The end of 2022 was pretty brutal and I had no intention of starting 2023 with a theme or a goal or anything resembling real direction or drive. But on December 22, 2022, I had this thought that Clear should be my one-word theme in 2023.
It was pretty literal at first. Our hallway looked like this on a good day:
And I thought my life might be a little better if it didn’t. If instead, it was clear enough that I could walk through the hall without stubbing my toe or running into something. (What a revelation!) I thought, I want a clear hallway, that’s it. . . . Okay, maybe also a clear bedroom floor. But that’s it! That sounds minimal and modest but I sometimes go months without seeing parts of my bedroom floor — and I’m not talking about some obscure corner, but portions that are about 18 inches from the doorway. It’s a problem.
As usual, things didn’t go as planned — which in my life often means that something that was supposed to be concrete like clearing floors, ends up being abstract and conceptual. Now in all fairness, it wasn’t entirely my fault. I shared the following post on Facebook about the major health decline that started just 42 days into the new year:
With it suddenly being impossible to do almost any physical activity and lots of middle of the night rumination, I started to think about the cloudiness of my life in general. When I was unceremoniously terminated from BYU Idaho in September 2022 and then extended a offer to rejoin the team just two months later, I was crystal clear that my trust was so badly eroded that I would never work there again. But losing a flexible, remote option was also quite terrifying as a chronically ill person. Even though I was working full-time at the Mountain Communities Family Resource Center and loving it in so many ways, I knew that a serious flare-up might quickly make it impossible to continue in that job — and now I had no work-from-bed back-up. When the flare-up came so soon and there were fewer and fewer days that I could make it to the office, I agonized about two things: (1) whether what I could offer the center from a distance was enough to support my team and the community and (2) whether my health would ever bounce back enough to sustain working in such a stressful environment — a center for crisis intervention where you never know what challenge is going to walk through the door. (It wasn’t for a few more months that I really started to disentangle the intersection of my health meltdown and the secondary trauma I was experiencing.)
I realized that the biggest thing I needed to get CLEAR was what work I could sustain. Writing this 18 months out from Spring 2023 when I was weighing all of this, I can say a couple of things pretty definitively. First, it was impossible to see clearly what I should do for work because I was surrounded by such significant “haze”: the love I had for the Frazier Mountain community generally and the MCFRC specifically. I treated it like my third child, and how can you abandon your baby? Even when I did make the bittersweet move to a new job in August 2023, the fibromyalgia flare-up continued unabated for several more months. All told, I experienced significant pain and fatigue from February through November.
Which leads to the second thing I am pretty certain of: I don’t think I could have recovered my health while still working at the Family Resource Center. It took an almost completely stress-free work environment (technically it has the same kind of stressors that all jobs have, but compared to working in actual crisis intervention, it’s like a walk in the park), including a very rigid schedule that prevented me from working outside of my designated hours, and months of sustained focus on my health: sleep, exercise, doctor visits. All things that were proving impossible to balance with my MCFRC work.
Most of 2023 ended up being about getting clear about my work, how to spend my time, and what I needed to do to get healthier. Reading Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals at the end of 2022 was fortuitous. It reminded me over and over again that the most important productivity tip is that I will die without having done all the things I want to do, helping all the people I want to help, and I must accept that. And the quote from him that I shared in my Book Love 2022 post brought me comfort as I stepped away from the MCFRC:
“We’re all in the position of medieval stonemasons, adding a few more bricks to a cathedral whose completion we know we’ll never see. The cathedral’s still worth building, all the same.”
The MCFRC was and is a cathedral to me, consecrated by the human suffering witnessed there and the efforts made to alleviate it. It was an honor to add my few bricks.
My bedroom floor is every bit as covered and chaotic as it was as the beginning 2023. But on January 9, 2024, my hallway looked like this (for at least a few days before and after Neal’s parents came to visit, ha!).
Clear.
Don't call us, we'll call you 
