There is nothing but newness in this new year. I could say that almost nothing has stayed the same, but that’s not true.

But taking stock is a bit like reviewing my moving list. It’s long, sometimes crossed out and in other ways never ending. Some of it’s also still in boxes, locked in storage as much as it’s begun creating and shaping a new shelter in a new place I try to call home.

I have moved from one coast to another, leaving most of my support network, my family, my friends. I have let go of more ghosts. Sadly, I don’t get to spend as much time with my nephew. I am questioning more and more what the use is of saying words or phrases like “I’m sorry” when I can’t look in someone’s eyes, and I’m also learning how to not apologize so much after saying it far too often as a person socialized female who’s long learned to apologize for just about everything. Including when I don’t want to have sex.

I have more time for myself, and have attempted to focus that on my body, and honor the changes. After another surgery, hip pain, and learning how to bind less and less, I am giving my body more room to breathe. I look in the mirror more.

Unfortunately, I dance less. So I do more exercises, hoping physical therapy will bring me back and offer one way to release.

I have learned how to take stock in ways that move me forward, not hold me back.

I am not interested in the same tired political debates, conversations, affiliations or communities. Yes, I even mean my own participation in the patterns I internalized of pointing fingers, laying blame, critical analysis to the point of breaking down where building becomes a theory few implement. My energy is shifting, and my spirit too.

I am more interested in honoring faith. I am more interested in honoring. period. I believe cultural organizing has a solid and necessary place.

I am admitting that the change is, in many ways, not new. I’m not interested in reinventing. I’m not experiencing just for the sake of being new.

Rather, for the first time in a long time, I think I understand what is meant by the idea of teshuvah, of returning, of finding ones center of self. I am being forced by something larger than me to embrace and move, and at the same time, as I return, there’s no other way to find myself but somewhere different, and stronger, than where I was before.

I am surrounded by nothing but newness, and in all that’s new, I know that the task for me this year is less about apologizing, although of course that’s a part of living and being humble in life’s work.

The task is letting myself mourn the person I know I am ready to let go of to allow myself to return, and that the more I allow myself that space, the more I will meet others with an open, and restorative, heart.