How do I write you alive?

I found myself reaching out to tell how funny it was that Jimmy Buffett and the lead singer of Smash Mouth couldn’t bear to live in a world without you, and then I remembered why I was making the joke.

Henry Kissinger died, too, and you missed it.

You should have gotten old, Alan. I can see it so clearly. Stringy ponytail and gnarly toes. A man who is always outside, always studying power lines against candy-colored skies, always telling you about the time they killed the mountain lion and the time they re-painted the water treatment plant. I can so clearly see the path for you, so full of regret and wonder. I want that for everyone: the whole run, the gamut. I want everyone to live a life so full it breaks them down slowly and over time, and not all at once. Not too soon. Not now and not yet.

How do I write you alive, Alan? How do I keep you in the present tense? I look back on your writing, at your last piece. I meant to read this before you died. I put it off because there would always be another time. Writers are formed in death, Alan, so it’s not fair for me to look at it now, with so many long shadows making this harder to read. But I look at it, in the present tense.

In this piece, we walk beside characters. We’re invited to look around Los Angeles from a pedestrian’s point of view, from bus windows and beneath glowing signs for donuts and dry cleaners. We walk beside sex workers, real and fictional, with you as our guide. We discuss strip malls; we point out places of interest, movies to watch. Los Angeles is the main character, however, and we can’t compete with her. We walk through parking lots and past motels. We look around: this place used to be a different place, and this one has been around forever.

When a writer dies, I’m left with hyperlinks. I’m left with a voice in two dimensions. When a writer dies, I sift through syntax. I look at each letter until it becomes something I’ve never seen. When a writer dies, I’m left with their writing. How unfair to writers.

I look back on the first piece of yours I ever read. I love this piece. This piece, too, is full of Los Angeles. I can feel summer in it. I can smell the exhaust and smoke on Sunset. I mean, no, I can’t. I’m smelling a pine-scented candle right now, miles and months away from Sunset and The Black Cat. I don’t drink Miller High Life anymore. Any outfit I’d ever worn on Sunset has sat at some point since in the Goodwill on Brand because Buffalo Exchange never buys anything from me. I imagine you writing this piece, Alan, deleting and revising. I imagine you looking back. I imagine you emailing editors. I can’t smell Sunset; I lied about that. But time is melting into something new as I try to write you alive. I never told you how much I like this piece.

When a writer dies, I look for clues. I imagine his ghost caught screaming in his sentences. I expect a word of comfort, a warning, a dispatch. I look back on you walking through supermarkets, and now it’s a haunting. I look at the end of the world and there you are, haunting. You’re a ghost in every photo. Every video you’ve posted is now of someone I used to know. This machine is now cursed.

When a writer dies, I’m left with their (very famous) observation about Tom Cruise’s fake butt.

I wish you could see this.

You should be aging, Alan. You should be posting, keeping us updated. You should be complaining. You should hear about this movie and you should write about a building I’ve seen a thousand times but never looked at. You should be writing, Alan.

How do I write you alive.

You invited me to read a little something about broken hearts at a museum in Hollywood, and I didn’t realize we were supposed to read essays about ourselves so I wrote a horror story in the form of a BuzzFeed list. I was so embarrassed, but we became friends.

You were kind to me.

I never got out much, Alan. But when I did, I saw Los Angeles from a pedestrian’s point of view. I looked at it from bus windows. I passed donut shops and dispensaries and gas stations and Del Tacos. I saw famous people in restaurants. I saw a man shitting outside 7-Eleven. I saw women waiting for the next bus. I saw walls of burnt bougainvillea. I saw sweating plastic cups of mango and chamoy. I saw amber eyes beyond the twilight traffic. I saw Los Angeles. I saw it through you.

I hear it’s still there, the city. But we wouldn’t know.

How do I write you alive?

“Nothing is real” was the unofficial slogan of my former workplace, and it was a Pretty Good one, accurately reflecting our minds’ protective flinching at the absurdity and terror of existence. The idea that none of this is really happening is a meme that seems to have particularly captured our collective imagination online since, oh, 2016 or so, hand-in-hand with the idea that “this is all a simulation.”

And it really has felt like that, all just a terrible dream. And now we can laugh at it, haltingly and with a shudder, all teeth. Not because any of this has been particularly funny, but because we need to laugh to release tension, to laugh as a means of self-preservation.

