In archiving these articles, it's fun to see what I've been like in past years on this blog. I started writing this site as a daily blog (I know I don't hit every day, but it evens out to roughly that when you get down to it) in the middle of 2012, and as a result there are articles here from well into my twenties. In some cases they are articles that I don't remember writing...hell, there are articles on this blog about topics I don't remember, and I'm confident if you go back far enough, you'll find articles where I'm shocked at the opinions I held then (this is why I rarely blame politicians for views they had in their twenties-people change over time, and adjust to societal norms).
I also found that I shared more about my personal life back in the earlier days of the blogs, frequently writing about my views on my dating life & how I was approaching adulthood, which I did a little bit of during the pandemic, but I have largely eschewed this year. In the spirit of the season, where we look back at what was & hope for what will happen in the new year, I'm going to hearken back to that today & be honest about 2023. 2023 is one of the hardest personal journeys I've been on, the hardest personal year of my life since I started this blog.
This past year was a challenge for me personally for a variety of reasons, and I'll spill them out not out of a pity party, but because it brings some context (also, this is my blog...no one is making you read this, though I'm grateful if you are!). In April, my grandmother passed away. I talked a bit about this here, but almost eight months later, it still doesn't quite seem real. I still have moments where I want to talk to her, and where I want to tell her stories or get her thoughts on my life. Part of me realizes that this is something that I'll always feel in some capacity. When you love someone, you open up a world of yourself they get to see and no one else does, and when they leave, that world feels empty, even if you're grateful for it being there. I know with time that will get better, but it has hurt more than I expected it to, and it still feels raw, like this is just a long gap between visits and that we've somehow left behind our last conversation.
In the months since then, I will be honest-I have not taken as strong of care of myself as I should have. Initially, I started to overeat, an issue that I have had for decades with food but which I had spent the previous three years really putting to bed, and while I had already started to slip in April, in the months after my grandma's death I lost a lot of my drive to stick to a diet, and gained much of the weight I had lost back. It wasn't so bad initially because I was exercising so often, but in the past few months even that has become less a joy to go into the gym and see what I'll accomplish next, and more just a chore, a reminder of how far behind I have put myself.
The weight gain, combined with feeling down, has meant that 2023 is easily the least I've ever dated, and I'll be honest-I didn't even try this year. Virtually every year of my thirties, I've had a guy that felt like a "potential boyfriend" or the "boyfriend of the year" but in 2023...I didn't feel attractive, interesting, or worth dating. The few dates I went on were disaster zones, either proof that I have lost my ability to have small talk with strangers, or proof that I had become so uninteresting or disconnected from mainstream pop culture to gay men that I, well, was undateable. So I just deleted the apps, and resigned myself that this was not a year for love in my life. I don't know what it'll take, quite frankly, to change that mentality, other than the fact that I don't like it for myself.
The problem with giving up dating, unfortunately, is that because of my life situation, where I work from home, which is great in many ways but an issue for my social life, and because my family lives so far away (and so many of my friends had major life events they were focusing on in 2023), I spent most of this year by myself, not quite to the degree of 2020, but because there was no quarantine, there was not a pressure on other people to remember me in their own seclusion. I didn't have a major life event (no romances, no promotions, no major goals that I could brag about), I didn't have a defining thing that happened in 2023 just for me...this was a forgettable year in terms of my usually goal-focused mindset, and I spent most of it by myself. I had fun this year (I was in one of my best friend's weddings, which both the ceremony & bachelor party were the undisputed highlights of my year, along with visiting some friends in Chicago in July), but I'll be honest-much of 2023 was miserable for me, and I've felt listless, occasionally even pointless, for large swaths of it.
I wish I said that I had 2024 ahead of me & could tell you that this article has a happy ending, but I don't know that attitude is always the problem. I think sometimes people ignore as they get older that you don't get to go back, you don't get to relive moments or understand when you were the happiest until at the end of your life when you can point to "that's the spot." But in nearly 40 years of life, I can say that having to deal with the loneliest year of my life so far, much of what caused that loneliness was beyond my control & largely by myself, and in many cases, it was something I actively tried to prevent...I don't know what to do next. I've spent the past few weeks working diligently on a large to do list, so that it feels like I'm starting 2024 with a lot of momentum, but while that is working, I do worry that some of that is just adrenaline that will die when the list is over. Eventually you can't just run-you have to be running toward something. So while I make no promises that 2024 will be better, I will try, in the spirit of the holidays, to have a little more hope, to be a little stronger, and to try to believe that the nadir of my thirties is a good place to start a new decade of my life next year.
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