Good morning,
I am currently reading a series of interviews with Ursula K. Le Guin, one of the most inspiring writers of her time.
It feels like the best book to end the year with because Le Guin’s approach to life has helped me punctuate many of the things I am metabolizing from this year, most importantly, that common human work is fuel for writing and art.
This especially:
If I was “free,” as so many male writers have been free, I would be impoverished. Why should all my time be my own, just because I write books? There are human responsibilities, and those include responsibilities to daily life, to common human work. I mean, cleaning up, cooking, all the work that must be done over and over all one’s life, and also the school concert and the impossible geometry homework and so on. Responsibility is a privilege. If you delegate that work to others, you’ve copped out of the very source of your writing, which after all is life, isn’t it, just living, people living and working and trying to get along.
If I could boil my deepest lessons from the year into two, they would be these:
Feeling incapable, outsourcing difficulty, placing responsibility for one’s emotions on the world, is the fastest route to unending despair.
There is a magic to finding your way through difficulty. It gives one access to this feeling of: What more can I do? What more can I learn? I think this is what the will to live feels like. I want to live.Letting go is far more expansive than I ever allowed myself to believe.
There is a line in the book Crying in H Mart, where Michelle’s mom tells her that she always keeps a small percentage of herself only for herself, in her marriage. I adored this idea when I encountered it because I, too, have always been someone who refuses to allow anyone in entirely. There was always something to protect.But this year, boundaries dissolved into a safety that feels more powerful than self-protection—a safety that comes from investing in generative care, in the future, in safety for all of us, not just me.
It’s a strange transformation, to slowly give up autonomy and live life in a dance of permanent partnership, permanent mothering and permanent community-building. This year, the boundaries of you, me, us, we, all blurred in ways that felt metamorphic. I enjoyed it. I am grateful.
My eyes are wide open to the remnants of patriarchy and invisibility that still plague so many of us. But somehow, I find that creation is more powerful than resistance. That families and communities can move together in a million different ways if someone is willing to name and lead the cultural currents within a home with intention. That there is more me in us than I realized.
I hope you, too, can end the year relishing whatever common human work allows you to both create and feel safe.
And I hope it’s not alone.
Happy New Year,
Jihii
Beautifully said!!!
Beautiful!!!