But that moment of release and relief never came, and so this has felt like running from one slice of time to another in a dream, feet sinking into the ground, legs heavy. But also not like that at all. Because no matter how 2010 or 2016 or last year or this year have felt, regardless of whatever dream logic may slip like smoke between the cracks, this has been real. It’s been real in big, sweeping, violent ways. It’s been real in small ways, a microscopic shard of mirror in your eye. Not real and too real. Too real so that it can’t be real, so that maybe nothing is real.

Everything is just so weird.

This is the feeling pervading Twin Peaks: The Return the only thing that made any emotional and psychological sense to me when it aired in 2017, the only thing that has made sense to me in years. In it, reality is subject to machinations beyond control or understanding, and time in the world (or worlds) of Twin Peaks is not linear. It exists in loops, and these loops can sometimes twist into one another, making time layered or even cancelling out moments and lifetimes. Everything there is real, and nothing is real.

This decade has been horrific, like every decade. It’s been absurd, like how being born and living and dying are absurd. To quote my favorite philosopher, Lula Pace Fortune, “The world’s wild at heart and weird on top.” And it always has been.

All this to say: Twin Peaks: The Return was, for me, the defining art of the past decade, channeling current and universal anxieties into a story that defies most categorization and narrative conventions. It was many things, including a meditation on the nature of evil, seemingly ushered into being by humanity’s own greed and hubris, explored to spectacular effect in a sequence featuring the 1945 detonation of the first atomic bomb. The show offered surreal depictions of human laziness and malice, over-reliance on resources like corn and oil, the exploitation and decay of individuals and communities through drug abuse, the dangers of nostalgia, selfishness and lack of respect for human life, and the passing down and inheritance of all these evils.

It also showed that hard hearts can soften, that the lost can find their way, that love endures, and that Michael Cera is the best actor of his or any generation.

That all rings true.

Perhaps The Return’s most compelling idea, comforting and horrifying in equal measure, is that we do not have a shared reality. Could be that some of us are quietly waiting to die in Odessa while others are wrapped in plastic at the water’s edge. Or maybe we’re trapped in a body in a suit in a casino. Maybe we’re having fun. Maybe we’re bad. Maybe we’re dancing beneath violet light at a familiar bar. Maybe we’re in a white room with no exit. Maybe some see a country made great again, pioneers with smiling white faces, golden fields of wheat tended by happy farmers. Maybe some of us see our families, our friends battered and beaten and sent away. Maybe some of us lament that this isn’t who we are. Maybe some of us point out that this is who we’ve always been. Maybe none of this is happening at all. Maybe it’s all a dream. Maybe we can’t wake up. Maybe if we try hard enough, we can save just one person. And maybe we can’t.

That feels real.

We’ve living, individually, as splintered selves at a time when algorithmic data and elected officials with the chins they deserve all decide which reality they want us to see at any given time, on any given platform. Our fading decade has been such a strange time to navigate because we’re more isolated and together than ever, receiving an incomprehensible amount of information through screens and filters. How do you trust what’s real when the experience of reality differs so vastly from one person to the next?

But for all its violence, all its battered heads and bloodied women, Twin Peaks is nothing if not a study in balance. Maybe, it seems to posit, it doesn’t matter whether or not this is real. If we lose ourselves either way–if we fall victim to forces far beyond our control, to time, to apathy, to disease, to a dying planet, to iron fists and just one large enough medical bill–shouldn’t we do what we can with the power we do have? If evil exists, then so must its opposite.

If we can save someone in at least one reality, why shouldn’t we try?

It may be true that Agent Dale Cooper, fragmented and lost across time, will keep getting it wrong. Evil–or just life, just absurdity in its most neutral form–will keep twisting his plans. He will keep losing himself. What else can he do? He can’t remain trapped in a world of coffee and pie. He cannot turn to evil, a life wasted on consuming and destroying. He must keep trying.

The Return’s ending was, on one level, pure horror, the marrow-deep, personal, cosmic, existential, domestic, personal, universal terror of not knowing who and where we are. On some level, we’re aware that we are born on a well-trod road that nonetheless has no end and no beginning. There is no destination to be found here, but we make markers regardless. Time, for example, and place. We make calendars and look at clocks and give ourselves names. We pretend these things matter, that 2019 means something. But beneath that there’s nothing, just a woman screaming at a dark house on a suburban street, plunged into non-existence.

That’s all real.

