“You were set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.”

Since 2016, I’ve ended each year with the same ritual: I go to a beach alone, and carry with me all the gratitude journals I’ve completed throughout the year (I’m not disciplined enough to write each day, but I do write gratitude at least a few times a week). Then, I sit for hours on the beach reading through them, from January 1st of that year to the present day.

Usually I’m in Florida in December and I do this ritual at a state park near my brother’s home, but this year in Brazil I could spoil myself and do it on the beaches in Ilha Grande. 

I once interviewed a woman who told me she knew indigenous folks who had a tradition of spending the first week of the new year “remembering.” I think my ritual intends to do something similar: to refuse to start a new year without reminding myself why this one was beautiful, to push against my brain’s tendency to overly focus on the sadness and the failures and the longing, while often overlooking the very real moments of pleasure and true satisfaction and deep connection and mesmerizing growth.

Having now done this four times, I’ve noticed some patterns: the first two hours of this ritual I experience an incredible, energizing high remembering so many amazing things from the beginning of the year that by now I had forgotten. My body gets overwhelmed with the tingly joy that I usually have to take a break to walk or swim and release the giddy energy.

The middle few hours are always harder. Oddly, reading through a year’s gratitude can also feel lonely, disappointing, triggering, confusing. What to do when you read the entries of loving dates with someone you are no longer seeing? When you read the excitement and hope of applying for “my dream job” that I never ended up getting? When reading about the pride of submitting writing that in the end never got published? When noticing entries where I could tell I was faking it, forcing myself to feel gratitude for a situation that —with all its privilege and objective positivity—just still didn’t feel quite right? 

It’s also hard to notice that curiously, some of the best moments of the year are entries left unfinished. Sometimes I see the first sentence: 

“For the weekend in …

“For the ceremony…”

….And then notice the entire page was left blank. 

Other great moments —my friend’s birthday weekend in Tahoe, finally having an honest conversation with my father about my sexuality— I realized in retrospect I never even wrote at all. 

I’m noticing I’m actually afraid of soaking in moments like this, because they have that complex happy/intense/vulnerable feeling I don’t know how to make sense of yet. Brene Brown used to call this “foreboding joy”— this terror people experience when something is too good. They worry how they will hold onto it. I heard this term years ago. My gratitude journals  were partially a tool against it; to make myself be more present with my joy instead of afraid of it. But seeing these half-written entries made it clear that I still have work to do. I still don’t easily allow myself to trust joy, especially when it’s joy tied to vulnerability. 

Still, for better or worse, this ritual always ends back with that energetic high from the beginning, my body and brain still incredulous at how many amazing moments happened in a year I had before just considered “pretty good.”

Throughout the ritual this year, I kept thinking of Leslie Jameson’s recent essay where she presents this list of questions: “Where do we find pleasure? How do we find language for it? How do we create narratives that hold the kinds of happiness that exist not in superlative moments but across longer durations?” My gratitude journals and this ritual have helped me answer these questions. Slowly, I am learning how to articulate my own joy, with a specificity and clarity that allows me to learn all the new pleasures my life is creating: the pleasure of housemate intimacy, the pleasure of decolonized and liberated love, the pleasure of true belonging in the city you live in, the pleasure of witnessing your gifts tangibly help someone else.

I am trying to lead with these pleasures, give them as much airtime as I’ve given my moments of sadness. Annie Dillard wrote “You were set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.” Here’s to devoting two days to being astonished, and grateful.