This will be my last post of 2024, so it’s a good time to take stock of the year that was for me. I think I’ll make this a regular thing at the end of each year, like Spotify does.
My Theme for 2024: Transition
Every book has a theme–sometimes more than one–and so it is with the annual chapters of our lives. The past year had a number of themes for me: breaking from the past, facing hard truths about myself, challenging my fears, and putting myself first once in a while. But the overall theme for my life in 2024 was transition. I’m not entirely sure what I’m transitioning to because I’m still in it, and it’s likely that 2025 will be more of the same. Transitions take a while. My transition from married husband to embracing my renewed single identity took me three years. In between, there was a lot of misery, a lot of stops and starts, a lot of pursuing validation from dead-end situations, a lot of solitude and second-guessing myself, and a lot of emotional self-flagellation. This transition has most of those but it feels much less intense.
Like my prior transition, this one began with emotional upheaval generated by a broken relationship, one of the more significant relationships I’ve had, and all the things I thought I knew about myself but really didn’t. If you’re open enough, failed relationships have a lot to teach you, and this one taught me a lot. Historically I have put far too much weight on physical attraction and ‘chemistry’ in deciding to enter into an exclusive relationship, and far too little weight on the overall person, their life circumstances, and whether committing to someone and going ‘all in’ is in my best interests long-term (or even short-term). Once I get smitten with someone, I typically default to trying to fit myself into their life and what they want and need instead of asking myself whether they fit into my life and what I want and need.
This forgetting of myself to satisfy immediate needs like sex, emotional intimacy, friendship, and validation in a relationship with another person is a character flaw. I was not aware of this before 2024, at least not consciously, but now I know that there are reasons why I do these things and act this way. My entire life I thought I had a healthy view of myself, and in many ways I do–I do a lot of things well, generally like myself, and have a lot to offer a person in a relationship–but as I’ve written before, my unconscious core beliefs about myself, which derive from my childhood, are a bit fucked up.
Sidenote: A lot of people’s are. I just think about this shit way more than the average person does.
These are humbling realizations, to say the least. In 2024, I started therapy to illuminate these core beliefs of mine and get some help on how to bring them to my consciousness so I could chart a better way forward in my life. This was another transition, a big one. I think I accomplished the first part because I had a great therapist who, with gentle but focused empathy, helped me make the unconscious conscious. So now I’ve never been so aware of my flaws, which derive from these core beliefs that I’ve carried with me for so long.
One of the biggest reveals of the year was that I always thought I had a secure attachment style, but therapy taught me that almost half of my attachment style is anxious attachment, which makes total sense given how I was raised and the parents I had. I always thought I pursued avoidant attachers, but therapy taught me that no, I actually pursue anxious attachers like myself, which is incredibly magnetic in the beginning because we feed off of each other’s attachment styles in an insanely intense way, like a hurricane hitting warm Gulf water. This can cause me (and them) to miss or minimize problems that manifest later. Then when one or the other person starts distancing himself or herself, it can feel or even become avoidant to the other person. Emotional attachments can change over time, but it’s the beginning I’m most interested in because the beginning–pursuing the wrong person–is the original sin that leads to crucifixion.
The second part, charting a better way forward, is a work in progress. These things don’t change overnight. I still seek too much validation from women and whether they’re attracted to me. I still define myself too much that way and question my value when rejection hits, though the sting dissipates a hell of a lot faster now because I’m finally viewing situations more objectively and giving less fucks about other people’s decisions and opinions about me. I still put too much emphasis on physical attraction and chemistry instead of the overall person, but again, it’s less than I used to, and this is one area where I feel like I’ve made a lot of progress. Now I find myself pulling my mind out of immediate attraction and looking past a beautiful cover to focus on what the book is really about. I’m dating with more intention and trying to find validation in things other than women. It’s not easy, especially for someone like me who has a healthy sexual appetite, which, let’s be honest, has been a solid contributor to my myopic decision-making in this area.
