The End of the Year, New York City, and “In Lieu Of” as a Resolution for 2023

Hi guys,

I hope you are all having a joyful, meaningful, and hopefully re-charging holiday season whether with family, friends, chosen family, or alone. Someone reminded me that winter should be the season for tuning in, resting our bodies, nesting, finding warmth, retrieving from the mundane, from the achieving and – quite opposite from the season’s messages we get bombarded by – from the accumulation of stuff. 

Winter is my favorite season, especially in Los Angeles, where adding the occasional extra blanket is a welcome pleasure. 

We have been having a magical season, that started off with one of the most beautiful and comfortable Thanksgivings with our chosen family made of Jim and Cynthia, and that continued shortly after with the celebration of Catherine’s fifth birthday; we went to Disneyland, baked traditional Italian Christmas sweets, made the perfect gingerbread men (recipe here) and enjoyed the company of our dearest friends. I don’t celebrate Christmas in its religious meaning, but I do celebrate the togetherness, the spirit of kindness and generosity, the lights, the winter solstice, and the spiritual meaning of this time. 

If you know me a little, you know I love the music, the movies, and a good Douglas fir in the living room. This year, on Christmas day, we were also lucky to have some of our dearest friends over for dinner, who happen to be Jewish, and they shared with us the lighting of the last candle of Hannukah. 

Ultimately, this last paragraph encloses everything I celebrate and believe in when it comes to the festive December season: the oneness of it all. When winter comes and nights grow longer, it is much easier, more natural, to feel that oneness, to be it, to embrace and rely on it, to renew and reinforce its power. 

December has been, for me, a month of embracing. 

I had to embrace being sick and embrace how it made my body feel. I had been having stomach and intestinal pain for a while, at least since my parents where here, in the fall, and after ER and urgent care, GI, and doctors, it became clear we had to dig further to find the source of my pain. For now, we know of both a virus and an infection in my gut, but we will know more after the endoscopy and colonoscopy in January. I found quite interesting and ironic, that what I had to accept, more than the pain itself, was the discomfort my body has been in: bloating, sense of feeling big, heavy, ugly, swollen…all the things I have run from my entire life. I have not accepted it, by the way. Like a stubborn child, I get angry and frustrated every time I zip up my jeans, every time I go for sweat pants instead, to cover up the way I feel. I throw tantrums, just like a toddler.

During a therapy session, just the other day, I told my therapist I was at a point where not only I didn’t know what I wanted, but not even what I needed. So today, I wonder if what I need is to be okay feeling all the feelings and the things I never wanted to feel within my physical body. After agreeing with her that I am incapable of self-compassion, I wonder whether I will find some, knowing that the reason my belly is not flat isn’t my lack of discipline, a punishment, or a reminder of my unworthiness in a world of fit and thin, successful and naturally sun-kissed, with day-after beach waves in my hair, but rather something in my body that isn’t currently working as it should.

I don’t do New Year’s resolution, but a part of me is hoping 2023 will bring just that: self-compassion in lieu of self-hatred, self-acceptance in lieu of self-pity, grace in lieu of self-harm. 

As some of you have noticed, I had to cancel my Hollywood Farmers market event, but the event at Chevalier’s Books, the following Sunday, was a success; I met many new people who gave my book a chance and many friends showed up to celebrate with cookies and laughter. 

I am writing this on a plane to New York, where we will be spending the last days of 2022, and the first few of 2023, and there isn’t really a place I’d rather be for this transition. 

On the screen in front of me, an extraordinary performance by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds on Austin City Limits, reminder for me that if I want to write another book, I must turn off the noise from outside and turn up loud the one from within, that after all these years, I still spend most of my time trying to escape.

I am usually not one to make a big deal of New Year’s celebrations, but because of the deep change I am going through and my 41^st birthday coming up, this time I am particularly excited and genuinely curious about what will come next. I am very much done with what has passed, and I am ready to be free to be happy, free to look at myself in the mirror and smile rather than judge, to finally look at my work and say out loud: “You did great, kiddo.” 

There is no other place I’d rather be for the end of the year because I want to feel the frost on my face while looking up the very top of the skyscrapers. I want to feel small overwhelmed by the noise of the city, I want to breathe Joan Didion’s inspiration on E 71st Street; I want to feel part of the movement and of the stillness, of the mightiness and the helplessness. And I know that I could get all that in the perfect beauty of nature…but it is the holiday season, after all, and I want to go ice skating in Central Park, stay at my favorite hotel, do some shopping, perhaps, seeing friends I haven’t seen since January of 2020, meet my publisher in person, and walk the streets of Manhattan in the wintertime feeling that sense of possibility that only New York City has the power of gifting.

That’s why there’s no place I’d rather be, as 2022 ends.

No updates this time, but from the bottom of my heart, thank you for reading these newsletters, month after month, for now years. I don’t take it for granted. 

Happy new year.

With love, always,

Alice

ps. Don’t forget to sign up for January and February’s classes as spots are limited to 15 per class. Sign up here.