But there’s another ending in The Return: the ending where Pete went out fishing, and then came back home. For one ending to be real, the other had to be just as real, too.

That’s the nature of reality, simulated or not.

Pain is real. Trauma, unseen and intangible, is real. So are birthday parties and slot machines and seedy bars and high school hallways. Other people are real. Redemption and forgiveness are real. Angels are as real as pictures of angels, which are also real.

David Lynch’s work often unfolds like this, particularly his films about A Woman in Trouble. There is always redemption to be found onscreen, quite literally. In Fire Walk With Me–more tonally consistent with Twin Peaks’ third season than the series’ original run–Laura watches the soap opera that has been her sad, short life, laughing as the icy blue of the television set illuminates her face. In Mulholland Dr., a broken Diane Selwyn gets her happy ending in her dream place, reunited with Camilla in an overexposed reel as consciousness fade. No hay banda, but we hear the music nonetheless. In Inland Empire, the concepts of transferable cosmic debt and eternal return culminate in the most overtly hopeful and optimistic ending of these three films, with Sue Blue embracing the Lost Girl whose debt she has paid. The Girl, lost in time, has been watching this all play out on a hotel room TV, waiting.

In these three examples, Laura/Carrie, Betty/Diane, and Nikki/Sue are not real in the sense that they are all projections and personas, actual fictional characters we are watching on a screen. But they are getting at something true, and one self cannot exist without the other. If there are insects writhing beneath the rose bushes, there are robins in the trees above, too. For love to exist, so must hate. For success, failure. For redemption, sin. Or, at least, that’s how it works onscreen.

Twin Peaks: The Return gave us and Agent Cooper an ending dripping with horror, and that’s real. And then we loop, and we twist back. We rewind. We fast-forward. And we find our happy ending in a place that’s real, too.

If this is all simulated, if there is no band, no orchestra, it makes no difference. We still suffer and strive. We dream and we wake up. We pay the debt. We make it weird. We stumble back to move on. That’s the truth at the heart of The Return.

Maybe nothing is real. And everything matters.

I recently quit my job for many reasons, chief among them a desire to terrify myself into writing a novel. Throughout the process of writing and editing and not doing either of those things, I’ve watched and re-watched the entirety of Baskets, a show about a depressed rodeo clown named Chip Baskets. When I come to the end of the show’s third season, the last episode available on Hulu, I return to the pilot and start the whole thing over. I have done this maybe twenty times since the end of May, sinking softly each time into the show’s steady rhythm and its pitch-perfect portrayal of sad suburban clownery.

Only recently have I realized that my enjoyment of this show may stem from the fact that I, too, am a depressed clown. Like Chip, I’ve slipped from believing I’m a winner to realizing I’m a loser sitting by myself at Arby’s.

Baskets kicks off with Chip failing out of an elite French clown academy, as one does, and moving back to his hometown of Bakersfield, CA, a sun-bleached stretch of big-box stores and rodeos bordered by mountains. Much of the show’s first season focuses on Chip generally being a sad, angry loser. In “Easter in Bakersfield,” the show’s fourth episode, we see the depth of Chip’s melancholy and the source of the seething anger he has exhibited to that point. Dragged from Easter mass to brunch by his aggressively chipper mother, Christine (played to perfection by Louie Anderson), Chip listens to a French lesson on tape, stuck in a no-man’s land between his gold-tinted past in Paris and his present reality in Bakersfield. As Vulture’s write-up of the episode so beautifully put it,

He’s a man forever doomed to be out of his element. After all, what could be more heart-wrenching than realizing the only place that felt like home was a place that didn’t want you?

What, indeed?

When I was about 25 and living in New York, my parents came to visit me. I was a senior editor at the time, underpaid like everyone else I knew, and in a newish relationship. I had a small circle of friends, people who would invite me to rooftop parties or free shows or anything else that let us wring out the most fun for the least amount of money. I thought my life was going pretty well. But while on a walk through Central Park, my parents told me, gently but bluntly, that I was a loser. Or, more accurately, a winner trapped inside a loser’s life.

If I wanted to be a writer, they asked, why wasn’t I writing for The New York Times? Why did I live in a loser’s apartment with a loser haircut? Why did I insist on wearing loser clothes to my loser job? Why was I surrounding myself with losers? Didn’t I know that loserness is contagious? Didn’t I worry?

