The Distance I Have Quietly Traveled

You are a different person now from the one who began this year. A year ago, you were inside a different life. The architecture of your days was shaped by something that no longer shapes them. The shape of your worry was different. The shape of your hope, if there was hope, was different. The shape of your body, in the morning, was different.

Sit for a moment with the comparison. Not to flagellate yourself, not to perform progress for an imagined audience, but quietly — softly, privately — for your own honest sake.

Where were you at the beginning of this year? Probably still walking around inside something. Probably still bracing for the next round of difficulty. Probably still doubting your own perception of what was happening to you. Probably still trying to make some impossible version of things work. Probably still very, very tired.

Where are you now? Probably steadier than you were. Probably more able to name what was happening. Probably more honest with yourself about what you can and cannot fix. Probably surrounded by a smaller, truer set of people. Probably still tired sometimes, but a different kind of tired — the tired of someone who is rebuilding, instead of the tired of someone who is being slowly undone.

This is not a small distance. The fact that the change has been gradual does not make it smaller. The fact that you have not always noticed it does not make it less real. The compounding is real. The slow days have stacked into something larger than the days felt while you were inside them.

Today, let yourself see the distance. Not to congratulate yourself in any loud way. Just to know, quietly and privately, that the year was not wasted. The slow steady work was real. The person on this page now is not the person who began the year. The change is yours. You did it. Look out across the water you crossed. The sea you were once lost in is, from where you are standing, only a distance now. You walked it. You walked all of it.