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What a difference a year can make, truly.
I’d forgotten just how dark the end of 2021 was, until I reread my year of fashion in review post while preparing this one. After a few months of living something that resembled our former lives, we’d been forced to scrap all our plans again. There was no indication of when we might be able to start making them again. This was a struggle for me, a lifelong planner. I felt like my dreams were on hold, the future I’d spent so long working towards suspended until further notice.
..and now, here we are, twelve months later. I barely recognise the woman I was a year ago. The woman who was trying so hard to find a new way to live in the wake of the loss of the life she’d known for so long. 2022 is coming to an end. And it’s staggering to see how far we’ve come this year, how much life has changed again. And how I’ve changed, too. The journey has not, by any means, been effortless. In certain moments, it was a conscious choice that I needed to force myself to make each morning: enjoy the life you have exactly as it is. Be happy with it. But I did make the choice. Every. Single. Day. And that counts.
Happiness is a choice. But I took that for granted until March 2020 because happiness wasn’t something that I’d ever needed to think about choosing. There were moments of uncertainty and anxiety, to be sure, even some periods of genuine struggle. But I was always happy. I lived a life of relative privilege, a life that I worked hard to build on as an adult, to craft and mold into exactly what I’d envisioned for myself as a teenager daydreaming as she flipped the pages of Vogue magazine. A closet full of beautiful clothes, regular holidays, places to be every night of the week and wonderful people with whom to share it – I really felt like I had it all.
And then, well… you know how the story goes. In 2022, I told myself that enough was enough. If necessary, I would change my definition of having it all. I couldn’t continue to live in a holding pattern, waiting by a metaphorical door for the return of a life that might never come back.
We did a remarkable amount of living in 2022. In the early months it was often fraught with anxiety – threats of holiday cancellations and potential illness continued to loom large. But after confronting near crippling imposter syndrome, I made the decision to just live the best life I could. That meant letting go of the compulsion to plan every moment of my life (and thus face inevitable disappointment when plans didn’t come to fruition.) After that, everything felt different. Not easier, necessarily. But looser, more fluid, like there could be more than one right answer to questions that came up along whatever path I chose to follow. There were different paths, suddenly – options, where before there had always been a prescribed plan from which there could be no deviation.
I chose to be happy with what I had, rather than because of what I had. It made all the difference.
I vividly remember a specific June afternoon when it all crystallised in my mind. It was a hot day. I was out for my usual after work walk with headphones in. About a kilometre from home, I switched from my usual playlist to a mix from an artist that I listened to on repeat in eighth grade: Phil Collins. With Two Hearts turned up much too loudly, just like when I played it on cassette to dance around my bedroom, I felt a smile stretch across my face. This is a happy song, a happy memory of a time when I worried less and just embraced what I loved in life, with no thought to potential consequences. “What if,” I asked myself, “life could be like that again? What if you didn’t need to have the perfect plan? And what if, god forbid, nothing needed to be perfect at all?”
What if, indeed. It was a revelation.
For a long time, I felt like I needed to be perfect, because if I was beyond reproach, if I did everything right, it meant that I couldn’t be blamed, that I didn’t deserve certain things that happened to me.
There were so many reasons for that, including some quite specific ones that I’ve alluded to throughout 2022. I’ll unpack them all in detail next year, but for now, that’s not the point. The point is that this persistent belief that I needed to prove my worth in this way led to a lot of incredible things, really. But it also made it very hard, if not impossible, for me to accept and forgive myself for my own humanity. It meant that I beat myself up over tiny mistakes. And that any plan that went awry, even if it was beyond my control, led me down a spiral of disappointment and self-flagellation.
I spent 2022 learning to accept that I’m not different from anyone else. That means the rules aren’t different for me. I can and will make mistakes. I’m allowed to – in fact, it’s encouraged. That’s how we learn. We try new things, we take risks, we throw plans out the window and make new ones.
How liberating it is, not just to know that intellectually, but to actually believe it.
2022 wasn’t the year that I expected. There was, at times, a shocking amount of discomfort to wade through. But it was the year that I needed. And I’m thrilled to be here now, at the end of it, looking forward. There’s a Phil Collins album playing through the speakers in my living room as I type these words. These are happy songs for me, all of them. And that’s how I’m moving into the new year: happily. The choice is mine, and I’ve made it.
I wish you all happiness for the new year, too. May it be, if not the one you want, then the one you need.