I worry constantly, of course. Like Christine Baskets, I worry about my family. Like Dale, Chip’s twin, I worry about what people think of me. Like Chip, I worry that, maybe, I’m not any good at the thing I love most. I worry about an earthquake splitting my apartment in two or at least shaking my book case enough that it falls on my dog and kills him. I worry about finding lumps and I worry about losing teeth and I worry about being shot in a movie theater and I worry, constantly, that I am not where I need to be in life, that I’m sliding off the map set out for me, that maybe every choice I made isn’t even wrong because there is no winning choice for me. I worry that leaving my job was the wrong choice, encasing me in loserness forever.

That’s what makes someone a loser, you know: the worrying. You can’t be a true loser if you’re not constantly aware of it, lashing out at family members and running away from your job at Arby’s to join a troupe of street clowns. If you’re not constantly looking at the things you’ve lost, at all the empty space in your life, then you’re not truly a loser.

If you’re a loser and don’t know it, then maybe you’re just happy.

That conversation in Central Park stuck with me mostly because, at the time, I thought I was on the path to winning. I thought I was making a good living, able to pay rent with enough left over to buy ramen. I thought I had a full social life and had not even once thrown up in a cab, always after I’d gotten outside, like an adult, like a winner. I thought my clothes were, I don’t know, kind of cool. I thought my eyeliner looked nice. I thought I was young enough that this was a time for planting seeds that would grow into trees that might grow into New York Times bylines later, the platonic ideal of a circus for this sad clown. But my parents had achieved more than their parents, and now their eldest child–an academy-trained clown!–was in danger of not achieving enough. I was not the person they thought I was going to be.

To my parents, I was not in a state of pre-winning. To them, I was stuck fast in the middle of losing.

Some years after the Loser Talk, life in New York became more untenable and more expensive and I eventually moved to Los Angeles, to try my dream from another angle. Here, surrounded by bougainvillea and wildfires and chunks of mango glistening with lime and Tajín, I made a profound discovery: I was still a loser.

As with Chip, I settled into each new chapter of my life and saw the same things repeating, eternal return on a small scale, again and again, no matter if we’re at the rodeo or join a Russian circus or try grief clowning at a local children’s hospital. The loserness is always there, la tristesse exquise d’être un clown.

Like Chip, my soul’s twin clown, when I look back on my career, I see a string of failures, of companies and projects that had so much potential and then fizzled and folded and failed. I see the things I could have done better. I see things I’d planned that turned out warped, or were canceled, or handed off to someone else. I see all the things that didn’t happen and all the faults with the things that did.

Fortunately, Baskets has the wisdom and grace to not dwell on loserness or exploit the Baskets family’s pain for laughs, but to offer us, through them, different models of hope and ways of handling loss.

In Christine, for example, we see the real difference between a loser and a winner. She allows herself to feel disappointed in setbacks both professional and personal, but she is able to move on from them, to build something new without dwelling in the shadows of past loss. No matter what happens to her, Christine is always a winner.

In Martha, Chip’s only friend, we see someone so far removed from any concept of winning or losing, dreaming or settling, that she is always entirely in the moment, taking what she can and discarding what no longer serves her. In Martha, we see someone with the foresight to realize, as she puts it, “I’m almost 50. I can’t keep acting like I’m 39.”

And then there’s Dale. Acting almost like Chip’s shadow self, Dale always seems to fail when Chip is finally making some headway, and forever gloating whenever Chip begins to slip. In Dale we see the ultimate loser, a man so twisted by his desire to be perceived as a winner that his bitterness has curdled into something truly fetid and toxic. Dale’s anger has cost him his career, his home, his marriage, the version of himself that would never have worn a mullet. Only a deeply unhappy man, after all, would order mimosas on the rocks or demand a cheeseburger at a Chinese restaurant.

In these different models of being we see that being a loser isn’t an inherent quality; it’s a matter of perception. What makes someone a loser is the way one views a loss, or if one is even aware of it at all. The show’s central thesis isn’t about eliminating the desire to win or to have–it views the rampant suburban materialism of many of its characters with equal parts fondness and judgment–it is, instead, about learning to deal with the consequences of desire. There is healthy desire. There is healthy loss. There is a healthy way to learn from both.

