2023 Recap
2023 was quite a fucking year. I’m a markedly different person now than I was at the beginning of the year. I opened up my life, with the help of some amazing people, and created one I had always dreamed of having. During the pandemic, I used to feel like my life was devoid, empty, and I was the walking dead. Even felt that when I first moved here. All I wanted was for my life to feel full. I’ve been reflecting a lot as I begin my next internal journey through sexual trauma, and that reflection fills me with gratitude. Because I can see where what I asked came to be, my life is so full now, and there’s even room for more!
I fell in love with my island, with myself, my life and with other people. Some people left, but my love was never lost for them, just dormant. Jesus, as painful as that has been, was someone who showed me so much about the ways I was still afraid of embracing myself, I wish our lights could’ve flickered together longer, but I’m glad he illuminated me for the time he did. He made me glow when he lit me up to myself. My mom was right, he came to bring me community. To show me how to create it for myself. I always admired how he could talk to anyone. And before he left, he brought me together with new friends who I cherish.
As I examine the year ahead and a big year for me it is, I’m proud of 2023. Like I predicted it was a year about relationships, where I realized so much more about what it means to actively maintain and form friendships, how to communicate better and how to show up more. I’ve been realizing how much I shut myself off from people and I’m trying to learn how to let people in and how to be there for them too. A lot happened in the world, a lot happened internally. Here are some other recaps of the year!
Best books I read this year:
My Body— Emily Ratajkowski
“In my early twenties, it had never occurred to me that the women who gained their power from beauty were indebted to the men whose desire granted them that power in the first place. Those men were the ones in control, not the women the world fawned over. Facing the reality of the dynamics at play would have meant admitting how limited my power really was—how limited any woman’s power is when she survives and even succeeds in the world as a thing to be looked at”
The Woman in Me—Britney Spears
“In some ways, they turned me into a teenager again; in other ways, I was a girl. But sometimes I just felt like a trapped adult woman who was pissed off all the time. This is what’s hard to explain, how quickly I could vacillate between being a little girl and being a teenager and being a woman, because of the way they had robbed me of my freedom.”
Ain’t I A Woman—bell hooks
Best music I discovered:
Barbie Movie:
I just watched it and I cried my eyes out multiple times. I think what broke my heart most was seeing Ken uphold the patriarchy to Barbie. In Barbieworld, men are subjugated much like women are in reality, and I didn’t like that. But when he took away her place in her world and made it a place where she didn’t have anything, not even female friendship, I cried harder.
I thought of every man I’d loved and that inevitable moment of shock and a drop in my soul that came with him reminding me of who was really the power player between us. When he rubbed in my face my inhumanity as an object for sexual observation and that I was in competition always for his attention.
I was curious to know some women, including my friend, didn’t like the movie or cry. I wonder if they maybe hadn’t been hurt the way I had, maybe it’s an age difference. My friend my age said she cried too. It was another moment where I was hit with the reality that what my pain has been isn’t normal and is sadly, so normalized that it’s universal. The pain of being a woman so easily communicated on screen, without even broaching the topic of children. That’s what made it sell the way it did. To be seen.
Insights or profound shit I thought and wrote down:
At the core of existence is the question of what am I and why do I exist, consciousness is asking that and all of us are just expressions of this question
Don’t wrap your politics around you in the cold dark night, for you forget, you may be a less marginalized body but you are still a body who has no rights except the ones we collectively believe we hold, rights are a belief until they are held, humans don’t have rights yet, not fully
I lost myself inside myself, I buried myself so low, I’m still finding me in the rubble, that’s the thing when your coping mechanism is suppression, that’s why I don’t even feel feelings.
Sex is the only thing that feels safe when you have intimacy issues, it feels like love and it feels like connection but things that force us to feel instead of allowing us to blossom are illusions, sex feels real and it’s the biggest performance of all
We first have to free our enslaved bodies from the chokehold of misunderstanding humans have been holding bodies to this whole time, without knowing the truth, body’s aren’t to serve us or be bent to submission, they are meant for freedom too
We overreact with emotions when we are trying to suppress them, it creates tension that allows them to explode
The West’s hatred of Islamic subjugation of women is a projection of their self hatred for how they subjugate women in our society but refuse to acknowledge it
Sex can’t be only for pleasure because men and women alike are told to wrap our worth and gender into our sexuality, when men want to fuck me I know really they feel powerless and want me to give them some time to feel manly, that they don’t want to fuck me, they want to fuck in general to reassure themselves of their own fragile masculinity
In conclusion:
Emotionally heavy and taxing, I did open my life like I’d planned. And this year has impacted me so deeply. I have ideas that next year will be tied into structure and further care of self for me personally. I’m excited to do a collective post.
I’ve turned off my asks, and may keep them off until past the new year as I will be going out of the country for a bit in early January! I want to clear out my inbox as much as I can before the new year as a way to create space for new energy. I’m planning to do my 2024 post soon as well. I also have been thinking up an astrology post! If you want to message me to talk, please do, as I love being able to help you guys and provide insight, but my inbox is closed for a bit while I get things a bit more structured for myself. Mahalo. Mucho love and happy holidays 💕✨💋
