The last book I read in 2024 was The Midnight Library, and it was the perfect book to close out the year. There’s a quote in the book that says:
“It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living. Easy to wish we’d developed other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we’d worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.
It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn’t make, the work we didn’t do, the people we didn’t meet, and the people we didn’t marry and the children we didn’t have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.
But it is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy.
We can’t tell if any of those other versions would have been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.”
This year, I feel like I lived 100 lives and constantly found myself wishing for small tweaks, dwelling on the tiny yet annoying “what ifs.” I was metaphorically slapped in the face and told to grow the f*** up by 2024 in the nicest way possible—just like the most real and honest of friends would do when you need it.
This year, I hope to continue being the brave version of me who says yes to scary things, who eases her anxiety with kind hugs and quick pep talks from loved ones, who loves people hard and free. Most of all, I’m inching a percentage closer to that infinitely long loading bar of caring less about what others think and living life for myself—the most authentic version of me today. Beware, that version might change tomorrow, and I might contradict myself, but that’s what makes me a perfectly imperfect human being.
Here’s to more much-needed kindness, kisses, laughs, and oat lattes.
Sleepy Awakening 