We're Still Here

Hello friends,

If you’re reading this, you are still alive! Hooray! No matter what condition our lives or bodies are in, we still draw breath. After 2020, that’s no small thing. It is something to celebrate.

In the final weeks of December, I began preparing for 2021. Arbitrary markers, yes, but useful to me all the same. I looked at what 2020 brought me and asked what I could bring to 2021. I started making notes. Not resolutions.

I don’t make resolutions, I make plans.

This year’s overall plan is:

To do my best with what I have.

What this plan looks like in execution:

• Meditate daily.

• Exercise daily.

• Write daily.

• Help people.

I can get more granular than that, and do—for example, I could add in this weekly newsletter, and my Patreon, and I also have monthly publishing plans, and large writing projects I want to start or complete, and the steady ways I care for my chronic illness—but the items on the bullet list are my basic touchstones for 2021. The bedrock on which everything else will be built.

My more granular plans and goals? I’ll likely need to deviate from those, perhaps multiple times. Plans always change. My touchstones will keep me going, though, just as they have through this past, tumultuous year.

Plans, even the most changeable, are important to me. Why?

Making plans is not only prudent, making plans is an act of hope.

And I feel a little bit hopeful today. I’m also filled with gratitude.

That doesn’t mean I don’t have grave concerns about what’s going to happen to people in 2021. I do. This rolling disaster is far from over, hence that “help people” plan, which I’m working with my household on refining.

But that said, there’s so much that reminds me to feel blessed. So much I am hoping for.

What are your plans? I want to read about them.

Let’s hope together.

love - Thorn

Thanks to all of you subscribers—free and paid—and to those who have commented on or shared these newsletters. In 2021, I’m really hoping we can help each other build a better connection outside the strange vagaries of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

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Folks having trouble with payments? I’ll be contacting Stripe this coming week in hopes of figuring out the issue.

***If you subscribed as part of my old, mostly-monthly newsletter and don’t like the steadiness of this new format? My apologies. I’ll miss you, but Substack makes it easy to unsubscribe.