The good news is I now have conscious awareness of these truths about myself. I didn’t have them last year, or four or ten years ago. Without my past relationships I may never would have acquired them. So now I can see the underlying purpose of past events. The patterns I was repeating with people. This is a positive development and a big part of this transitional period for me.
In time (hopefully) I will meet someone amazing and will know that I would never have met them or appreciated them fully enough without having gone through this. I think that will happen one day. I don’t think I’ll be alone forever. But not wanting or needing someone and being just fine alone–really fine, not pretending to be fine–has to happen first. Deep down I know that.
2024 Highlights
By far the biggest highlight for me this past year was my trip to Paris in August. It was exciting and restorative, a bridge between the past and the present. I feel like I found myself there and gave my life an epinephrine shot. I found comfort in traveling alone, connecting with strangers, and just wandering through a city I love. I brought this joy and mentality home and have been implementing it in my life here, which is another big progress marker for me. As critical as I am of myself all the time (another character flaw), it’s important to acknowledge the good things I do, and the progress that I make. This trip was such a net positive and gifted me so much, that I intend to do annual trips like this again to the extent my life allows. These trips may not always be this transformative, but they bring me a lot of happiness regardless. In a way, I feel like they take me back to my pre-childhood self, before all that emotional angst started. I need to keep doing it.
Another highlight was climbing Whiteface Mountain in October, something I promised I’d write about but haven’t yet. Yes, I approached it too much like Mr. Magoo and didn’t properly train or prepare, which was stupid and dangerous, but I fucking did it. The entire climb, my mind was divided against itself about whether it was safe to continue or smarter to turn around, but I fucking did it. The entire climb, my knees, ankles, quads and calves were screaming at my brain, pissed off at the dumb decisions it was making that they were stuck paying for, but I fucking did it. I could barely walk for the next two days, but I fucking did it. I’m 56 years old, and I climbed a 4867 foot mountain I had no business climbing with no training, not enough water, and no headlamp.
But I fucking did it. #Positivity
Other highlights:
So many firsts relating to my daughter and experiencing her growing up. Attending her first school dance, watching her get her first serious crush on a boy (then, on a dime, dumping that for another crush–is this when this shit starts with women, at the age of 11?), attending her fifth grade graduation, going to her first rock concert and seeing that familiar musical nirvana in her eyes, watching her walk to school on her own for the first time, being with her when she got her first period, traveling alone with her to a new place we’d both never been before, and just experiencing her transition from a girl to a teenager, which includes her occasionally calling me out on my shit and making me question my own behavior. This is not something I expected to experience as a parent, certainly not from an 11 year-old. But she’s smart as hell and has a wisdom beyond her years.
Reconnecting with old friends in July and my cousins over Thanksgiving. These reunions are fleeting but they bring me so much joy that this is another thing I plan to continue.
Going to see Glass Animals in August — this concert was another restoration of self for me. I went alone, which I hadn’t done in years. I wasn’t the only one there alone–a lot of people were. This felt validating. Another gift to myself.
Committing to working out every week and eating clean and actually noticing results. I have TikTok to thank for this. For years I’ve been doing certain lifting wrong and not using proper form or weight size. My TikTok algorithm fixed this by introducing me to certain lifts to give me the results I want and describing the proper form to achieve them. My goal in 2025 is to squeeze in another lifting day during the week. If that damn gym at my office ever opens, it’ll be easy.
2024 Lowlights
There weren’t a lot of these, other than the internal mental angst that’s always driven by transition. Early on in therapy, my therapist gave me a one-page sheet called “Cognitive Distortions”, which are “irrational thoughts that can influence your emotions.” Everyone experiences this to some degree but when they’re excessive they can be harmful.
The sheet lists 9 of them, not all of which apply to me. I circled four of them that I believe do apply to me:
- Magnification and Minimization: Exaggerating or minimizing the importance of events. One might believe their own achievements are unimportant, or that their mistakes are excessively important.
- Jumping to Conclusions: Interpreting the meaning of a situation with little or no evidence. This includes Mind Reading (interpreting the thoughts and beliefs of others without adequate evidence), and Fortune Telling (expecting that a situation will turn out badly without adequate evidence).
