So it’s finally new year. 😭

How are you, my friends? Happy new year!

I hope 2023 finds you in your best form and space and fortunate time.

As for me, I’ve been taking my time off of digital space recently (well unconsciously and quite helplessly) to probably purge myself of unnecessary expending of my very little left energies come the end of the long year that was 2022.

Funny how I’ve just been seenzoning messages (I’m very sorry really, haha). I really did not have energy for socializations. It’s like I woke up one day in December and my mind decided to turn me into a full on introvert for the holidays. I swear, I can’t do anything about it and I’m sort of relieved that I don’t have to. haha.

Anyway, I hope the past year has been kind to you.

Twenty twenty two has been long and swift, and dim and blinding all in all. So I’m not the least surprised that I’ve been very much exhausted and conflicted when the year closed.

I think this has been the longest and the most times that I’ve cut myself a whole lot of slack– for all the days and nights that I’ve I found myself in front of the mirror, asking that weary reflection on it how much of everything is worth whatever.

Wishing that it somehow had answers for me if I asked how much longer will the struggles hold. Or will I be able to get through another year in postgrad school, finish work things as expected, do volunteer work with my heart in check, and deal with a whole other lot of personal stuff I somehow find myself entangled with on some really strange days.

There were afterwork evenings when I could not even get myself to finish a paper or read a journal or make a goddamned work report. These were the same many nights of contrived feelings of dread and ennui just thinking about things. 😵

Yes, I’ve had them too. And oh, I’ve tried so hard to genuinely confront them also. And I know, they have been nothing but awful and exhausting.

Although I’m glad (ahhh, yes, so awfully glad) that I’ve weirdly found solace in many things hallyu. BTS and Seventeen, and K-Pop and 2D1N and K-Dramas that I happen to randomly find in the right places, at the right time. 😭

No shame, really, they bring me to a safer place and let me leave a dreadful place that was actually my now.

Don’t get me wrong. I get this. In my heart I know I have allowed myself to plummet a good space down however you call it– a rabbit hole or a sink hole or hell, whatever. The most tiring part of it is really trying very, very hard to hold yourself together, and making sure there’s something (or someone) else to hold on to when worse comes to worst.

I guess this is the most important lesson I bring with me this year as I get older, and as I move further into my own psychology practice, meeting different colleagues, learning from them, getting all the humbling ‘training’ from the world that I badly need. *cry gif*

So when the year took another turn at new year’s eve, I gave myself a most heartfelt double toast of soju & makgeolli because I know how painfully hard I crawled my way through this incredulously strange year.

I also said a silent prayer of thanks to the kind heavens for gifting me with the most wonderful people around. This has been the best of 2022 for me, I guess– I’ve come to know myself more and in a totally different light, amid all the many people I have had the luck (or the non-luck 🙃) to spend my year with.

So yah, cheers to you and me, and the whole universe that continues to toss and turn and go on anyway, amid the crazy. If you need to stop, or pause or shamelessly slide down to whatever rock bottom, by all means, allow yourself to. And then give yourself a full shot of good alcohol (or water, or wine or whatever you like) when you catch yourself in a corner with a moment of peace or silence or quiet epiphany.

Gurl, this year, please cut yourself some slack. However long, however many times over, however crude and ugly.

That’s how life turns and shows you another page of meaningfulness, I guess. When you find the slack and space to give attention to it, before anything else.

So yeah, happy 2023, I’ll see you more here this year. 🎉

And here’s a nice new year song from RM & Park Ji Yoon. I would also like to say this to you for now– this year, please, no looking back, no… no looking back, no, no more...❤️️

HNY, my friends, sending you lots of love and cheers! 🥂