Meeting the year ahead
No real resolutions, as usual, but I'm hoping to reframe my perspective with a little help from writers and artists who have echoed my desires.
However you found your way here, welcome! I’m Emily, and I write letters about how we seek and tell stories to make sense of a changing world and our place in it.
Happy new year!
I’ve taken a little time to settle back into some semblance of a routine after the festive celebrations, being the sort of person who needs time to recover from any lack of time to myself, no matter how much communing together was enjoyed (and I enjoyed it a lot, despite grappling with a slight undertow of negative emotion entirely of my own making).
Anyway, in my moments of introspection since, I thought it would be good to kick off the year with—not resolutions (I hardly ever make them), but words from other writers, documentarians, and creatives that I hope will guide me through living, writing, and embracing the world in the upcoming year. Many of them express contradictions I have long grappled, and continue to grapple, with—and I hope you, too, find something in them that serve as a handhold in these challenging times.
“She was style, and she was an old loneliness that nothing could quite wipe away; she was vastly knowledgeable about people, about books, about the mind’s emotions and the heart’s. She lived sometimes in a black box of memories and unanswerable questions, and then would come out and frolic—be feisty, and bold.” —Mary Oliver1