When I worked at a music publication, I hated the end of the year. It’s when we published our best-of albums and records lists. I resented how those lists boiled down the entire year's musical landscape to a handful of winners and losers, as if artistic merit could be neatly confined to a December deadline. While I still find the year-in-review trend tedious, there’s nevertheless something to be said for reflecting on that which has passed. Truthfully, I had no plans to recap anything about my 2023 at all. This year, for me, has been one of glacial stillness. I've had a stagnant year, one in which I've stood in place. Physically, emotionally and creatively. It's been deeply frustrating but also strangely rewarding. In 2023, I learned that even within dormancy, transformation can happen. This was my frozen year. I.When I say I froze, I don't just mean in a metaphorical sense; my body seized up. I started 2023 with a stiff arm. It crept up quietly, a soreness that I chalked up to the afterburn of a heavy workout. But the ache lingered a little too long and soon I couldn’t use my arm properly. It was like it was locked in place by an invisible sculptor. As the months passed, my mobility declined. I couldn’t raise my arm past my shoulder or bend it behind my back. I haven't shaved my right armpit for six months. I have to contort my body into weird angles just to do basic functions, like shrugging my coat on or putting my seat belt on. My eventual diagnosis was stupidly fitting: a frozen shoulder. A hardening of the joint, a gradual narrowing of my range of motion. The word “frozen” would come to mean much more to me than a description of a shoulder problem. The pain in my shoulder has been a constant companion this year, reminding me of the constraints imposed upon me. I move around the world like I’m wearing too many winter layers, uncomfortable, caged in and limited in movement. Daily, I’m reminded of that which I can’t reach. This year for the first time, I was forced to confront the limits of my physical being. It's been a painful lesson in acceptance and one that I’m not sure I’ve fully learned yet.
II.In Illness As Metaphor, Susan Sontag writes about how we all hold dual citizenship to the land of the well and the land of the ill. I'm currently a passport carrier to the latter. Sontag wasn't a fan of using diseases metaphorically so I'm not sure what she'd make of my parable of my frozen shoulder. But here we are and that’s what I’m doing. My frozen shoulder mirrors my creative stagnation. My professional achievements this year have been mundane, to say the least. A flatline on the EKG of my ambition. No books, podcasts, or other big projects to speak of. I haven’t had any triumphant newsletter milestones – I started the year with the same number of readers I’m ending it with.
The business world – frankly, society as a whole – only wants to see lines that go in one direction. “Year-on-year growth” is expected to track upwards. No CEO wants to deliver the update that “this year, we didn’t move the needle”. Thankfully, if ever there was a moment to do less, 2023 was it. It was the year we purposefully underperformed – and flourished for it. My writer pal Emma Gannon quit a lot of things this year and her life is richer for it. It was the year of “loud quitting”, “lazy girl jobs” and “bed rotting”. All these terms, as Anne Helen Petersen wrote earlier this year, are code words for worker disengagement. But as tempting as it is to label my own stasis a deliberate act of rebellion against the hamster wheel, the truth is that I didn’t quit by choice. And yet, even though this pause wasn’t intentional, I still learned from it. Even though I feel like I languished this year, there’s much to be celebrated. My most important professional achievements this year weren't flashy or public. Instead, I quietly secured long-term clients who’ve provided a stable foundation for my business. It may not seem like much on the surface, but inside, this feels like a powerful development. It’s the steady heartbeat inside the chrysalis. III.It was during the summer that the bitterest frost settled. It was when my dog, Dolly, died – and my heart froze. She left behind gaping holes in my days. I didn't know how to move forward in her absence. I struggled to get out of bed because I simply didn't know how to start my mornings without her. And so I stayed under the duvet longer than I wanted to, pinned in place by the coldness of her loss. The house became a graveyard of memories. Her empty bed in my office, the chair where she used to nap, her lead still on the peg. Each a silent testament to a love that had been. But even in the depths of this wintery grief, there was a flicker of warmth. My memories of Dolly, though tinged with sorrow, were also vessels of joy. The wet nose nudging my hand, her manic spin when presented with a lead, the unconditional love in her eyes. These memories, like embers in the snow, refused to be extinguished. They kept me warm and slowly, painfully, quietly, thawed my heart.
I hadn’t revisited those best-of album lists since they were first published. So I went back to look at the last one I wrote, which was in 2016.
The blurb I wrote was for You Know What It’s Like, a gloomy, debut album by the electro-pop artist Carla Dal Forno. I re-listened to it as I wrote this letter. I found it just as I’d described it back in 2016: “A ferociously gentle record for moments when you want to question everything, but aren't ready to make any kind of resolution”. Not to overegg this freezing metaphor, but I think Dal Forno was cold when she made that album. She wrote it while living in a precarious housing situation during a harsh winter in Melbourne in 2015. From that place, she made a record that’s a meditation on the quiet power of liminal spaces. In my own icy pause, a strange truth bloomed. Freezing, I discovered, is a dance between physics and philosophy – a portal to contemplating existence, change, and the very nature of time. It’s not death, but hibernation. A suspension, a waiting. Freezing allows for a space to hold questions without needing to rush towards conclusions. As my frozen year taught me, sometimes the most profound transformations occur in stillness without resolve, as chilling as that might feel.
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