reverent vs warm

Topic: A personal year-end reckoning with a difficult year
Axis varied: tone
A: Reverent B: Warm

What to notice

A treats the year as something owed attention. “There are years that ask more of you than you agreed to give,” and a name chosen quickly that the writer “came to take seriously.”

B treats the reader as the thing owed attention.

The tell: A’s care is aimed at the events; B’s at the person hearing about them. A reverent account can be slightly cool toward its reader and still succeed.

A: reverent

There are years that ask more of you than you agreed to give. This was one of them.

The project - I had been calling it Meridian, a word I chose quickly and came to take seriously - occupied two years of careful work before it ended. It ended without the outcome I had given myself to. Not because the effort was careless. But because the conditions I had built upon did not hold, and I had not seen clearly enough, early enough, that they were shifting. That is a hard thing to say plainly without softening it. I am trying not to soften it.

And then there was the friendship with Elena - which is perhaps too small a word for what it was - that changed in a way I did not choose and could not stop. We did not end badly. We ended with a quietness that was, in its own way, more difficult than argument would have been. What had been close became careful. What had been easy became occasional. I do not know how much of that was mine to have prevented. I suspect some of it was.

A year like this one does not resolve. It does not offer the satisfaction of a clear moral or a changed perspective that redeems the difficulty. Some of what I lost simply stayed lost. What I am choosing to carry forward - not because the loss was secretly worthwhile, but in spite of the fact that it was not - is a more honest accounting of what I am willing to risk, and what I need not promise lightly. That is small. It may be enough.

B: warm

You have been with me through enough that I want to say this plainly: this year was hard, and it did not end well.

The project - the one I had worked on for nearly three years - closed in April without the outcome I had hoped for. I want to be honest about that. I had believed in it more than the evidence warranted. I held on past the point where holding on was wisdom, and when it ended I told myself stories about timing and circumstances that were partly true and partly a way of not looking at my own choices. I got things wrong. The product was not the problem I thought it was. I misread what the people around me needed. I was slower to listen than I should have been.

And then, a few months later, the relationship with Marcus changed - not ended, exactly, but became something different and smaller than what it had been. That one I did not choose and could not fix, and I have had to sit with not knowing what I did or did not contribute to it.

I have tried not to wrap any of this in a gift. Some things just cost you something, and this year cost me. I know you know that too.

What I am carrying forward is a clearer sense of when I am holding on out of fear, and a little more respect for the people who told me hard things early. That is not a silver lining. It is just what I have to show for it, and I wanted you to have the honest version.