A red candle burning. A blue pen in my hand. A piece of paper in front of me taunting me, challenging me. These were my witnesses as I ushered in the new year.

I’m not a person who believes. I’m predisposed to doubt, always bracing myself for bad news. It’s a bad habit, one I need to break. And that’s what I was starting to chip away at that night of the 31st. I have a horrible fear of stating the future as fact. I think it’s reckless and dangerous. “Who am I to prophesy?” “Who am I to accept good as truth when all I have is evidence to the contrary?”

Speaking is risky enough. Words are spit and air if no one hears them, but writing? Confessing hope and committing it to a page? That’s even worse. But I did it. I wrote down what I wanted to leave behind in the rough, calloused palm of the old year, and what I wanted the fresh new one to offer me. I admitted that I was stupid enough, greedy enough to want things. It was embarrassing. It was depressing. It required me to grieve past, present and future versions of myself, to exorcise ghosts that had been trailing fingers of regret and resentment down my spine for ages. But it was necessary.

I recently reread one of my favourite stories from one of my favourite authors, Eloghosa Osunde. “Grief is the gift that breaks the spirit open”, the title assures us. The story is about loss and leaving. And love, I guess. But love is also about loss and leaving, so do I really need to add that? This year held so much grief I was not prepared for. I mourned breaches of trust, ended chapters, past lives, the inevitability of future losses. I grieved in arrears and in anticipation and my spirit cracked and broke and shattered and shattered and shattered. That too, was necessary. I needed to become familiar with that feeling of being brittle, I had to know that I am a breakable thing , a thing that can be put back together again, that can take new shape, that can live in scarred skin. 

There’s a passage from Octavia Butler’s Parable of The Sower that I saved on the inspo board for my novel.

God is Power—

Infinite, Irresistible, Inexorable, Indifferent.

And yet, God is Pliable…Trickster, Teacher, Chaos, Clay.

God exists to be shaped.

God is Change.

This is the literal truth.

I have had to learn that change is not death. Change is power, change is clay, change exists to be shaped. These lessons were carved ungently on the tablet of my heart. It was necessary, because that is the literal truth.

Back to the witnesses. 

What did they see? They saw tentative truths pour out of me. I was vague with my desires, timidly putting down imprecise statements about the work I wanted to do, the resilience I wanted to cultivate, the grace I wanted to give myself. I was too scared to be specific, but I was brave enough to be honest. I’m grateful to myself for that.

When I was done, I took the sheet where I had written the things I wanted to leave behind, my candle and a match and went to stand outside under the moon. I’m not a spiritual person, but I’m a dramatic one. I believe in symbolism. The fire sprouting urgently from the candle, the benevolent face of the moon, my heart poured out on a page. It had to mean something. I didn’t know what exactly, but it was definitely something.

I burned the sheet and let the ashes scatter, then I went back inside to face the distinctly more terrifying prospect of desire. I lit another candle and read out loud what I wanted out of the new year. I repeated it until I was crying, until I was begging, until I was angry. Until all these other feelings had blanketed my fear. And then it was the new year and I was laughing and there was a message echoing in my head:

“From rotting fruit bursts seeds”

I don’t know what specifically inspired that, but like all the other confusing, intriguing, sticky ideas that pop into my head, I wrote it down to save it for a story. And then I wrote it down again on a sticky note and stuck it on my desk as a kind of reminder. A reminder that a fear of death is a fear of life, that rot is the midwife of growth.

I changed so much this year. I grew so much. I allowed my spirit to break and accepted help from people who chose to love me and help put me back together. I planted seeds and I’m waiting patiently for them to grow. 

Tonight, as the old year dies and the new one rises from its grave, I will be confessing again. I will be confronting sins of fear and hope. I will be clasping change to my heart and refusing to let go until it blesses me. Next year is for reaping. Fruits of labour, fruits of faith..next year is for new fruits. And it will be sweet.