Brooklyn No. 6

We are so addicted to fresh starts. 

2023 was not an easy year for me--I experienced my first year of post-grad life, and it was full of the fumbles and bumbles that are the trademarks of your twenties. I started the year with hope of a new job as an assistant editor. I was confident I was going to get my foot in the door at some shiny publishing house in Manhattan and impress everyone by living out my 90s rom-com career. 

Andie Anderson made it look so easy in How To Lose a Guy in Ten Days! How hard could it be? 

Turns out, it's pretty dang hard. Between writers strikes, hiring holds, publishing house mergers, and a deplorable job market, I acquired an impressive amount of rejection letters. 

My fresh-faced, recent grad optimism was lost somewhere between writing my hundredth cover letter and receiving my ninety-ninth rejection. 

Aside from entering the work-force, I spent most of my year trying to hold it together as three of my closest friends got married. This evolution from girlhood into womanhood was unexpectedly painful. 

I grieved the place I once held in my friends' lives, dutifully standing beside my friends in their white dresses and then quietly taking a few steps back as their new husbands became the best friend, confidant, and safe place I once was for them. 

In 2022, I still felt like a kid masquerading as an adult. As 2023 slipped away, I found myself grasping for some semblance of adolescence as the mess of my life seemed to add ten years to me. 

By December, I was eagerly awaiting January 1st. I needed something new and fresh. I was desperate for a clean slate. 

It is now February 16th. The New Year has come and gone. People everywhere have defaulted on their resolutions-- planners are blank, gym memberships unused, and books unread. But as I soldier through these last biting months of winter, I'm finding comfort not in the newness that 2024 promised me, but in the harvest of all the seeds sown in 2023. 

I am leaning into the support of all the friends I made last year, resting in the intimacy sown through weekly coffees and quick phone calls just to catch up. 

I finally got hired for a job I applied for in August--the result of interview after interview, email after email, chasing down what I needed. 

My saving grace is not a new journal that promises to straighten out my life with clean lines and flashy graphics--it's trusting the promises of a Father who has proved Himself faithful again and again. 

I've read eight books in the last six weeks and I've never felt more like a kid than I do devouring 300 page novels over a weekend. 

Newness is not doing what it's advertised to accomplish. Instead, faithful rituals have proven most effective again and again. 

I implore you to return--return to tradition and habit--not to addiction and compulsion, there's a difference. 

Return to faithful presence. Return to habitual care. Return to steadfast labor. 

There is more to ritual than meets the eye, and less to a new start than they want us to believe.