Rarely has a common thread woven itself through a single year of my life so plainly as to be easily discerned at a glance. 2023 has been a year of seismic changes, but every one of them has been unforeseeable – the product of chance encounters, not the fruits of hard work. Such changes have by no means been universally negative, but realizing my lack of agency in steering the course of my own life is a sadly sobering revelation. Three examples jump to mind immediately. 

The first was in February, a few days after Valentine’s. I commented on a Facebook post from a former friend from high school with who I ran cross country – an individual who rarely come up in my feed, and one I was surprised I was still friends with, given the rather extreme political slant of the last few post I’d seen from him, some months or years prior. But this one was innocuous, about running at one of the state parks we all used to frequent, and several other former teammates were also commenting on the thread. I replied to something said by a girl on whom I had a crush on in middle-school more than two decades prior, and that brief exchange swiftly snowballed into the most serious relationship I’d had since college and grad school. 

Despite the pedestal I’d placed her on back when we were teenagers, she was very much the reacher in the relationship, being the one to ask me out, being the one making plans for the future, being the first to drop that thermonuclear L-Bomb… and being the one to end it, much to my relief and shame. The relationship was in many ways the same object lesson that I learned and subsequently forgot after my engagement all those years ago: overcoming my fear of a life of solitude, singleness, and loneliness, at least enough that I don’t simply settle down with a woman with whom I’m fundamentally incompatible, saving our hypothetical children from a miserable marriage and an inevitably bitter divorce. Of course, knowing that such was the right decision is small comfort, and escaping the fiery flames of a doomed relationship into the freezing desolation of singleness merely trades one apocalypse for another, per Frost.

The second example occurred at a wedding – the first I’ve attended in years (most of my friends are sentenced to solitary confinement in this life, same as I). I expected to be the best man, and even indicated that I was eagerly anticipating planning the bachelor party. As the day approached, it dawned on me that I was not even being asked to be a groomsman, which this friend would merit in my own wedding party. This I already took as a slight, and as such, had the bachelor party the night before without him. But when we entered the church I discovered that he had no less than six groomsmen – twice as many as his wife’s bridesmaids. My exclusion was not due to limited numbers, but a deliberate decision. At the reception, I and the rest of our inner circle were placed at the table furthest to the back, last to be called up for food at the buffet.

And yet it was at that table that we became fast friends with two others, a guy and gal, who had been exiled there as well. When the reception winded down unexpectedly early in the evening, I suggested moving the party to the Silver Lyan, a speakeasy in an old underground bank vault. The gal was also from Jersey, and she and I made plans to meet up to sing karaoke sometime. Though our initial plans were postponed when she was jumped and hospitalized by a stranger on the street who mistook the gal for her husband’s mistress, we eventually met up some weeks later, and after that she invited me to her July Fourth party, albeit with a warning: “Everyone else there is going to be a passionate member of a particular political organization.” Less than an hour after meeting the first of her friends, I was ready to pledge my membership dues, thankful to have finally found my tribe. Joining the organization has been one of the most positively transformative changes to my life in 2023. For years I’ve felt a civic obligation to become more politically active, and the opportunity to do so sought me out unawares… all because my friend snubbed me for his wedding party. 

The third example occurred at that same gals birthday party later in the summer. I was enjoying an excellent and eminently civil conversation about history with the sole individual of opposite political persuasion in attendance, and a friendship formed from that quickly. While hanging out at NerdNight in Manhattan, he invited me to begin attending some sort of ballroom dancing at a German heritage club uptown. Dance is far from my forte, and his promise of single gals was hardly incentive as I imagined they’d immediately lose interest upon witnessing my obvious lack of rhythm and upon feeling the heavy weight of my two left cowboy boots upon their toes. Then he corrected me that neither cowboy boots nor hats were permitted, and I immediately went from a ‘probably not ‘ to a ‘definitely no’. Still, he persisted. And persisted. And persisted. I finally relented, and agreed to give it one chance. 

As the day approached, a modicum of excitement began to grow in me. Knowing I’d have to lose two inches off my waistline in order to squeeze into my only suit pants, I managed to shed ten pounds in a month, all in anticipation. However, within a few minutes of getting out on the dance floor, I made the decision not to come back; ballroom dancing, as expected, definitely was *not* for me. Then came the afterparty. At which I decided ballroom dancing definitely *is* for me (at least insofar as there’s an afterparty after each and every one of the dance classes, each at a different bar, and evidently an after afterparty, and an after after afterparty, after which the first morning trains are already leaving from Penn Station to Jersey). Between the political organization and ballroom dancing, I’ve found myself in Manhattan more frequently than anytime else in my life, and a social calendar filling every crack and crevasse between workdays. And between the both of them, I’m certainly hoping that by the time I write “The Year that was My 2024”, the above screed about being single reads as the ironic words written by a man who doesn’t know that he’s about to finally meet the love of his life. 

Conversely, my biggest attempt to take charge of my destiny this year fizzled out to no effect whatsoever. I applied for a dream job near the heart of down Nashville, thinking that eleven years of experience within the company might be enough to secure a transfer, but I was sorely disappointed when the position was awarded to someone else. Moreover, any hope of transferring instead to North Carolina was subsequently dashed when I learned mere days ago that our terminal there was unceremoniously sold off, same as the terminal at which I was working for the past several years – the location at which I interned in the summers during college, at which I genuinely loved coming into work each and every day.

The one area of my life that’s actually proceeded according to plan and represents the fruit of long labor is my secondary career as a writer. At the end of my review of 2023 I made mention of my resolution to get back into analysis and criticism, this time of the literary variety. Within the first quarter of the year I was writing scripts for In Deep Geek, which I’ve long considered to be the best channel for Tolkien content on YouTube. It’s been a huge honor and I feel that I’m doing some of my best work since Wisecrack. I’m particularly proud of my scripts analyzing The Seventh Age of Middle-earth and Morgoth’s Ring. My other resolution – for The History of the Decline and Fall of Færieland to find publication – was unfulfilled, with two submissions being answered with two rejection letters, but given its nature as a long narrative lay, that was to be expected, and the success at In Deep Geek far out shadows the failure of my poetry to be published. 

As for 2024, my one resolution is to secure a book deal. Getting a book published has been at the top of my bucket list for years, and the time has come to make a real attempt at crossing it off. Towards that end I’ve been writing a non-fiction work on a subject in which I’ve demonstrated some amount of expertise. The content itself is coming along swimmingly, with several chapters fully researched and written, and the vision for the whole quite clear. The difficult part, at least from my perspective, will be the minutiae of writing a pitch and soliciting publishers and all of the other ancillary work apart from the writing itself. But such will be worth it if I could one day come across a tome I’ve penned sitting on the shelves of Barnes & Noble. That’s long been the dream, and this is the year that it hopefully stops being a dream and becomes a reality.