2024 Year Review: The Year I Disappeared

I suppose we might call 2024 “The Year I Disappeared”. The year that, without much warning or pre-planning, I faded from view. One Instagram post in the whole of the last half the year, blog posts dried up, emails became inconsistent, the business essentially gone.

I disappeared online as my focus moved into putting things in place in my offline life; but I hadn’t realised how that would make me, and who I thought I was, disappear too…

Slotting Into Place

The year started with uncertainty. My part time maternity cover was coming to an end and I knew that I either had to get a full time job or had to do something miraculous with the business. There was only really one choice, although I didn’t want to admit it to you, here, at the time. Looking back on the post about my goals for 2024 there’s a lot of non-committal intentions like “being all in” and being “go getting” when it comes to income – because I knew I was job hunting but wasn’t quite ready to admit it.

Job hunting was much more emotionally tortuous than I’d expected. I did the thing that you shouldn’t do (but I also never learned not to do when dating), where I’d apply for a job and then plan how my morning routine would be, and think about how I’d make a best friend there, and where I’d sit in the office I looked at pictures of on their website – and then I wouldn’t get an interview and it would feel like something had died.  Because something had died - the made up life in my head.

In April I was being more hands off with my expectations, firing off applications and going into things actively trying to care a lot less. As I walked back from an interview to my boyfriend’s house under blossom trees I thought “this would be nice, I could do this every day”, and later that day they offered me the job. A month later, my boyfriend’s house also became my house as I moved in ready to start the job, and as easily as that everything slotted into place.

That was really the moment the last three years had been in service off. All those months and months and months of angst and striving toward financial security, emotional security, having somewhere to live and someone to love – they were all wrapped up in a few lines at the end of a paragraph. And I suppose, when something’s right, it’s just easy.

To celebrate, my best friend and I went to the Eras Tour in Stockholm.

Creative Frustration

The job started in the summer, which being in the education sector was the quietest time. There wasn’t a lot for me to do as a new person at first, and I was impatient to be “making my mark” on something, frustrated with the energy I wanted to expend.

I applied to be a trustee at a local museum, expecting a few hours every six weeks to help me feel important and like I was making a difference to something. I walked around the parks at lunchtime while ideas for stories formed, ideas that turned into a spreadsheet that turned into me starting a novel.

I’m not sure why, at this moment, I chose these things, rather than re-invigorating my own creative work. I suppose I was in the flush of this new life, and I wanted everything to be new. I also had no idea what this ‘old stuff’ was now, nor who I was in relation to it. It was an easier dopamine hit to go do something new that I hadn’t really thought through.

By September, with work having ramped back up and the trusteeship requiring an awful lot more time than I was able to give, I went away for the weekend with my friends and had to confront that I was a bit of a mess. My anxiety about balancing all these commitments was manifesting itself in stomach pain and I couldn’t pull my mind out of all the things I had to do to be present with them. Wrapped in a blanket on the beach I had arrived late to I said “I think I need to quit”.

And I did. I quit all the extra-curriculars, just for a while, just until I could get my head above water. I went to work, I did a gym class once or twice, we would usually do something nice on the weekend. But other than that, I rotted.

The Rotten Months

I am not finishing this year the person I want to be. It turns out it is very easy to slip into a routine where you allow your time to rot away with scrolling in the name of “not doing too much”. Particularly in winter, walking home in the dark, getting under a blanket, scrolling your phone, going to bed, going to work, repeat. Since we got engaged in October it has been easy for this to be called “wedding planning”, when it’s really often just scrolling and scrolling through pictures as the minutes of my life tick away.

My Word of 2024 was “Unleash”, which I’d actually forgotten it was until I looked back on last year’s post. The idea of Unleash was to go for it creatively, to publish more. The fact is, because I didn’t have the financial pressure to have to unleash, I didn’t. I always feared that when it wasn’t my job I wouldn’t publish, because it doesn’t come naturally to me to share without a point. I’d hoped getting a job would release my creativity from the pressure of having to make something that financially ‘worked’, but it really clammed me up – I don’t know what to say anymore. Life is normal, life is happy, and I don’t know what to do with that as a writer.

It doesn’t feel good to have let go of all of this, everything that was built over so much time, everything that I have loved doing. What began in the name of being easeful is now just doing what’s easy: nothing.

While the changes of this year have been good ones, things I wanted and needed, the pace at which I have gone from an old life to a new life has emptied out my identity a little. It was not long ago that walking in the mountains every day, keeping to my own schedule, writing about my life, forging creative work, was everything that I was. There is a gap now, a recalibration that needs to happen.

As I am on the cusp of becoming a wife, and hopefully in time a mother, I need to redefine the edges of an identity that is just mine.