totally different
I’ve been revisiting 2024’s letters wondering what I’ll find on this side of their revelations, and what, from this year, I could take forward to build my hopes around the next. The benefit of keeping a record: opening your eyes where they once were closed, or rediscovering what you may have lost sight of along the way.
It was the first year without my grandmother, the beginning of those major and minor revisions loss imposes upon your reality. The secret of this, though, is such rewriting never ends; October, the third, marked the thirteenth anniversary of my father’s death, and in November, I wanted for them both, my grandma and my dad, in a way that was so visceral and so raw and so very specific to its moment that it was breathtaking.
Grief has been at the center of my creative life for some time now, something I’ve written and wrote about before and after I could give it its proper name. My understanding of it has shifted wildly these last few years, and in ways I’m truly grateful for, because I believe they helped prepare me for what was and is still ahead, and have helped me to navigate its opposing tensions, its spectacular contradictions. I think of it less in terms of a numbing or despairing thing, but innervating. These great shocks of love and deep feeling that leave you with the choice to transform whatever moment follows, for better or worse. This year, I tried to choose better. I wasn’t always perfect at it, but I chose it more often than not.
That same grief encouraged me to make a refuge of myself, which brought meditation into my life, though I’m never as consistent with the practice as I ought to be. August marked a year into it, though I fell off a bit after summer and suffered the consequence. It’s interesting; you start to recognize when your mind is tired and reaching for a certain kind of quiet. It’s changed my relationship with screens. There’s less an urge to disappear mindlessly into their static, and a greater desire to participate in stillness, the levels of awareness there. It’s changed my professional relationship to my creativity, enabled me to differentiate related anxieties from my art.
And more than anything else this year, I have been determined to get closer to my art.
My understanding of myself as a writer and of my writing continued to evolve in ways I didn’t ever seem to anticipate, its opposing tensions and spectacular contradictions I have tried as hard to navigate and shared with you here. In truth, it hasn’t been easy in this final stretch of the year; my work has been increasingly defined by alarming stops and starts that remind me, a little, of emergency drills. Because it’s never enough to know something. You have to commit and recommit to applying that knowledge until you’ve seen yourself through, else follow the spiral back down. And that was me, spiraling in the fall when the writing stopped, then didn’t start again. And as weeks turned to months without any real progress to speak of, I denied myself patience, closed the door on its grace. All I saw was brokenness, an irreparability of process, and it brought me so low.
But then, a day in the car with my mother and sister, in weather that felt like a handshake between two seasons, we went through the story from its first written scene to its last and I realized what I had failed to communicate in its pages. I’d let that failure silence me, and then failed to listen to what the book was trying to whisper around that silence. I’m getting through it now, finally closing in on a clean, blank page for fresh new words. The lesson here, so many times learned: to stop resisting discomfort, stop giving in to the urge to seek out and eliminate its source, but to search, instead, for the language it needs to express itself.
And I am constantly considering the weight of that expression, the momentum driving its intention, its impact. How do I say what I mean, and how do I make it meaningful? Anything but an honest answer becomes your unraveling, even if you don’t always realize it at the time. I like the shape that these questions give my approach, the privilege and invitation of their challenge, however impossible, sometimes, it feels to meet, and however low that lays me. I want, always, my writing to say something and I want what it says to feel true.
When I reached the last of the year’s archive, I was left with the acute sense this was the middle part of my story, that I was still in the meat of it. I admit, I had different expectations of myself, that from the outside so much would have changed. But it doesn’t seem to have, does it? No clean division of eras to offer, no promise of the next thing, as I’m wading deeper and deeper into its present. The other side of 2024’s revelations appears to be more of the same work that I’m doing—but with certainty that it’s worth doing.
And has always been.
16 years ago, in December 2008, my first book released and I became a published author. A year ago, in December, I was feeling so far from her. Two days ago, still December, I discovered this quote from van Gogh: I am seeking. I am striving. I am in it with all my heart.
Thank you for sharing the year with me.
I will see you in the new one, in the next letter.
Purchase the paperback edition of Sadie
Purchase the paperback edition I’m the Girl
Purchase the paperback edition of The Project
courtneysummers.ca
instagram.com/summerscourtney
https://www.threads.net/@summerscourtney
I can't express how much this resonated with me. As someone who has also recently lost her grandma and, for all intents and purposes, lost her dad, and someone who has been feeling very creatively lost lately–thank you for your words. They came exactly when I needed to read them.
The thing about eras is, as much as we love them and are fascinated by them, is that they are largely a marketing concept. It's fun to have them from a branding perspective, but if you are sitting in truth and discomfort, it's impossible—life feeds ever forward.