2021 Review - Out Of The Hole And Into The Light
Welcome to the review of 2021, thank you for coming by! If you would prefer to listen to rather than read this post, you can do so via Grow With Soul here:
As I have been collecting my thoughts ahead of writing this review of 2021, that well-worn, never-quite-attributed quote keeps coming to mind: you overestimate what you can do in a day, and underestimate what you can do in a year. That really feels like the story of my 2021 – not much happened, but so much happened. This time last year I was at the bottom of a very dark hole, so much so, you may remember, I couldn’t even write a proper year review. It feels mind blowing to now be in a new home, free, in the wide open air; I am so glad that my hole-dwelling self raised from her depths a resilient persistence to get us here. And yet, this also feels like the year I didn’t really do much. But let’s see if that’s case when I tell the story of 2021.
At the end of 2020 I was low on hope. Usually an enthusiastically festive person, it was only an hour before Christmas dinner that I conceded to gather some ivy to decorate in the house. By this point my ex had made it clear he would not yet be leaving the house he refused to contribute to paying for, and I couldn’t countenance to continue to stay living in the same house for any longer. And so, I was throwing myself on the mercy of holiday home owners, trying to find someone on Airbnb willing to let to me in the midst of a national lockdown. On 4th January, I fitted as much as I could into a Fiat 500 and let myself in to an Airbnb – I didn’t know for how long.
It turned out it would be two months. I feel I need half a book to adequately describe the way those two months changed the course of my life. I think of them as a furnace; a high firing in which I had to sit while I was made stronger, made what I was supposed to be. For the previous three months I had been cooped up in the house with my mother and I downstairs and my ex living upstairs and now I was thrust into complete isolation in an all but empty village, in a total lockdown in the middle of winter. All I had to do was fixate on my heart break, wonder what the fuck was going to happen, have an existential crisis about my work and feel hollowed out by loneliness. I was doing my 40,000 word project, so I was immersed, half-drowning, in my feelings as I wrote about them, at length and in detail, day after day.
But there was a shining light. As well as my Grinch-like list of activities, there was one other thing I had to do: walk. I had never done much walking while living in Wales; I wasn’t very fit and didn’t want to go up any hills which severely limits your options. So I was doing little flat walks around the village until one day I took a footpath which I hadn’t expected to take me up quite such a steep slope and which I certainly hadn’t expected to make me feel quite so alive. In the early days of January I walked up a 73m hill and thought that that was as big a climb as I would ever be capable of; at the end of January I climbed a 783m mountain. The long dark evenings in the Airbnb were spent doing YouTube yoga and dance videos (I had sworn off watching TV as a new year’s resolution), and every day I challenged myself to more and more walks. I was in awe of what my body could do, of my capability. In a period where my whole life was stagnant, here was somewhere I could see progress – but more than that, I began to feel more truly myself, more on my own side, than I ever had before.
Somehow I managed to convince my ex to leave the house and at the beginning of March I moved back home. The whole time I’d been paying all the bills on the house as well as for the Airbnb, so it was a financial relief as well as emotional one. It felt like a huge step forward in reclaiming my life. The day I moved back was International Women’s Day and I had signed up to a Zoom women’s circle – as I shared to the group, I was crying so uncontrollably the others couldn’t hear me. At first I was on edge; I would keep the doors bolted and I remember hearing a car with thumping music drive past and instinctively dropping to the floor before crawling to the window to make sure it wasn’t him. But as lockdown began to ease, so did I. I saw my friend again. And, emerging from my furnace, feeling hopeful about restarting my life, eager to see what was possible… I downloaded Bumble.
Dating kind of defined my spring and summer. I had sex for the first time in two years, and enjoyed it for the first time in much longer than that. I met some interesting people and I was made to feel special; I was also coerced and ghosted and treated with less respect than I deserve. I had never been “single and dating” before but all the anguish of the two blue ticks and the goddamn wondering feels like part of it, and also brought me closer to friends when we could laugh and gossip and decode text messages together. I also feel like dating vastly improved my relationship with myself – again and again I proved to myself that I would have my own back, not stand to be treated as any less than a goddess. I found myself to be someone I could trust with my own best interests.
Looking back, dating mostly feels like one big distraction tactic. In May, two major things happened: I sold my house, and injured my knee. The summer of big hikes I had planned dissolved in an instant, and suddenly needing to find somewhere to live and clearing out a big old house became pressing concerns. I was plagued with a recurrent UTI (somebody on Instagram recommended D-Mannose and in so doing changed my life – look it up if you also suffer!) Plus, behind all of this was a backdrop of knowing I didn’t want to do coaching anymore, didn’t want to do marketing anymore, but not knowing what on earth I did want to do.
With nowhere to walk and nothing but real estate dead ends it was much easier to lie in the sun on my patio messaging boys on Tinder; much easier to agonise over whether someone was right for me or not than look at a blank screen and blinking cursor. And it was a distraction from the biggest fear of all. I remember crying on the phone to my friend halfway up a hill after pouring my heart out into a WhatsApp message that, still to this day, was ignored – it wasn’t even about the guy, it was the fact that the guy represented a possibility and with that possibility off the table I couldn’t ignore the fact that I was totally, totally alone.
Summer had been ungrounded, quite literally, as I hadn’t been able to walk in the mountains (I realised how much I connected with myself on my hikes, and my own self had felt inaccessible during these months). But also because I had had long wonderful weeks visiting friends and having visitors. I am smiling now as I think back – accidentally staying up 'til it got light around the fire pit, bottles of wine in the caravan, giddy laughter on the way to dinner. I swam in the sea for the first time this summer; one evening my friend and I went a little too deep, and as we swam back toward shore something caught my eye over my shoulder. We found our feet on the bottom again, and turned as a pod of dolphins cut through the waves a few metres away. Not sure whether to laugh and cry, we held each other and watched as they headed around the coast. At the end of 2020 I put a wish into the river for love – and I found it with Ally and Robyn and Elen and Jen and Grace.
Heading into autumn and I was ready to sink my roots back into the ground. At the beginning of September I celebrated the anniversary of my break up by taking myself for brunch and a beach walk. That fear of being alone began to feel less like a whirlpool that would drown me and more like a still lake I could lean into. I went on a still-in-place hiatus from dating apps. The magical wonder that is the Instagram community helped me find a house to rent, and I signed the lease. I joined Madison Morrigan’s mastermind to give myself the time and structure to gently ease back into thinking about work, with the hope of falling back in love with it. There are not many stories to tell of autumn because I spent most of September and October thinking I would be moving any minute, packing up the house and on the phone to solicitors. On 28th October I had the phone call that the sale had gone through and I lay on the floor and cried. It was relief, I was free of the responsibility, free of him.
Now here I am. In a little cottage on a rainy December afternoon. There are fairy lights at the window and I have hung baubles on the old sideboard. Music is playing gently and a pile of Christmas cards sit on the coffee table ready to go to the postbox. I went for a walk earlier, up the hill behind my house where you have the best view of the mountains and there are lots of mushrooms. Shortly I will light a fire for the evening. When I think to the new year, I see only possibility. I am working on Mapping, which will launch in January, and after that I will be starting a new book proposal. And after that… let’s see. Even the uncertainties that lie ahead are ones I can feel excited about.
No more living in a hole. From now on I’m in the open air, wild and free, and all my own.
