January 12, 2024
Dear VTY girls,
Though it’s fashionable to rail against New Year's resolutions (not entirely unwarranted), I appreciate this time of year as a marker to purposefully reflect on how time has passed and how one has spent it. I always find myself reverting, in some way, to the version of me that existed one year prior—forcing me to compare the way that I was to the way that I am now, while simultaneously merging the two.
The past few weeks, I have been drawn back to the playlists I was listening to last year. I am remembering how I spent my days and am visiting the same places. I am remembering how sharply difficult winter was for me.
This year, I find myself struggling and also hopeful…and then struggling more ardently when I consider that this feeling of hope always always always bubbles up at this time, like clockwork, like my aforementioned reversion, every twelve months.
I think I get so upset about these recurring patterns because they imply that I might not have changed as a person and, in my mind, a person who does not change is a person to be pitied. I can tell you with certainty that I feel this way because I have watched people I love suffer immensely due to their inability to change, have suffered personally on account of their inability to change, and now feel deeply that an inability to change is the foundation of human tragedy.
Change is hard, though (did you know that?). We get comfortable with the ways that we suffer, or at least used to them. It’s all quite difficult for me to wrap my head around though, because I also maintain that I am constantly changing. This time last year, sitting in the same room that I am now, I was coming to terms with the fact that I loved a boy who also loved me, but that I could not be in a relationship with him because being that close to another person made my body feel like it was going to die. Presently, I am resuming this letter after a brief pause because I was interrupted by a call that, after a lovely, mundane conversation, ended with unison “I love you”’s to that same boy, who I very much miss sleeping next to during these brief few days we have been apart. Loving another person that way has awesomely altered how I empathize with the world and how it feels around my quiet existence. That is a change I never thought I would be able to experience!
To be honest, I think I am bored with the way that I suffer. I am ready to put my old suffering to bed and to suffer in a new way—which I tell myself will make me think and see the world differently. How exciting! How easy it sounds to phrase it in that matter-of-fact way!
What I’m realizing is, there are fluid parts of me that I leave exposed to things outside of myself so as to be shaped by them. Somehow, I am able to loosen my grip on these aspects of myself and my life, and so change that occurs within them feels natural. Other parts of me however, I hold fast to, and have always held fast to. They are hard, solid, cold. They scare me. They are also constant, and so I think I both loathe and love them for their dependability and, because they are welded to me, there is a part of me that feels like something unnatural and profane is occurring when I try to change them. And so instead of suffering that, I prefer to suffer the consequences of passivity eased by the stylish illusion of a future that will be filled with action. Same old same old. Tragedy.
I’m going to stop now. Any way I describe my experience can be counteracted by an opposite but equally true experience and if I continue to work this one out on paper, I’ll start to think it untrue and delete it even though I was just feeling the truth of it.
Sydney mentioned picking a word to underscore the new year. Mine, if you can believe it, is ACTION.
Wish me luck, girls!
Mackenzie
Dear Kenzie,
Change is a funny and fickle thing. Something struck me when you mentioned pitying those who don’t change, or rather, reckoning with the feeling that you haven't changed.
When I was a dancer, I was constantly frustrated by how much time I spent staring at myself in the mirror, willing myself to be better, to be different. For so long, everything feels the same. Every once in a blue moon, though, I’d catch a glimpse of the strength I’d gained, the techniques I’d spent hours on, and the flexibility I’d worked so hard for finally showing up in action.
And then I’d look back at what I looked like six months ago, and it was always shocking how much I’d underestimated the amount of change I’d gone through.
All that to say, I think the fear/frustration with not changing is felt most deeply by those who are in the middle of a metamorphosis (insert Gregor Samsa pic here).
.
For 2024, I want to commit to myself. I’ve spent a lot of time learning how to interact with the world at the whim of others. At work, I read my emails three times to make sure the tone is perfect and inoffensive. I feel like apologizing for any perceived offense among friends. Everything lately has felt like a bit of a performance. That sucks. I want to live a life where I interact with the world exactly as I am. I don’t think that excludes wanting to change and grow.
On the note of finding a word for the year, one phrase came up when I was journaling:
I want to be myself and nothing but that.
With that thought ringing in my ears, my word for 2024 is sincere.
Cheers!
Julianne
Dear Kenzie and Julianne,
I took much comfort in reading your letters. Kenzie, I can feel the love you have for your boyfriend and I am so overjoyed that you are not only getting to experience being fully known and loved but that you are aware and articulate enough to recognize and share that joy with us.
The new year brings change to mind for me as well. I was born on a Monday and though I don’t typically follow astrology I definitely feel Monday-born in some ways. I love the feeling at the start of something new (sadistic perhaps but I do get a rush from the Monday morning email clear out). Newness brings me feelings of excitement and hope and more than ever this year I feel ready to reset myself.
Julianne, I resonated with your words on sincerity and hope to honor my true desires this year or at least recognize them. In some ways, I felt I lost myself in 2023. As a young professional and new wife living in my husband’s college town near his family, I worked hard to slot into a role or persona that I didn’t consciously choose for myself. I recently started medication for a particularly heavy season of melancholy. Thanks to the Celexa I feel like I’ve woken up and I’m so grateful to be feeling like myself again. However, that wake up came with an oh no moment as I realized I’d drifted a bit too far from myself while on autopilot. I feel hopeful that the person I will be this year will be more true to myself.
I recently heard an audio bit on tik tok, an inspirational quote on someone’s mother’s wall, that really stuck with me. She had scrawled “improve because that is who you are” and in parenthesis something along the lines of (not because you don’t already love yourself). This spirit of doing the best thing for you, for your future self, as an act of radical self love is my inspiration for 2024. I suppose my word of the year for 2024 is self-love.1
Very truly yours,
Sydney
1.not in a saccharin gushy way, more in a proactive, confident in my identity way but I suppose I shouldn’t be worried about coming off too sappy since one element of my spirit I am proudest of is the way I feel deeply in touch with the joy of being alive and I just spouted off some lines about how I’d like to be true to myself. You know what, forget the footnote entirely.
Dear VTY women,
After reading Juliannc and Sydney’s letters, I find it a bit funny that we all seem to want to be “ourselves” again. We have this sense of being where certain things feel good and as they should, and certain things feel wrong, like going the opposite way on a one way. We know even the littlest habits or behaviors we do are not really us but rather some strange, depraved, horrid person inside of us, charging us to behave in ways we didn't know we were capable of.
I wonder where our sense of self comes from and how this “other” evil self slips into our habits?
I ask that because my boyfriends always giggle at me when I say things like, “I want to be more like myself.” He then asks when I felt most myself and I say early college, to which he replies, “You were so young how do you know that’s really you?” And to that, I have no real answer. But I think that’s when I trusted myself and saw goodness in the world the most.
Last year, I felt I needed to become myself again, thus ensuing upon the failed Year of Sexy. I felt like I had no control of my life, was not confident, and was not able to relax. I felt I was the opposite of everything I had known myself to be, even though I had had these anxious, low self-esteem feelings for a few years at this point. I did many things that felt like huge milestones during the Year of Sexy, but none of them really seemed to make me feel more in control or confident in myself.
What helped me the most was just learning to accept who I am and that I cannot control the world around me. And also, perhaps my brain has melted into soup and can no longer worry about every little thing in the universe.
Anyways, this year is the Year of Slay. I feel that I have a lot to do and alot to do well. From moving to growing my art practice to wedding planning, I have got a lot of things to do. I feel more confident and capable, and not 100% myself, but a rough 80% there.
I suppose my words of the year will be slay and capable. 2024: The Year of Capable.
very truly yours,
Grace McCraw
