Goodbye 2024. You were a real bitch.

Expecting more sunshine in 2025.

I’ve been stymied in my writing this year, as if wearing an invisible straight jacket that pins my arms down. The ideas are there—words rush through my mind, full concepts and sentences and source material, I even dream lines of prose at night, but somehow I’ve been unable to pull off the necessary slow down to make it all into something for others to read.

I couldn’t even eek out this last newsletter of 2024 before the calendar flipped to January first. But alas, it’s a new day, right? A new year! Time to stop boo-hooing about it and crack on.

Except that I know my lack of writing output in 2024 wasn’t a somehow. The truth is, this year was fucking hard. The difficulties of life drained me, leaving me limp. A grinding sense of futility chased me, the hungry ghost that zapped my will to see things through. My friend Maura calls this horrible sensation “overarching impotence,” and for me, this maddening afterburn from trying life events felt more injurious than the actual events.

For perspective on exactly how trying, everyone in my household had some type of major surgery in 2024, and those were just the easy parts of the year! 2024, by every metric I can muster, was a real motherfucker.

But sometimes, this is life. To be alive is to suffer and struggle. As Stevie Nicks sings so truthfully- Sometimes it’s a bitch. Sometimes it’s a breeze. If I had to pick a song for 2024, that’s the one. In fact, I included it in my set list when I guest hosted “The She Show” on Birmingham Mountain Radio, a real honor last year.

Me with BHM Mountain Radio’s Dru Cunningham, creator and host of “The She Show.”

My job was to choose 12 songs by women that capture all the feels of the times. Yes, there is rage, but also hope, compassion, and righteous resistance in these songs.

If you’re interested in listening, here’s the entire episode!

Looking back at this tumultuous year, my 50th around the sun, I wouldn’t trade it. Even with the unconscionable outcome of the presidential election, I am grateful for life. It’s not always natural to feel this way, but I’ve made it a practice to intentionally recognize all of it as a gift, even when it breaks my heart. I do this daily, sometimes hourly. Yes this is hard, I say. It is also part of being alive.

So instead of continuing to mentally circle the drain over my light writing output, I decided to take inventory of all that I experienced in 2024, and found many cracks of sunshine and bursts of rainbows, not a bitterly awful year but one in which I insisted on pursuing delight, with what the late poet Jack Gilbert calls “the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world.”

Some examples: I wanted to connect with more joy through dance, so I auditioned for a local disco performance group and now dance with them weekly and occasionally perform in full costume. I decided to get a new tattoo for my birthday, a gorgeous heart bursting with flowers on my left arm. I also baked a lot of cookies and brownies and cakes.

I read 33 books. I co-taught a college podcasting class with one of my favorite people, writer Kerry Madden-Lunsford. I also helped teach a week-long creative writing camp for high school students, started by the great professor and human rights champion Ada Long, who died in February. Ada was the best of us, and my unfinished piece about her irks me perhaps more than all other unfinished pieces of 2024. But Ada had tremendous empathy, and I know she would say stop with the self-flagellation. It’s OK.

Professionally, I spoke to groups around the state about my work making the podcast Earwitness, released in 2023, and the terrible injustice at the center of the podcast, the wrongful conviction of Toforest Johnson, who remains on Alabama’s death row. I am proud that the podcast continues to gain new listeners, and even prouder to stand on the side of truth and justice.

Speaking to law students at Samford University.

I applied for and was given an investigative reporting grant and embarked on the most challenging assignment of my career, which I’m still laboring at, but hope to publish at the end of January. It’s a beast of a project, but promises to cast a floodlight on a pitch-black pile of public dollars being spent to defend abusive prison guards. Expect more stories like this one published in October, about a $250,000 wrongful death settlement quietly paid to the mother of a man killed by Alabama prison guards in 2018. None of the guards were charged criminally and the state never admitted wrongdoing.

I’ve spent dozens of hours staring at spreadsheets, not my favorite way to spend time, but synthesizing this mountain of data and other source material (126 separate lawsuits!) into a comprehensible series of stories feels monumental. The slow pace of this reporting, and the cognitive energy required, have contributed to my angst. At the same time, I know I’m doing exactly what I’m supposed to be doing. Finally publishing this work soon is going to feel incredible!

So yes, 2024 was a doozy. Personally and globally, it felt as if we all lurched from crisis to crisis, just trying to hang on for dear life. We’re all contending with an ongoing unraveling— the continuing shape-shifting of social media and technology, the collapse of empires, the aging of our bodies, the struggle to maintain focus and direction in a glitching, terrifying world.

No wonder there’s overwhelm and futility. That doesn’t stop with a new calendar year. But take inventory of what you’ve done and experienced, and I hope, like me, you’ll find some cracks of light.

I’m anticipating much more sunshine this year—a massive documentary film I’ve helped produce will debut, and my first-ever writing residency is coming in February, during which I plan to finally get a book proposal done. These two things hold incredible excitement, not to mention more disco dancing, cake baking and world exploring. Jack Gilbert was right. We must risk delight.

So goodbye 2024. I forgive your bitchiness. This new year, I hold a renewed resolve to keep living, put out what good I can and forgive myself for the rest. My wish is for you to do the same.