- Emotional Reasoning: The assumption that emotions reflect the way things really are.
- Disqualifying the Positive: Recognizing only the negative aspects of a situation while ignoring the positive. One might receive many compliments on an evaluation, but focus on the single piece of negative feedback.
These mental habits are my enemies, so my 2024 lowlights would include people or situations that triggered them and led to emotional disregulation and rumination, which I’m prone to because my mind never stops going. It’s been a huge struggle for me to learn how to turn it off and pull myself outside of my thoughts and view them objectively using this list and everything I’ve been learning.
Lowlights that come to mind are a few dates I went on this past year where I was interested in the person enough to want to see them again but they weren’t. Or situations where I got ghosted after some positive text exchanges. There are parental examples where my daughter made some mistakes–nothing too serious and normal for her age, but more serious than her average mistakes–and it triggered some of these bad habits. How serious is this? Is this who she really is? How big a punishment does this deserve? Is this foreshadowing the future? Am I not giving her what she needs? Is this why this happened?
There’s nothing like parenthood to make you really question yourself and force you to regulate your emotions and check yourself before responding so you don’t act counterproductively by projecting your own insecurities and baggage on to your kid. My daughter has been a huge motivator for me to change myself. I wasn’t perfect and made mistakes last year, but overall I think I did a decent job with her, including imposing discipline when I had to, obviously while consulting Ex. Still, the rumination that hit when negative things happened with my daughter, no matter how mild, were lowlights.
Probably the biggest lowlight of the year happened back in February during a final autopsy conversation with an ex-girlfriend that didn’t have to happen and almost didn’t happen. It was emotionally regressive for me but probably for the best in the macro sense because it set many positive things in motion afterwards. I’m sure we both remember the night differently–unreliable narrators and all–and because I definitely suffer from mind reading, fortunate telling, and disqualifying the positive, not to mention I was seriously buzzed that night. Our conversation, which is a total blur now, was both a reunion and a eulogy for the slow death of a loved one. What I remember most is that we were not in equal emotional balance regarding each other, and this drove our dynamic that night. It had been a very long time since I found myself in this position–the weaker emotional position–and I didn’t like it very much. I have disliked it even more with the passage of time, if I’m being honest.
But even though this conversation didn’t have to happen and set me back emotionally for a few weeks afterwards–which made me question why I did it at all–it did ultimately serve me because it was a catalyst for transformation. Sometimes we need to crash our favorite gas-guzzling car into a brick wall and let the tires come flying off before we’re willing to let the tow truck drag the metal carcass to the junkyard. How else can we progress to an EV? So this conversation was one step forward, two steps back in the short term, but ultimately ten steps forward for me long-term. A lot of what I’ve done and written about this year, the insights and self-realizations, going to therapy, discovering patterns and forcing changes in myself, started with my emotional fall-out from that night, from that one half-drunk, two-hour conversation with someone I loved and was forced to separate from, and the ego death that followed. Crazy, right?
So was it really a lowlight? Yes, emotionally it was, absolutely. Maybe that’s how I’m indirectly categorizing these things, whether they generated positive or negative emotions in me. Long-term, I think I’ll view it as a highlight, one of those pivot moments in my life that helped lead to great things, but it’s still rippling in the pond, so I’m not there yet. Like I said, this shit takes time.
At least I’m not disqualifying the positive!
The Biggest Thing I Learned
I’d say two things. The first is I can be alone without being a total hermit like I’ve fallen into in the past, while learning and growing and making space in my life for people and possibilities.
The second, and my therapist helped me with this, is there are a handful of specific values that I hold and require from the people in my life, whether they are family, friends, or romantic partners–even sexual flings. It’s a small list, but here they are:
- Honesty
- Loyalty
- Authenticity
- Consistency
These are values, not personality traits. I love a good sense of humor, good communication, and a host of other things, but they’re not values. Values are woven into the DNA of a person.
