this year was an asskicker. this year kicked my fucking ass. i didn’t think 2024 would be easy; i knew i’d be experiencing my saturn return so (i thought) i was prepared for it to be a gnarly one, but there’s no way i could have prepared myself for this year, which has somehow been both the worst and best of my life.

i don’t even remember what was going on from january through march of this year. i really only remember my birthday. if anyone knows what i was doing at that time… let me know. in my mind, april 2024 (hell month) is when the year really began, because it kicked off several consecutive or concurrent life-changing events that broke me completely and dropped me into what i have repeatedly referred to as The Pressure Cooker of Accelerated Growth™️.

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my best friend BML died on april 4th and i’ve struggled to make sense of anything since. i’ve never experienced grief like this before. i can’t describe it and i feel stupid trying to. i’m not sure anyone can understand it without experiencing it anyway. it’s not the same kind of grief we have for the deaths we know we can count on. (that doesn’t make those losses any less painful, but it does make them different. you anticipate that your grandparents will die someday. you’ve had to consider it at some point in your life. you don’t, generally speaking, expect your best friend to die on the cusp of 30.)

i’d known BML for so long, i felt like i lost a fundamental and foundational part of myself. they were part of my family. the night they died, my sibling and i sat in their room and built an altar for them (complete with camel blues, fancy incense, black coffee in a silly mug with their face on it, etc.). we listened to music they loved and we cried and laughed and cried again. hughes joked that BML had “gotten out before the second civil war” (which they never believed was coming, for the record) and i joked that i’d spent years in therapy trying to learn how to feel my emotions in my body and BML had “fixed me” with this one simple trick (can you believe all they had to do was die?), because that night i knew exactly where my emotions were. there was no way i couldn’t. the grief was (is) so big and unbearable that it demanded to be felt and i was choking on it.

at one point, i told hughes that i felt like my own life was over, that i didn’t know how i’d ever go out and live life again. i didn’t know how to be in the world without BML in it. (still unsure, if i’m being totally honest!) they said something i needed to hear in that moment, which was simply, “it’s okay if this changes you.” this has been rattling around my head ever since. first i cried because i didn’t know how i’d ever continue living my life and then i cried because i didn’t know how living my life without them would change me.

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i’ve been so sensitive about the language people use to talk about their death. i don’t want to hear anything that might suggest there’s anything to gain from this massive loss. the entire world has been robbed and most people don’t even know how severely they’ve missed out and that pisses me off. i haven’t gained anything from their loss, but i have been changed — and i’ve realized that it’s not only okay that their death changed me, it had to. it will continue to, and it has to. i am so unbelievably and impossibly lucky to have known BML and been so totally changed by them, both in life and in loss, and i hope to continue to grow and change (even as i constantly joke about how i’ve had enough character development for a lifetime, thanks).

there have been other times in my life where i’ve had to rely heavily on other people but i’ve never done it so shamelessly and openly and guiltlessly as i have this year. i’ve never just let people hold me and care for me like this before. experiencing grief forced me to realize i’ve never been honest enough about my experience to give anyone a chance to care for me in the ways i needed. (if we want the rewards of being loved, we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known, etc.) i’ve been conditioned to believe any negative emotion i experience, any need i express, will be judged as an imposition on the people around me, so i tend to keep them close to the chest. i’ve been conditioned to tell myself there’s no reason to feel [negative emotion] and to believe if i ask for help i won’t receive it.

but then BML died and i couldn’t deny any of my feelings; i had all the reason in the world to feel desperate and broken and out of control, to need support, to cycle rapidly through every stage of grief minute to minute. i cried approximately 19 times a day and counted every individual interaction i made it through without snapping and screaming, “MY BEST FRIEND DIED LEAVE ME ALONE HOLY SHIT” as a miracle. i didn’t have the capacity to hide how broken i felt and i wasn’t trying to. i didn’t care about anything else (still kind of don’t), didn’t have anything left in me to give anyone else, and had to center my needs in a way i’d never allowed myself before.

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when i needed it most i found an abundance of love and care that had always been there for me — i just had to believe i deserved it. i had a lightbulb moment over the summer after my dear friend EJ asked to talk to me about something serious they felt i’d understand and i was so touched they trusted me to hold that space for them and realized: maybe it might also make my friends feel warm and moved if i asked and trusted them to do the same more often. maybe my friends were happy, even(!), that i trusted them with my grief and i wasn’t the burden i believed myself to be.

i went on to experience several other challenging and destabilizing events this year that normally i’d buck against with everything i have. i’d get stuck thinking, “i wish this wasn’t happening” and find myself unable to move through that to a place of acceptance (or anywhere else). i’d complain that i need god to stop sending me his toughest battles. instead, i found myself sitting in the eye of the storm, watching chaos unfold in my life and feeling, for the first time, like i could handle it. like i could trust myself as an authority in my own life.

compared to the start of this incredible and devastating year, i feel much less bitter and pessimistic. i see BML everywhere and i’m starting to feel comforted by that, less like the universe is playing tricks on me. i’m calmer and more level-headed in conflict and through change than i’ve ever been. i’m more open. i’m more honest. i’m more connected to the people around me. i have a greater capacity to hold complicated and hard feelings. i can practice acceptance when some fuckshit happens — not acceptance like, “i’m okay with this,” but acceptance like, “this is what’s happening and it is what it is, so what now?” not everything is a crisis.

some of this newfound self-assuredness and confidence is because BML’s death was so traumatic that everything else seems barely even notable but it’s also because of the ways i’ve been held and supported and loved through the worst parts of this year. as i look forward to the surgery i’ll have in 10 days i know as long as i continue to ask for help i’ll be held.

in 2022, i told my then-therapist that i was trying to make a habit of asking myself what my resourced self (what some people might call their higher self) would do in the hopes that it would bring me closer to becoming that resourced self. she asked me, “what if you are your resourced self?” which was simultaneously encouraging and infuriating to hear because i felt so far from resourced at that time. i think my response was actually, “fuck you for saying that.” but now i think i understand what she meant.

i really hope 2025 is better than this year. sitting here writing this i’m emotional knowing i’m about to start the first year i’ll live through without BML but whatever the new year has in store for me, i trust myself to figure it out (and i trust myself not to struggle through it on my own). the worst thing i can imagine has already happened and against all odds i am still here alive and kicking. i can handle it.

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