In the most cliché way possible, I am getting introspective while reflecting on what a fucking and complicated mess 2024 has been. Full of tears, laughter, loss, love, big fucking mistakes, healing, continuously failing, blowing up friendships, growth, realizations, acceptance… and that’s just to name a few off the top of my head.
But if you’re here for the tea gurls, that’s not the place I write from anymore. Sorry to disappoint you if you were expecting a past version of myself. But I love and respect myself and others too much to keep making the same mistakes over and over more than I already have.
That’s a funny expression isn’t it?
“The past version of me.”
It can vaguely be applied as a hypothetical turn of phrase, or be quite literally an example of how I am not the man I was yesterday, last week, last month, or last year. A friend once threw it back in my face in when I used this concept in a conversation in what felt like a very cruel and cold manner. Which, if I’m being honest, is hypocritical to say the least based on their selfish, repetitive and very big mistakes in our friendship. Not to mention how much they HATED and subsequently resented being compared to the person they were when they made them.
But I digress.
I have made it a rule of mine to no longer judge anyone anymore because to them at the time, I am certain it was what they were feeling and needed to express emotionally. I have also come to accept that people are allowed to feel their feelings and don’t need me to try to convince them that theirs are wrong, or that mine are bigger and more important.
It’s the middle of the night and I am wide awake. My brain is getting the best of me for the umteenth time, and I am replaying a handful of situations over and over in my mind. Conversations had where I wish I had said a specific thing. Decisions I wish I had made, and some I wish I hadn’t. But the reality of who I am today, and life if I think about it, is that this Daniel is a result of the challenging year 2024 has been.
I am not who I was, and I am not yet who I will be.
I want so badly to be happy, and I hope that that doesn’t make you sad or worry about me. I have moments of joy and I have had laughter. I have made memories and travelled to new destinations. I have stopped punishing myself so intensely and self-sabotaging. But if I had to sum up the year, I won’t love 2024 or look back on it fondly in any way.
Some years we thrive. Some years we survive.
The tears we cry and the things we lose hopefully one day make us stronger. But while people love to fantasize about the proverbial phoenix, they don’t often focus on the burning that has to come first.
I don’t like to play the victim, so I have to uncomfortably admit I have hurt a lot of people this year because I have been hurting so much.
I have been selfish and have put myself in dangerous situations. I have broken the trust of those who were there for me in some of my lowest moments, and in it all I have to take accountability amid my shame and embarrassment. For many of these moments, I know that an apology is too little and too late. However, it’s important that I admit to myself that they deserved better and I’m sorry. I hope I can learn to forgive myself entirely one day, but until then I try to practice patience with the healing process.
Over the course of the last few years I feel as though I have had to accept some difficult truths.
I remember the moment I sat in a surrogacy seminar tailored to the 2SLGBTQIA+ community. I vividly remember realizing when I heard how much it costs that I would never be able to afford to have biological children. That broke my heart and while I knew at the time that there were other options, having that taken from me as a reality was a loss and I had to mourn it.
A few years later when Dad died, not only did I mourn him – and continue to do so – I also had to very quickly accept that life is short. It started an uncontrollable fear I still sometimes worry about. Bernie (my Dad) died at 56 suddenly from a heart attack, which is the same age and cause of dead of his father. As irrational as it is to admit out loud, it felt like my fate was sealed, a stop watch was ticking down, and it all forced me to face my mortality without knowing it.
I’ve had to accept in life that, against everything I want to be true, that love isn’t always enough. There’s a layer in that psychologically that I have been working on with my therapist. I have held on to the romanticized version of love that children are taught in fairytales as a way to cope with surviving sexual abuse at a very young age. I couldn’t control that very traumatic experience, or that no one “saved” me from it when I asked for help. The idealized concept of love was a safe idea that made me feel less scared. If love could overcome anything, maybe I was strong enough to overcome something no child should have to overcome.
Realistically, I’ve never not felt scared to some degree.
I’ve never felt 100% safe in life. Especially when love is challenged, damaged, or lost.
I’ve never written those words before.
More recently I think I am coming to terms with the fact that at 41, and with the ending of something that I didn’t ever want to lose coming in 2025, the chances of me having a family are almost non existent now.
That is currently breaking my heart in a way I can’t quite explain. It feels similar to that moment when I lost the reality of biological children, except now it feels pretty permanent that the idea of being a Dad isn’t going to happen at all.
I don’t know if I will ever be able to afford adoption on my own. And while the idea of fostering is valiant some have said, it is also a long process to start and I don’t know or think I’ll qualify. Not to mention it would take me some time to get to a stable point where I was ready to start.
I think I have to come to terms with the fact I may never have children.
That’s a big one, amid several simultaneous big ones.
I never say never, because in 2018 I heard that word a lot and worked really hard towards something I thought was gone forever. Something that I knew was worth fighting for, and so against the whole world it felt like, I fought.
However, I think this is different. It feels different. This is something I have to start accepting as a very real possibility.
So, as you can see, I’ve been carrying all of this in 2024 and the weight has been crushing me. I think I’m admitting it all because for me, when I write these posts, it allows a certain sense of release. It also allows me to connect with you from a place of complete vulnerability.
This is me baring my soul and my heart and the thoughts that keep me up at night at the ending of one of the hardest years of my life.
While I try to turn this blog post around, because I do not want you to be as sad as I am this holiday season, I thought I would share the things I hope to leave behind in 2024.
I am going to try and leave behind the life I thought I would have in order to make space for the life that I deserve to make for myself.
I am going to try and leave behind the importance I still put in needing to feel liked and included by others.
I am going to try and leave behind my fear of opening up to new friends and connections.
I am going to try and leave behind my self-doubt and harmful self-talk that I am so used to.
I am going to try and leave behind my unhealthy patterns and self-medicating so that I can face the hard things in life head on.
I am going to try and leave behind the idea that I am an undesirable ugly fat slob who deserves all the bad things that have happened to him.
I say I am going to try not because I don’t believe I can, but rather because I don’t want to put so much pressure on myself that when I make a mistake I consider it a complete failure.
I am not a complete failure.
I still believe in magic, and soulmates, and twin flames, and past lives. I still believe in the power of love. I still love music as a way to express what I am feeling when I can’t. I still love that I lead from kindness, even when others don’t understand, appreciate, or acknowledge that in my place they wouldn’t.
I am not a bad person and I will not let 2024 define who I am.
This is a fucking hard chapter in my story, and when I look back, I will know that even when I kept falling down, I always got back up and tried again.
Some years we thrive. Some years we survive.
I am sending so much love your way, especially if you also have had a hard year.
Don’t forget to be kind & a little more honest with yourself this year