This year ate me alive in so many ways. Emotionally, physically, financially, all of it. Just two weeks ago my cell phone lept from my bike, over the edge of the ferry, and into the bottom of the San Francisco Bay. A good 7.2/10 for style, but 0/10 for suddenly needing to buy a new phone just months after replacing the phone before that, which was damaged by a mere fall onto concrete.
East Bay for Everyone got broken into earlier this year and we lost a few thousand dollars worth of tools and infrastructure to theft. My coworker's bike got stolen; he had just moved out here from NYC just over 6 months ago. It fucking sucked.
K-as-partner and I went on a bike tour in Seattle. There, they crashed at high speed down a hill. As reward they got got a whole lot of road rash and a free trip to the ER (thanks, Medi-Cal!), and mostly pain for the remainder of that trip.
I wasn't able to afford a holiday where I live in another city over new years, as I've done for nearly a decade by now. Usually I try to get away from home, from K-as-roomate and I squeezed into a far too small one-ish-bedroom apartment. If I don't, it eats at my feeling of agency. Of space. It'll chew up my relationship and drain it of love once K-as-roomate and K-as-partner combine together in unclear ways. Without a sense of distance between us-a sense that a two bedroom apartment might give-the line blurs between "hanging out as roomates" and "passionate romantic relationship".
My relationships must grow and develop and change over time or they die. Being stagnant sucks, and means I'm not able to be there for them as much as I want to. This relationship between K and I means quite a lot to me, and I want to keep it working. I'm not going to let 2019 eat me alive.
So.
I'm going to resolve myself to take care of myself, in ways better than I did for 2019. Only the future holds what this might look like, but I have some directions I hope to build intertia for.
I need to do a lot less. I need to be saying No to more things. I need to make time for myself, for my art, for my creativity. To savor my days and fill them with life and love once again.
Its time I gave EBFE another good shove, and let it run free for a while. I'm at the point in my advocacy now where I need to step aside and let someone else run things for a while, and just tell me what to do and where to go. A nice white lady with a non-profit isn't representative of who is impacted by our problems. But what I should do now is work on the machine itself. Continue our transition towards a democratic federated network of organizers across the east bay. Knit the region together in a way that has never been done before. In a way that can build the power we need in the places that have for so long refused and excluded us.
Noisebridge is going to be raising 14 million dollars. Its going to involve a lot of art, a lot of community, a lot of reknitting my family bonds.
And, of course, I begin to run in earnest for my local transit board of directors.
I'm going to need to take care of myself this year. A lot of people depend on me, and still more will. The world is going to turn more hard, more cold, more of a world of death and loss. A howling thing manifested as surprise medical bills, evictions, and an end to things.
The only way we'll make it through this is with the love in our hearts. When all is said and done, its the warmth, the relationships, the emotional meaning that we get out of life that matters. I read that somewhere this year. Its been stuck with me since then and given me a lot to think about.
I know there is a vast reservoir of it in mine. Its there. Its been so dull these past few months, but at times, I've been engulfed in its warmth.
My new year's resolution for 2019 is to remember that I have that warmth. That I must use it consciously and with intent. That it is the only antidote to a world gone dark and mad.
That I need to love myself before I can love anyone else.