Looking Back
At the dawning of the new year, I took some time to look back over my journal entries. What I saw on those pages surprised me.
As I began to think back over 2024 and the changes in my life, I didn’t view it as a very pivotal year. Certainly in comparison to the dismantling of my marriage, uncertainty in rebuilding my life, start of a new relationship, and launch of a business in 2023, I assumed my progress was lackluster.
Early on in my journaling for 2024, I had predicted it would be a year of “building back in a stable and sustainable way” versus the “dismantling the last of the things around me that were holding me back” of 2023. Boy, was I onto something. But sometimes, building stable foundations doesn’t feel quite a sexy, is less dramatic, and lacking in tangible evidence to show for the work.
I was impressed overall with my year long dedication to journaling. While there was an occasional week long period where I wouldn’t have a new entry, the total of 2024 stretched across 4 full journals, each one equivalent to about a quarter of a year. I had noticed the trend before that my journal seemed to magically begin and end at pivotal points and this year was no different. Journal 1 to Journal 2 marked the moving into a new rental. Journal 2 to Journal 3 hit around my boyfriend’s coaching job offer in a new city and him meeting my parents for the first time. Journal 3 to Journal 4 occurred on the eve of my boyfriend moving in after turning down the far-away job. And lastly, Journal 4 to Journal 5 chronicles the end of our first soccer season living together and conversations about the next steps in our relationship. Anyone else experience this phenomenon? It’s one of the main reasons I’m crazy for my smaller hand-made journals (pictured in the thumbnail image).
As I read the words I’d written on each of the pages, I was surprised about some of the moments I had forgotten. Enough time had passed that I totally overlooked having a short story published this past year in my list of accomplishments. But the biggest takeaways were the lessons I was learning and beliefs I was rewriting within myself.
I got to see over and over again how I faced emotional challenges and improved with each cycle. I saw how I always had the necessary strength and support in the moment to tackle any challenge when it arose. I worked through my fears of repeating past mistakes or cycles. I learned how to appropriately advocate for my own needs. Instead of pushing myself to the brink of burnout, I built community around my writing and pulled back from the writing business in ways that allowed me to be sustainable and consistent in my efforts.
It’s these insights and many others that embolden me to become evangelical in my push to others to keep journals. So many of these takeaways would have been lost to me if I didn’t see them laid out on the page. I even identified an unrecognized area of my life that kept tipping me into overwhelm and stress that I can make shifts and changes to going forward.
Message to myself: Thank you, Elizabeth of 2024, for writing down your feelings, saying the hard things, continuing to push forward, and showing up all year long. You completed the first full year of business ownership, were consistent in weekly podcast episodes, grew the foundations of your romantic relationship, curated one of the best home environments we’ve ever lived in, started a new job, got published, advanced your memoir, lead a writing course (twice!), and did it all without losing your mind!
