I hope this letter finds you well. When I stopped writing my newsletter two years ago it wasn’t a choice precisely, it was mostly an exhaustion.

The truth is that writing a newsletter is not an insignificant amount of work. The truth is also that I never really put a lot of attention on how to make this habit of writing to you sustainable, and so my energy for the task slowly dried up. 

And then of course the pandemic hit and life changed and for the past couple of years it has felt like there has only been distraction after distraction, crisis after crisis, and a lot of things fell through the cracks.

But it’s a new year and even though I don’t believe in resolutions, I do believe in reflection and recalibration. I believe in leaning into the things that whisper to us in the quiet moments when no one else is there to hear them, and lately this newsletter has been calling to me.

Exactly what it has been whispering is not entirely clear. I do not know why I feel called back to the page to write to you again now after so many years of silence. When I stopped writing I thought perhaps that I would never write again, and yet here I am. 

What I do know is that this newsletter has in many ways always been a place that I have returned to in order to know my own heart, and space for reflection is something that has been missing in my life for a while now.

So here I am again, writing to know my own heart and hoping that maybe somehow these words will help you to know your heart, too.

The truth is that the last few years have been hard. I am certain this is true for all of us, each in our own unique ways. For me the past two years have been a time of paradox: life has been great and terrible in equal measure.

I have loved working from home, skipping my commute, and have developed new exercise habits that have made me stronger in both body and mind. I learned that when I am not forced into an office environment every day, my body remembers how to sleep. In many ways I feel better than I have in years.

At the same time, my anxiety hasn’t disappeared – it’s just been transmuted. I sleep better at night but during my waking hours I feel worse. My meditation practice has fallen by the wayside since the pandemic started and it shows. Now instead of lurching awake before my alarm clock every morning, I’m restlessly picking up my phone throughout the day and opening six different tabs to check for updates on six different websites. 

In my experience this is how anxiety goes. You gently unwind its grasping fingers from one bad habit and it reaches out and grabs onto something else to replace it. But having danced this dance with anxiety for many years now, I can tell you that the strength of its grip is weakening.

Every time I unwind another anxious pattern it gets a little easier. I get a little better at learning how to let go and move forward. My anxiety settles down a little bit more.

The way I see it, the goal isn’t eradication. I’m not sure that that would even be possible. I think of it more like a meditation – the goal isn’t to cease the anxious habits or thoughts, it’s just to notice them sooner and sooner and to intercede with them more and more skillfully.

My recalibration for 2022 is to do just that. To intercede with these new patterns and hopefully, as a result of that, to have more time to spend on writing and meditation and the things that will actually make me feel better – instead of spending hours anxiously refreshing the latest headlines.

How about you? How are you doing? 

Do you also have pandemic patterns that you are ready to let go of?

I would love to hear from you, so please feel free to let me know in the comments below.

Much love,
Jessica