I was already aware of some of these values before therapy, but loyalty kept coming up during my sessions, and it wasn’t me who identified it, it was my therapist. I always viewed loyalty as a negative, something that governments use to get their zombie soldiers killed during avoidable wars, or what mafia bosses demand from their street muscle to ensure they continue to do the bosses’ bidding. So I’ve had a hard time appreciating loyalty, and I had no clue it was important to me until I started therapy.
But it is. It’s really fucking important to me. I value some of my oldest friends–friends from grade school, high school, and college–because I’ve known them for a long time, but also because they’re loyal and consistent (another value). Our friendships have remained faithful through the decades. These men and women have not changed who they are or how they relate to me, and it’s quite incredible to witness up close. Life has changed us all, obviously. We’ve experienced shit, had families, had losses, had successes and failures in our professional and personal lives, but you know what hasn’t changed at all? Who we are. How we relate to each other. How we want the best for each other. If anything, those other life changes have strengthened our loyalty, not weakened it.
I value that so fucking much. When my therapist asked me why I keep going back to New Hampshire, why that trip made me emotional when I was talking to her about it, this is a big reason why. New Hampshire is my home and always will be. It’s where I was born and raised. Witnessing the passage of time, witnessing the changes in myself and my friends, but still feeling the love and loyalty of friendship, always gets me emotional because I feel all of it deeply. The same with family. Not all of my family relationships are 100% solid, but we have a shared history and a shared experience that spans our entire lives. We have a loyalty to family and each other that is special and irreplaceable.
When that loyalty is broken by the people in my life for whatever reason, there are times when I’ll give them a chance to restore it, just as I would want that chance. This usually depends on how long I’ve known the person, how important they are to me, and the nature of the situation that led to the break in the first place. But some things are unforgivable, as happened with a really close friend of mine a couple of years ago. What he did was shocking and painful, and it was not hard for me to end that friendship, despite how much we had shared together. Getting blindsided by disloyalty can really fuck me up for a while because I don’t get close with many people, and I hate being disappointed. Disloyalty is sad and painful, but the entire point of having a value is setting a standard for your life and relationships that’s consistent with your own beliefs and behavior. I never knew I valued loyalty before therapy, and it really explains a lot of my emotions and behavior over the years.
Listing my values in this way, being aware of them, is like having a beacon to help me decide who I want in my life and who I don’t. In 2024, I crystallized what my core values are, discovered that loyalty is one of them, and made my values a point of focus for the future.
Fine, a Spotify Tribute
Since I stole Spotify’s idea with 2024 Wrapped, I feel compelled to post my Spotify highlights somewhere in here, so here they are:
God damn, this is embarrassing. I can’t even blame my daughter for this. Still love you, Chappell, but I really need to do better in 2025. (P.S. are you coming to MSG soon?)
2025
What do I hope for in 2025? Most of all, good health for myself, my daughter, my mother, and the rest of my family. Continuing on my path of growth and transition. More trips, maybe back to Italy, or maybe to a place I haven’t been before. I don’t know if I want a relationship, but it sure as fuck would be nice to get excited about someone again. I’ve been in deserts like this before, and yeah, growth is great and all and there’s nothing better for personal evolution than being alone, but a man has needs. I’m longing for that holy fuck smack in the face, that excitement and intrigue about someone that I can feel in my soul, that pull to see someone again, that reciprocation of what I give to a person, and mutual desire, someone who wants me as much as I want them. I won’t be blind about it this time, but that feeling, that passion is one of the things that makes life worth living. I’m hoping 2025 brings me at least a taste of that. I’m starting the year off in a much better emotional place than 2024, so I’m hoping that I’ve grown enough for whoever’s running the Universe to say ‘Fine, give that fucker something off the table. It’s time.’ Surely that life contract I signed before I was born isn’t going to make me wait too much longer for the Next Great Thing? I guess we’ll see.
To those of you who read what I post here, all my self-absorbed, introspective meanderings, rants, and random thoughts about love, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, thank you for reading and following along on this journey of mine. I hope the coming year brings all of you good health, love, and joy, and that you’re able to appreciate and learn from the difficult days that 2025 may bring.
May there be few of them for both of us.
