Tonight we on the Gregorian calendar say farewell to 2023 and hello 2024 … a welcome often given with much food, drink, sparkle and noise. This year, I may do all of these things. The difference will be that I’ll be doing them solo, my first time in 57 New Year’s Eves that I will be by myself.
Why? Curiosity, first and foremost, and behind that, a desire to reclaim and reframe that whole notion of what it means to ‘be alone.’
New Year’s Eve as a kid was the celebration I leaped into with an undercurrent of dread. It meant staying up late, lots of food, sometimes lots of people in the house with talking and music and so much energy … the next morning, it meant cleanup, taking down the tree, and bracing for back to school. The giant letdown after the Christmas season. With university and then my own place, New Year’s became the not-miss celebration with Boyfriend and friends. Then the celebration as newlyweds, and as new parents. On the eve of Y2K my husband and I spent New Year’s Eve watching our year-old son sleep in his crib, ready for whatever the world would sling at us as long as we were together. We spent New Year’s Day watching a Star Trek marathon on the Space Channel (Original series of course), our son taking his meals in his high chair in front of the TV while Captain Kirk saved the universe and wooed assorted lovely aliens all without spilling his coffee. Then, as our brood grew in number and age, New Year’s become a ‘get out of the house’ night for adult company at a restaurant with cloth napkins and no chicken nuggets anywhere on the menu. As the brood left for their own schools and nests, New Year’s again took on the mantle of sadness, heralding an end to the Christmas togetherness, a creeping silence as one by one the rooms emptied and the tree stood bare. Time for another marathon, this time the Annual New Year’s Day Movie Musical Marathon. Starting at 8 am, a stellar lineup of musicals new and vintage, always ending 9-midnight with The Sound of Music. For four years, bleary-eyed, brood and I rose early and gathered upstairs for musicals, while the Die Hard marathon ran in the basement for those drawn to both to float between. Good times, fond memories, creations I am now conscious of evolved to escape, slow down time until a new year beckoned my beloved children back to their own lives and left me to mine and perpetual unanswered questions. Who am I? Who am I choosing to become?
Books. Characters. Stories. Sentences. All layers of creation. What feeds those layers? Space. Movement. Flow of energy as ideas, motivation, inspiration, knowledge. An infinite playground made as small, exclusive, or confining as we choose. This year, in my cottage that is now my home, New Year’s Eve emerged on a choice point: choose down, mourn the fact that my children will all be in their own homes and with their own partners/friends this year, label myself a loser for being alone in a world that conditions me to believe I’m undesireable or otherwise incomplete without a man/woman/intimate partner. No date for the prom. No date for New Year’s. Would be sad if my life was a Hallmark movie. What feels sad to me is the number of people who numb themselves to the pain of their lives created at the denial of themselves to match the conditions, attain the ideal laid out by screenwriters and romance novelists and corporations making money from self-improvement, self-help, and retail therapy. What breaks my heart in this moment are the number of awesome, inspiring people who I would love to spend time with locked in their own stories, their playground now narrow and too small for anyone but those who can perpetuate their illusion of life, playing by the rules that life is something to give over to others’ beliefs and rules, to get through, to sacrifice.
In the past decade of conversing with awesome aware women, of expanding my playground to invite humans like me who know little and feel a lot to rediscover who we are, why we’re here, and what we’re listening to: the voices of others or our own divine voice, I’ve come to realize that the world’s belief of being incomplete without an intimate partner is not wrong … it’s just not the whole truth. Needing a date/boyfriend/girlfriend/partner/significant other or whatever term is preferred to be complete is pitched as that person being a separate individual. In fact, the statement is true when we see that the intimate partner we need and desire is OURSELVES. Intimacy with self: often mentioned right before the pitch to sell this book or that course or this set of inspirational cards with bonus candle. In fact, intimacy with self is both the easiest and toughest thing I have encountered. Try to understand it and my brain ties in knots. Let go and float into the emptiness that is I Don’t Know, that is the fallow field ready for creation, then it is the most powerful place in my universe.
And that is why tonight I am spending the last day of 2023 in my own good company. As I bid farewell to this year of peaks and valleys and challenges and joys, I bid farewell to the voices and stories that keep me cycling down into the past. As the clock strikes midnight I raise my glass in a warm welcome to a new moment where I live, create, and know I am, and am more than I know. Mourning the past, fearing the future, is no fun, and not a way I can live any longer. Being in the present, feeling my feet on the ground, the warmth on my face, the tingles that is me moving through the body that carries me and senses my world … that is what I will be doing tonight, tomorrow, and the day after that.
In performance, solos are the sought-after position, the opportunity to share in your own way, with the backing of your peers in the choir and orchestra. in life, ‘soloists’ draw hissed whispers of being selfish, arrogant showoffs; those living alone are pitied, viewed as victims of circumstance or in need of matchmaking and sadly, too many of us single folk begin to hum along to the tune of victimhood until it becomes familiar. We cling to loss as a trophy, treat space as a prison … accept a date or stay with someone who invites only a small piece of yourself, who you use to deny your full expression of self, because it’s better than being alone. I’ve learned that there is no lonelier place than that where I am separate from myself … my body living a life not of my choosing, while the essence that is me is buried under the static of others’ expectations and beliefs that no longer serve me.
Am I stepping into tonight fearlessly? Hell no … I have no idea what the next moment will bring, or how I will feel when darkness begins to fall, or when I awaken next morning, still solo and my home still quiet. What I know is in the moment I feel me, I feel space, and I cannot get this wrong.
Happy New Year! For all of you I have journeyed with these past months, years and decades: thank you. Your presence continues to enrich my life and the world. For all of you and those I have yet to meet … what awesome experiences might we co-create in 2024? There’s a perpetual question I don’t mind sitting with.
Thank you, for being here, for being you.
Jennifer
Jennifer Hatt is an author, communications consultant, publishing doula and CODE Model Coach™ .
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To learn more about Decloaking and Living Authentically and other offerings in the WEL-Systems® body of knowledge,
visit https://wel-systems.com/
the brilliant website of its founder, Louise LeBrun, https://louiselebrun.ca/)
and the powerful offerings of CODE Model Coaches™ Stela Murrizi, https://sparkingthesacred.com/
and Sheila Winter Wallace, http://bodygateways.com/