It was announced (today, actually) that the fourth season of Baskets currently airing on FX will be the show’s last. I will miss it. It has been a truly beautiful, heartbreaking, hilarious, dark, absurd look at loss and loserdom, a reprieve from more mainstream ideas of winning and losing. My timelines, for example, are stuffed with treacly affirmations about taking risks and advocating for myself. Strangers online are constantly telling me that my feelings–all of them, any of them–are valid. Promoted posts all done up in swirly, chunky, ‘70s-inspired fonts tell us that we are all Boss Babes and that we’ve Got This and that they know we are Doing Our Best.

But maybe none of those things are true. Maybe I’m not doing ok and I’m not trying my best. Maybe I’m just a loser, clowning up and down the west coast, and maybe I need to view that this string of losses as fact and as a reality and not a destiny.

We can synthesize conflicting cultural messages and strike a balance between following a dream and facing reality, between hurtling after our hopes and the loving but misguided expectations of the people invested in us. This is what I’ve learned from a show about a sad clown in Bakersfield, that it’s ok to lose, again and again. And it’s ok to step away from that for a moment and ask why we so often think about life as a game made up of wins and losses, a bolt of fabric we’ve stained and ripped with all our bad choices, with all the things that have gone wrong. I’m grateful that a show as strange and melancholy as Baskets was even able to exist. I’m thankful to have been able to witness something that reflected by bitterness back to me and told me that I still had time to turn it into something more useful.

I can be a loser clown in the process of being… some other kind of clown. I have time. You have time. We can be any kind of clown we want to be.

In the words of Chip’s mentee Jode, juggalo and Arby’s manager, when told he can wipe off his face paint: “Killer, this ain’t makeup. This shit is my life.”

Thank you, Baskets.

I think that’s alright to say.

A year is a fairly arbitrary slice of time, sure, and it’s a whimsical quirk of human nature to try and make sense of our lives by characterizing arbitrary slices as good and bad. There is a degree of symbolic, performative magical thinking woven into how we cope with a world for which we were given no instructions. We think about how often we mourned collectively, and how certain tragedies affected the national mood. We think there such things as a national mood. We tend to be united by horror. Good moments are forgotten in favor of particularly traumatizing images of scandal and decay and threats and obliteration. We remember businessmen throwing themselves out of windows during times of recession; we don’t much remember lottery winners. This is the natural course of things. And we often deal with horror by making it smaller, more manageable, by joking that it can be limited to a stretch of time from January 1st through December 31st. This is not, as some have erroneously interpreted it, literal thinking. This is simply how we cope. We are imaginative creatures, after all, stumbling unguided through a world built on myths and illusions.

And so this year, this arbitrary slice of time, has been a bad one, even though each year has its share of good and bad and moments that simply begin and end. But it is fair to say that is has been bad. We can say that. It has felt bad.

Let’s make it personal: I thought, this year, that I would die. Many times, sure, because my God. But one time in particular

At this one point in 2016, I looked at an image on a monitor, my legs splayed on either side of a doctor I’d met just minutes before. She asked what I thought of Kanye and Kim and, gauging what her take might be while knowing she had the power to make me extremely uncomfortable, I told her I didn’t like him. (I do like him.) This was the answer she wanted, and I could tell by her hair. She did not have the hairstyle of a woman who really likes Kanye.

The doctor was still talking about Kanye when a big, dark blob on the screen caught her eye. I saw it too, and in that moment, I began to prepare to die. I saw that image on the screen, in 2016, and I thought “this dark and mysterious thing growing inside my body means that I will die very soon.” And I prepared myself for the day I would cease to exist. I cried alone, and I didn’t tell anyone how scared I was to die. I was focused on being prepared to let go, and that was all. There have been times when I have allowed that moment to be folded into the rest of 2016, another bead on a necklace that I can’t wait to regift to my closest enemy.

It turned out to be a false alarm, that dark mass, but I prepared for death before I knew this for sure. Sometimes this made me strong, sometimes like a dandelion fluff one breath away from being a memory.

The experience taught me a lot of about letting go, an arbitrary theme I’ve gone and assigned to this arbitrary slice of time. This year, I also quit a job that could have held a lot of potential for me, and I was laid off from the place I’d gone to afterward. You have, no doubt, also dealt with difficult choices and disappointments. You may know what it is to worry about money, about insurance, about plans for the future that are now words with lines drawn through them. You may know, too well, that worry can so easily turn to bitterness or terror when you cling to it too tightly. But every time you practice letting go, it all becomes a little easier.

Letting go is a process, and it can hurt. Sometimes we approach letting go by kicking and screaming, sometimes we thrash against the impending peace that comes with unclenching our jaws and letting our shoulders drop.

