Lessons of the past
I hate to be stating the obvious, except in the business of comedy, so I'll keep this short: This is it. 2025 is coming to an end.
For what it's worth, I’m not even entirely convinced it was only one year because there are entire galaxies between how it started and how it's ending, at least for me.
As I‘m pondering this, dressed in a bathing suit and looking out onto the park of the thermal spa I’m staying at (last minute getaway over the holidays), there is a sense of awe and gratitude, mixed with a fair bit of perplexity. Life is great. Life is weird. A lifetime ago (eleven months, to be precise), walking up and down the stairs of my rental to do laundry started to become impossible. Two days ago, I went on a spontaneous 12 km hike with 500 m of elevation in -2°C and a snowstorm and all I got was sore calves.
This marks the final bit of reintroduction. It is now confirmed that I'm able to do everything I could do before I got ME/CFS. I'm also using the sauna again after 15 months and let me tell you, it's awesome. So as I'm looking outside towards the big cascades, the powdered trees (yes, we do have snow here) and the dog walkers with bonnets, I'm also looking inward, trying to make sense of what happened in those twelve months.
Usually, I re-read all of my diary entries of that year towards the end of it. This year, my endeavor was a little bigger. Starting in 2003 when I first picked up journaling, I went through all of my past up to 2019. 12,000 pages (no, it's not a typo), over 70 individual books. Initially, the idea was to catch up all the way to the present, but 2019 and onwards mark some of the toughest years and I had to take it slower.
Nonetheless, 16 years of life is a lot to read through. I had lived in at least seven different homes, depending on how you count, I graduated school and university, abandoned my master's, worked as a journalist, model, videographer, writer, streamer, stage hand, props manager and Youtuber (I probably forgot some), worked my way through challenging relationships and built a tiny house. The remaining years I have yet to read will see the difficult road to my parking spot for said house, my marriage and the falling apart of it, mental health issues, therapy and, eventually, severe illness. It's kind of a lot.
A little over a year ago in one of the more stable phases before the big dip in early 2025, I had tea on the market with a dear friend and one of her friends. As we, all three of us spiritually open to various extents, discussed our relationship with the past, my friend's friend said: ‘The past is a messy kitchen drawer. Why would I want to look in there? I put stuff in it I want to get rid of and that's it.‘
Her view was opposed to pretty much everything I stand for, with the meticulous and sometimes ridiculously ambitious documentation of the past. And yet it got me thinking. The past is messy. Making sense of it is usually a hindsight project, and because memory is unreliable even when you have a diary at hand, your construction of what happened and why can take on many forms; depending on what fits your current narrative about yourself.
I was never going to agree with her statement fully - every single thing we know about resilience, therapeutic success and personal growth tells us that ignoring what happened to you (and a lot happens to all of us) will not work in your favour. But she certainly had a point in reminding me that constantly trying to sort out that one drawer in the kitchen where all the 'umm, whatever, no idea' stuff inevitably lands can be unnecessarily obsessive and take away from the task at hand. Which is, live your life.
I'm writing this entry not only on the back end of an incredibly transformative year, but also a few weeks after I made a big decision that will affect where I live, work, and much more, in the coming years. I'll speak more of it at an appropriate time, but suffice it to say that just like with my illness, this will create a before and after distinction in my life. A massive change.
Just like sorting out a kitchen drawer can become obsessive, so can dealing with the past. In trying to create meaningful story arches and personal continuum you can lose yourself to things that were - but maybe also never quite were the way you remember them. Circling around what was can be the mirror you need in order to see your own destructive patterns - and it can reinforce them by shifting the focus from what could be to what has already happened.
It is the same with labels of any kind. Stickers you apply in hindsight to give structure. I use them too. I call myself neurodivergent, for instance. The danger lies in letting labels and past experiences become the framework for the future. Understandable, in some sense. We are who we are, and accepting our own boundaries is important. But self-limiting prognosis on the basis of applied names and recent history is a common side-effect and something I see a lot in the ME/CFS and neurodivergence bubble (which, not surprisingly, have a big overlap).
Ordo a chao - out of chaos, order. I live and breathe this idea. But structure and, in that, the construction of the past can become self-serving and in turn obstructive. Yes, I want to understand how I got here, also in the hopes of not repeating patterns that led to my sickness in the first place. But I also, for now, just want to be here. And with the big decision I recently made, it became clear that it wasn't necessary for me to have all my kitchen drawers in order before I could move on. Some of them will always be messy. I love structure. But I also love life.
How did I get here? Well, the nervous system works in mysterious ways and I will probably never fully understand what happened, except that trauma therapy and somatic work had a lot to do with it. For now, that's enough. I didn't bring the remaining diaries on my trip (but I did bring a lot of other books). Instead, I simply relish the complex feeling of being on the other side of something big and knowing in my heart that the future will look very different from the past in many ways. The present already does. And I trust that even though there are still chaotic drawers, I can just get on with the cooking. Well, actually not really because I booked a four-course meal tonight, hehe.
Happy holidays, everyone. Pamper yourselves and don't fear the shadows of the past. It's okay to put them in the cupboard for now and maybe sort them out later. More soon.