What I’m Making This Year

My word of the year for 2024 is make. The word make means to bring into exis­tence or to give mean­ing to. The term was first used nau­ti­cal­ly, mean­ing to arrive (as in, we can make it to the next shore in six days). It’s a beau­ti­ful term and encom­pass­es many nuanced, lay­ered emo­tion­al states. 

We make love, make calls, make up, make out, make do. We make wish­es and we make believe, make sure and make it happen. 

Here are a few things I’ll be mak­ing this year (and a few things I won’t):

Art. 

My medi­um is writ­ing. I would like to dive deep­er into my writ­ing this year to see what I uncov­er. Writing, for me, helps me process, accept, and appre­ci­ate my life. My gen­er­al hope is that it res­onates with some­one else out there too, even when (espe­cial­ly when) the algo­rithm makes sure very few peo­ple see and read it. A cre­ative life is a ful­fill­ing one. Writing for the sake of writ­ing is enough.

Money.

Life is expen­sive in a way I was not pre­pared for. My fel­low Gen Xers car­ry more debt (mort­gage, cred­it card, and school debt) than any oth­er age group. Fortune Magazine calls Gen X “finan­cial­ly trau­ma­tized.” Yay us, I guess, for um, win­ning? While I don’t believe that mon­ey can buy hap­pi­ness, pover­ty can’t buy any­thing. Everyone needs enough mon­ey to alle­vi­ate the day-to-day stress of wor­ry­ing about month­ly bills, rent, and pay­ing off the mortgage. 

Mistakes.

The old­er I get, the less I am con­cerned with curat­ing the per­fect exis­tence. Making mis­takes is an impor­tant learn­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty. We grow through what we don’t know; if we want to try new things, we need to accept that we’re going to be bad at them for a while. Mistakes allow us to become more hum­ble, resilient, and adaptive. 

A Difference.

I want to be the change that I want to see in the world, to bring more empa­thy and kind­ness to my day-to-day inter­ac­tions, to remain soft in a world that demands a hard­en­ing of heart. In chang­ing the world, I change myself. The more I care for the hap­pi­ness and well­be­ing of my fel­low humans, the hap­pi­er I myself become.

And final­ly, two things I won’t be making:

Friends.

I have spent 50 years care­ful­ly curat­ing my cir­cle. It’s small and it’s pow­er­ful. I hon­est­ly have nei­ther the time nor ener­gy at this point in my life to widen that cir­cle. I would rather cul­ti­vate deep­er, rich­er con­nec­tions with the peo­ple who have already cho­sen me as theirs. 

America “Great” Again.

If I could make a wish for all the beau­ti­ful mar­gin­al­ized, dis­en­fran­chised, poor, and/or over­looked souls in our coun­try, let it be that we do not elect a pres­i­dent who has shown him­self count­less times to be a thought­less, heart­less, racist, misog­y­nist asshat.