bring.

I think it’s a little bit luxurious to press on that ache, gently, just enough to remember it’s there. To wallow in the sadness that isn’t unbearable, just sad enough to remind you that you’re alive. To remind you that you still feel and that those feelings live close enough to the surface to prick you just a little, just sometimes, just in the moments of rest when your mind wanders to what would soothe.

I grew up on the internet, is the thing. I built the home of myself from digital communications across miles and oceans and wires and signals. I peopled that home with friends I learned to love without ever having felt their physical presence. I’m accustomed to missing, to imagining a time when it would be different, when I could hug my friends and lean against them and share counter space and couch space and intermingle my things with theirs for a week or however long a visit lasted. I know how to navigate this. But I used to resent it. I felt the injustice of it, how unfair that I was denied the company of people who understood me, whose wavelengths matched mine. What cruel god dreamed up a world where I lived in one state and almost everyone I loved lived in others, or other countries across whole oceans, even?

Now I view it differently. I’ve learned to find peace in it, and, even if there are days when I feel like screaming because I just want to exist alongside someone who makes me feel safe and known and held, I go on drawing in breath and with each inhale, I color in the outline of a world where my people are mingling in shared space and I’m in the middle of it all, and with each exhale, I send out into the universe the certainty that one day this world and that one will meet. One day my friend who loves cooking and feeding the masses will occupy my kitchen, and as the smell of what she makes to nourish us fills up the house, my friend who is gifted with music will serenade us, and my friend who loves to write realities into being will tell us stories, and I will sit and hold the hand of my friend/more than friend/kindred spirit who defies explanation while another friend who has a magic touch with fashion and aesthetics will braid my hair. One day we will all touch and be touched and we will all love and be loved, and the miles will cease to exist and there will be no more need to let a few tears fall because someone I love is too far for me to put my arms around them.

But for this moment, the Italian food has come and I have eaten and put away leftovers, and I’m telling myself a story where you sat at my kitchen table with me and we used two forks for one dish, passed the bread back and forth, talked over each other in our excitement to share our lives and laughed at each other’s jokes and maybe, just occasionally, just lightly, my arm brushed yours, our knees bumped. Maybe, gently, we relearned how it feels to be near enough to bounce off of each other and come back together. And maybe, quietly but firmly, in a moment between bites, I said “I love you” and you smiled and said it back.

maybe that’s all we need. Maybe that’s all anyone needs. Maybe one day that story will leap off the page and burst into life. Maybe if I begin, “Once upon a time, there lived a girl who loved so hard, so big, that it altered space and time,” maybe the rest will unwind before me, a road I can walk with my two real feet and at the end of it, a door I can open with my two real hands and someone on the other side waiting to say hello, where have you been, it’s about time.

Death Cab for Cutie sings, “So this is the new year, and I don’t feel any different.” It’s an arbitrary date, one that doesn’t mean much unless you want it to. And God, I want it to. I want to be different, always, longing for transformation into something other, greater than what I have been. I make grand pronouncements and come up with elaborate plans for how I’ll get to where I want to be, and do they ever come to fruition? No. In this way I’m just like everyone else who pledges to lose weight, eat healthier, exercise more, read books, do anything they can think of to better the self.

This year, I don’t want to make resolutions based in denial. Denial of myself or denial of the things that bring me pleasure and joy. This year, I want to be more, but not because I have so far been less. I want to be more because I deserve more. I want to be more because I carry within myself the capacity for everything I’ve ever longed for, and I’m tired of waiting patiently for the universe to deliver to me. I’m tired of manifesting and praying and hoping someone or something else will drop the things into my lap that I want. I’m ready to make things happen.

The common wisdom surrounding the desire for romance is to become the person you want to attract. Build a life you’re happy and fulfilled in, do all the things you want to do with a romantic partner, and love will come. Maybe it’s true and maybe it isn’t, but what is true is that I know who I want and I know who I want to be. Her hair is a little wild and her cheeks are flushed because she’s consuming life in greedy gulps. She speaks with kindness when she can and with grace even when she can’t, and she tends to her heart and her mind with the same tenderness she gives to her garden, and she’s steady in all the ways that matter because she feels a deep and unshakable trust in herself and her ability to pilot her own life.

She bakes and she sings and she writes, and she reads tarot and she roller skates and she plays guitar, and she knits and she reads and she is always surrounded by the sound and sparkle of someone who is intentional about cultivating a space where she feels safe and warm and free. She’s always a little overdressed for the occasion and she always has a present for the friend she’s meeting, a small something that says I thought of you, here is my hand and here is something to tell you I love you. She is the physical and spiritual embodiment of cozy.

Is she a little bit of a manic pixie dream girl? Maybe so. Probably so. But she belongs to herself before she belongs to anyone else, and if she is me, then what of it? What if I want to enchant my own world, to blow through my life like a gauzy fairy whirlwind and shake things up and teach myself the life lessons I have yet to learn? What if I want to be my own manic pixie dream girl, to fall extravagantly in love with myself and give myself a year to build and grow on? What if I want to be the obnoxiously twee folk song girl who makes me swoon?

Beginning is always the hardest part. I meant to write this on New Year’s Eve, and then New Year’s Day, and now look. The year has already begun. It’s been whispering in my ear for weeks to remind me of what I lack, what I can offer to myself. I’m keeping it vague because I don’t want to lock myself too tightly into a particular thing as a resolution. The point is wild. The point is free. The point is room to bloom. The point is the adventure and the discovery and the cultivating of whatever presents itself along the way. The point is just do something, anything, however small, just commit to a single action that will propel me forward into 2024.

The point is no longer being scared and hesitant and uncertain and questioning, no longer undermining what I know lives inside me because I’m too afraid of failure to even try. The point is I’ve got me and I know I’ll be okay, so it’s time to take bold, messy risks and throw things out to see what lands.

So this is the new year, and I’m ready to take it by storm.