dear january

I always consider you a "30-day free trial" of the new year. We got off to a bit of a rocky start, you and me, but now I realize why you were so melancholy and gray on the inside, and sky blue and sunny on the outside.

You brought the addition of my first successful cowl to my handmade scarf collection and got me caught up on Coffee With Chrachel and Dear Sugars. I cast on another blanket made from the same yarn that made a cowl filled with tenderness in 2015. Miniscule callouses litter my fingers, tiny scars of using my hands every single day to make something I will love and keep in my eventual home/craft museum. I'm learning that this blanket is going to take me forever—the smaller the yarn, the more stitches, the more hard emotions I can knit away and call it some form of therapy.

I scribbled down, "Hold fast to your pockets of joy" on a Monday morning. Simple pep talks to celebrate a day when I dragged myself out of bed and went for a walk in the backyard. The sun was out, and it was 30 degrees—a heat wave compared to the negative temperatures we had been dealing with for weeks before. I danced in the backyard to Tegan and Sara and felt gratitude for quiet January mornings.

Later on that night, at work, I dropped a giant roll of Saran wrap on my big toe and could only laugh at my happy thought from hours before. That was the beginning of my melancholia. Days of the week blended together, and I stopped showering or making any efforts to do above the absolute bare minimum. Depression made its way into my every day again. Slowly at first until there were days when I was laying in bed for hours, whispering, "I need to go to the store" over and over until the sun sunk down below the horizon. Admitting defeat, I muttered, "I'll try again tomorrow."

On the days that I did manage to make it out of the house, I greeted opportunities that felt like Grace congratulating me for making it out into the world. One of my childhood theatre friends reached out to me about wedding photography. A former co-worker of mine asked me to collaborate with a small business downtown for a portrait event. I felt the tiny inklings of community around me—a network of dreamers and doers that encourages me never to give up and follow my dreams.

Emily Jeffords, one of my favorite artists that I follow on Instagram, posted "Progress is always quiet and slow" on her story one day, and it stuck with me, whispering in my ear whenever I felt stuck. I stared at a lot of blank documents, willing words to come whenever I tried to write. I typed a few lines, backspace, delete, rewrite, scrap the whole thing and eventually just save it as a draft and vow to return to it in a few days or months or years. (The artistic process, in a nutshell, everyone.)

The words did come back though, on a Monday night in the mundane routine of closing at Hardee's. It's always the little things that simultaneously break your heart and bring you comfort all at once that bring whatever you've lost back to you. Finding peace and closure in moments that would have put butterflies in your stomach in a previous season of life reminds me of how much growth I have established in only a few years time. The power of choice is a potent weapon if wielded correctly. Love is fickle in her passing moments of desire, but you cannot build a relationship on a foundation of threadbare moments of passion and hidden smiles around tiled corners, concealed away from the rest of the world.

Mourn the passing of what could have been. Propose a toast to lost opportunity and new beginnings, to the next chapter of this life. Maybe in your next lifetime, or the one after that, your paths will cross, and you will get to try again. It will feel like bumping into an old friend. A simple, "Hello. Where have you been all my life?" in the midst of the chaos of the next world when you need someone to shelter you from the storm of your own creation.

In the darkest parts of my life, I will always come back to the sky. Pastel and cotton candy skies, slightly obscured by winter's silhouetted trees marked January's beginning, middle, and end. Every night at work, even if it's only for a few seconds, I lean out the drive-thru window and breathe for a second. Take in the magic that always comes with the sun saying goodnight and the moon greeting us for an extended stretch of darkness ahead. We're at that point now where every day I petulantly ask, "How many more days until Spring?"

Winter is hard. December through March always seem like the longest part of the year solely for the darkness alone. My mantra the last few weeks, when things have suddenly become more stressful and overwhelming has been, "This too shall pass. The light will come back." I have been struggling with the sharp upward and downward slopes of the precarious roller coaster I call my mental health journey. I had to write pep talk after pep talk after pep talk to pull myself out of my darkness.

"You are kind. You are important. You are worthy. Don't listen to the lies that your darkness feeds you. The only way to live a long, happy life is to get back up again when it seems like everything is doing its best to kick you while you're down. If you need a little encouragement, this is it. You can do this. I believe in you."

January, thanks for the sunsets and the pep talks and the small blips of encouragement and goodness amongst all the heaviness of life. See you next year.