Goodbye to 2023

Reflections on a hard year, and looking to the year ahead

2023 was a hard year for me personally. Not all of it — there were certainly joyful parts, like our first international trip with the kids, and our honeymoon and first year of marriage — but enough that I look back and think, “that was a really hard year.”

I spent a lot of this year in various states of grief, fatigue, and nausea. I threw up every morning for 80 days straight, which sounds awful, but the worst was the first 6 weeks when I also experienced all-day nausea and my diet was severely limited to bagels and cream cheese and crackers. It was a bleak time.

Despite the bleakness, I found glimmers of gratitude too that helped me make it through.

Gratitude for the ability to work from the comfort of my home (which I did not have the luxury of when I was pregnant with Alina and Jackson) with a work culture that prioritizes well-being.

For kids who are old enough to be genuinely helpful and ask me if I want tea or snacks, and tell me to sit down and rest “because you’re preggy” (vastly different from being pregnant with a toddler to care for!)

For everything I’ve learned these last few years about how to take better care of myself and how to ask for and receive support.

For the space and ability to let myself be tired and less productive, to just take things day by day.

For modern anti-nausea medicine, which took the edge off of the nausea and results in me throwing up just once a day rather than throughout every day. But also intense fury at the de-prioritization of women’s health. If men had to be pregnant, I guarantee we would have paid pregnancy leave and effective treatment for pregnancy symptoms (or more likely, the ability to grow babies fully outside of human bodies).

For the truly amazing (and a little creepy) biology of the human body that lets it grow another human body.

And even for the nausea and vomiting, which was a reassuring sign to me that this pregnancy was progressing healthily and less likely to end in another miscarriage.

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As the year draws to a close, I’m grateful to be past the worst part of pregnancy (before getting to the second worst part of being so uncomfortably large in the third trimester), to be able to enjoy foods I love, to have more energy, and to have the space to slow down as the new year approaches.

The end of the year is always a slow and reflective time for me. During my divorce, I happily agreed to a holiday schedule of always having the kids for a week over Thanksgiving and for them to always spend Christmas week with their dad. As someone who didn’t grow up celebrating Christmas, this was honestly a huge relief to opt out almost completely from the November-December frenetic rush of Black Friday shopping, so much stuff, and family obligations.

In the years since, I’ve had space to be more intentional about how I want to spend holiday time. Nowadays, our annual holiday activities are limited to stockings, our small four-way Secret Santa gift exchange (not so secret when kids are involved), and Venmo gifts to teachers, gardeners, and cleaners.

This year, Naveed and I spent four nights in a beautiful tiny home a few hours away, and sloooooowed way down. We prepared and brought yummy food and turned our phones off. We had a lot of solo time together —Naveed meditated throughout the day, while I wrote morning pages, read so many books, and napped.

We also spent a lot of time together talking about the year ahead and intentions for 2024. Intention-setting has always felt like a variation on goal-setting or New Year’s resolutions that suits me better. I’ve learned that I resist goals and long-term planning and am much better off with regular reflection and dynamic adjustments that keep me aligned with what I want to be doing.

In years past, I’ve done and enjoyed various kinds of reflection and intention-setting exercises, including Susannah Conway’s Unravel Your Year, and Year Compass.

This year, I felt like taking a more an unstructured and organic approach, and our slow retreat in the mountains was perfect.

If you’re also feeling a little averse to a more whole structured workbook or workshop, but want to do some reflection on the year past, and the new year to come, here are just a few gentle questions to think about, journal about, and have conversations around

What were you most proud of in 2023?

At the end of 2024, what do you hope to be most proud of?

There may be things that are noticeably absent, or themes that take up more space than expected. Your answers may surprise you and reveal what’s actually important to you.

Happy new year, all. I’m also grateful to all of you — writing here at Tech and Tea has been a special rejuvenating place for me, especially this year when I really needed it. It’s helped me carve out time to write, and also navigate feelings of guilt and letting go when I didn’t feel up for it. I hope you all find some time to get more of what you need, whether that’s slowness and reflection, time by yourself or time with others, space to do something you’ve always wanted or space to do absolutely nothing at all.