No Grit, No Pearl: 2023.
Reflections and ponderings and community.
The audio version of this post if you need, or would prefer, me to read it to you:
The world makes sense to me with a pen in my hand. I journal when I need to process, or digest. I love an end of year reflection, flicking through the pages, highlighting key learnings, looking at photos and posts from the year and trying to distil into tangible take-aways. Learnings that I can hold like evidence that I have lived…well. That I am in motion…changing, changed, growing. A seed planting seeds. So many seeds.
Photo by Gang of Babes Photography.
Some of this years pearls:
Live the fuck out of your life. Go all in, on your terms, because in one hundred years it’s not really going to matter at all. You will be an ancestor. None of the chaos, or debt, or even things I own will remain. I don’t find this thinking morbid, I find this thinking like fuel to the absurdity of culture as it has been created, and thus think of it as a delicious reminder to be brave and bold and authentic and to live well.
Get Still. More stillness, less disassociation. More presence. More genuine rest.
Get in the deep end. We have no idea of what we’re actually capable of navigating, life will inevitably throw you into the deep end, so why not throw yourself in too. Stretch your edges, bit by bit. Grow. Embrace the fear and awkwardness and see what happens.
There is no mountaintop. There is no place of arrival. There’s just valleys, and mountains and peaks and troughs and beautiful bits and arid bits and pauses. The notion of, ‘ill be happy when…’ is a falsity designed to make us feel bad and spend more. Now and onward all at once. Take the fucking pressure off and enjoy the walk not the one day hope of a destination. Notice the trees. The feeling of your feet in your shoes. The pain and beauty co-existing.
More empathy. We have no idea what people are going through. That person in the Coles checkout could be navigating the worst week of their life and we’d never know. Go easy. Empathy. Compassion. Let your tough shit stretch your capacity for empathy for the humanness in others. We are, after all, just animals dazzled by our evolution. But the experiences that are the most pleasurable and the most painful are the ones that are the most primal. And so much of how the world operates is created for us to avoid what’s primal and innate. We are just feeling creatures who use stories to make meaning…and who’s to say the animals don’t do that too. We’re all just trying to make meaning…make it make some sense.
Home. Your body is not your house, it’s your home, act accordingly.
Openness opens. Authenticity and honesty are emblazoned permission slips for others to show up as themselves too. We are not as isolated as we think. We need each other more than we acknowledge.
I see you. I hear you. I give a shit about you.
So, I’ve created a thing to carry all of these take-aways this year, I’m calling it GRIT GUILD. A low stakes and joy-led guild of reflective babes. It’s me actioning my deep sparkle punk belief that community is vital. It’ll be for paid subscribers on my Substack and every Sunday night (starting December 31st) you’ll get a gritty pondering for the week to journal about and reflect on, then on the first Monday of the month we’ll commune and do a monthly stock-take, share our pearls of wisdom and steady ourselves to navigate the beauty, mundanity and messiness of life.
We need each other. Community. Spaces that feel safe and edgy and if my gut instinct about this is right it could be beautiful.
If you want to read more about GRIT GUILD, head here.
Let’s be real fucking gritty in 2024, my loves, full of passion and perseverance, mess and pearls…so many pearls.
Happy New Year.
I love you.
Love Claire.
Things to know…
I have a 8 week writers group course happening in January with the delicious Avid Reader called Writers Play Group for anyone who has an idea they want to play and commit to. Actually, you might not even have an idea, you might just want the accountability and push to commit to your writing, that’s okay too. There’ll be creative prompts, delicious conversation, room for sharing and feedback and time to write and I’m really excited about it. Bookings are through Avid Reader and I know there’s payment plans available if you get in touch with the team.
Pearler is written and created on the unceded lands of the Yuggera and Turrbal people here in Meanjin, and I pay my deep respect to First Nation Elders past and present. This always was, and always will be Aboriginal land.
I also want to acknowledge the atrocity and genocide we’re seeing play out in Palestine right now. I don’t believe I can wholeheartedly support sovereignty of this land I live on without honouring the impacts of colonisation of Indigenous people everywhere else. We need ongoing and final ceasefire.