We have to enjoy this, too

A mental posture to enter the year with

I don’t know about you, but I am decidedly not bounding into 2026. The last time I wrote, the year was wrapping up nicely. But then, more curveballs came, more uncertainties, more difficulties presented to our family in a way that, I have to admit, starts to feel a little bit personal. What have I done to you, universe?

I was holding it all together, but then, I just couldn’t anymore. I was done being resilient, positive, hyper-functional. I spent most of the “break” (lol it’s not a break when you have a toddler and childcare is closed for two weeks) being a version of myself that I don’t particularly like: Sunny to people I saw on the outside, and a live wire inside the walls of our home.

You don’t even need to know the particulars, because I’m sure you’re facing stuff like this in your life, too. Financial stuff, job stuff, the inadequacies of systems and bureaucracies that in theory are functional, but in practice, really aren’t. (Fortunately, and I stress this, we’re not dealing with health stuff.)

When you map the dramas of one life onto the state of the world — the way systems are collapsing, norms seemingly no longer exist, and the version of adulthood my parents enjoyed recedes a little more each day — it can start to feel really hopeless. I have written about this stuff in the last few years in an intellectual sense — collapse, the changing nature of work — but that doesn’t mean the emotional toll of it doesn’t sometimes land again anew, with full force. At 36, one of the defining experiences of this decade so far has been experiencing waves of grief for the world I’m living in, as I live in it.

We are a two writer household, and it’s a daily struggle for both my husband and I to quell the sense of doom that pervades our profession. And of course, it’s not just a profession for us, it’s what we do in our core. We tell stories. We believe they matter. We believe human to human connection is the most important component of that — the place where the entire enterprise rests. Beyond the low-grade panic of watching your profession recede, it’s also deeply wounding on a spiritual level to watch the most powerful, well-funded corporate entities in the world tear that apart. That they’re allowed to do that. That they don’t see what they’re destroying in the process. That so many people acquiesce. It’s yet another thing to grieve.

I don’t usually publish things when I am in this place. I sound too negative, and I’ve learned from experience to not write from the wound. But for days, I’ve been searching in vain for some kind of mental posture to enter the year with. Something other than the visualizations, resolutions, and manifestations I see on Substack Notes. One that is realistic about the state of things, the challenges ahead, and the fact that you can do all the right things and still find yourself in front of a mountain of shit.

I have a really powerful brain, by which I mean whatever I decide to direct my mental energy to, gets a lot of energy. Too much, you might say. And in the past few weeks, I’ve been directing my mental energy on the chasm that lies between how I want the world (both personal and collective) to be and how the world actually is. Call it The Gap. A Buddhist might tell me that, by dwelling here, I’m inflicting an optional amount of suffering (my own resistance) on top of the compulsory suffering that comes with being alive.

One thing I can tell you about the The Gap is the more time you spend there, the more you miss out on. If your brain is like mine, you can actually create a life that is only suffering and anguish, nothing else, in spite of the facts on the ground. Your capacity for joy completely disappears. Ask me how I know.

I bought my son a book of poems for Christmas. Shel Silverstein’s Where The Sidewalk Ends, which I have vivid memories of being read by my parents as a child. It was one of those presents that was more for me than him; I knew I’d enjoy revisiting poems like Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout Would Not Take the Garbage Out, but assumed he probably wouldn’t be into it yet. Turns out, he loves it. He keeps saying, “Mummy I want you to read me five poems.” That he is so interested in a black and white book of oddball line drawings and quirky poems published in 1974 — that it can handily compete with Spidey and His Amazing Friends, Paw Patrol, and all the rest — seems like some kind of miracle to me. The sheer wonder of that is precisely the kind of thing I’m liable to miss when I spend too much time in The Gap.

My husband and I went for a drink a couple nights ago when our child was at his nana’s house, and had the first substantive conversation we’ve had in a solid month. (That is an entirely true sentence only parents of small children will believe.) As we were talking about the year ahead, and our various problems that don’t seem to want to resolve, I admitted to him, and to myself out loud, that I’d spent the entire Christmas break in The Gap. He said he could tell. And then he responded with the most disappointing and reassuring thing he could have said: “You know, we have to enjoy this, too.”

That’s the mental posture I’ve been looking for. (I didn’t marry for money, clearly, but I married for wisdom.) I’ll be honest, I don’t entirely know how I’m going to do this yet. I know a lot of it has to do with maintaining good “top-line habits,” as they call them in 12 Step recovery. This seems apt, because The Gap does become a kind of addiction if you have a brain like mine. It also has to do with having small things to look forward to. And with figuring out a way to stop thinking of myself as so special, gifted, organized, or cosmically lucky that I too shouldn’t have to perpetually deal with hard things. I obviously have some work to do on that front.

But just having the reframe helps. It helps me be honest about what the job is. Things might actually not get better. More things will replace the ones that resolve. The suffering will continue to be mandatory. And yet, we have to find a way to enjoy this, too.

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