In any case: I made it through this year. This terrible, frightening, challenging year. I lost my job. I cut my bangs too short. I laughed. I drank. I embarrassed myself. I reached out and I held in. I hurt people. I was hurt. I thought I was going to die. But. I made it through.

And, importantly, so did you. You are reading this. You made it. Not whole, of course. Time has a way of wearing little parts of us down, polishing some sections smooth and leavings other rough to the touch. Especially during a bad year. And this year has been bad; it’s ok for us to say this, to mourn collectively and publicly, to make a show of our pessimism and our disappointments, to joke about them. There have been many years before this one that have also been bad. There has been death and confusion and panic and disease, for many years. All those little beads on all those little strings, all throughout time. There have been bad leaders and brave people who have fought against them. People we loved, even if they are strangers to us, faces on a screen, have died before. There have been wars, even before this year, and there have been lives ripped from bodies not yet ready to give them up. This is nothing new. But that is why we are scared this year, I think: We have seen all this before.

I wish I could tell you whatever it took to soothe you, to give you comfort and take your pain away. I wish I could hold you in my arms and tell you that everything is going to be alright. All the trouble in this world will fade, and we will all be fine. This is all just a false alarm, preparing us just in case.

But I cannot tell you that.

All I can tell you, and all that matters, is that you are here today. All I can let you know is that you being here today dictates what tomorrow will bring. You matter and your every movement creates ripples across the universe. Without you, all would not be as it is. Your every thought and shrug and sigh make a difference. You matter so much. And the future hinges on you. I know, we know, that we are all just one dark mass on a screen away from total annihilation. We are all just a step away from no longer being around. And yet. We are here. You are here. Vulnerable and flailing and stupid with hope. We persevere. We exist. We stay.

Because letting go has never meant giving up. Finding peace has never meant giving up the fight. When I prepared to die, I also prepared for procedures and scalpels and medications and tubes filled with things I likely can’t pronounce. I prepared for nights on an adjustable bed under fluorescent hospital lights. I thought about how I was going to share the news, the people I would need to tell and those who didn’t need to know. And I prepared to let go. I would really practice it, because my fate was ultimately not something I could control. But I would not give up on the things I could change. I would fight for my life, the way we all do at any given moment. But I would do so in peace, with peace, through peace. I would let the bitterness fall away, let the hard shell of terror peel away from me in long, ragged strips. I would allow myself to soften, to become pliant, to let life and its good and bad years flow through me without sticking.

So, it is alright to say it: this year has been so bad. So hard. In so many ways. And next year will bring more hardship and pain, that much we know for sure.

But, my God! It will also bring more of you. How lucky are we, to have you? Another year of you. Despite the pain. The questions. Despite all that may go wrong. We still have you. You, so precious and so rare. You, who will learn to let go of the suffering over the things you cannot change. You, who can let go of the pressure you place upon yourself. Close your eyes and imagine them as two orbs coming to rest within your head. Unclench your fists until you need to use them to punch the air as you fight, still, for the things you believe and cherish. Do not let go of your anger. Cultivate your anger so that it never recoils and causes you harm. Make it sharp and fine so that it whistles through the air, a tool you wield with precision. Use your anger, but let go of your fear. Let it fall away from you so that you walk a little lighter. You have enough things to carry, and fear is so heavy.

Let go of the little things that form a fog around you, clouding the view from behind your eyes. You can lose your job and still be you. It has never defined you. I know this because for too long I thought jobs and titles defined me. But I have lost those and I am still here. You can lose friends, lovers, family members, either all in a moment or slowly over time, and still be whole. You are you without your fear. You are still a series of regrets and wishes and reasons to fight. I don’t want to give you hope, because hope hurts too much. It hurts to see the light at the end of the tunnel you can’t find a way out of; it feels like a taunt, mean and unfair. Instead, I want to give you power. Let go of hope, of the thought that it will all be ok in the end. Know that sometimes, that often, it will not. And hold fast to your power.

Do not forget this as we talk about entering into a new year. This new slice of time is not a fresh start. It is one in a series of unceasing beginnings and ends that will mark the rest of your life. Cling to the knowledge that change is always possible, as you let go, little by little, of the idea that you are bound within a year, defined by all the things swirling around outside of you.

Next year will be hard. That is alright to say. It may be bad.

But you are good. Let go.