Not the profound, witty and wonderful year-end Substack listicle you have been waiting for.

I figure other people have those covered.

Yesterday, New Year’s Eve Eve Day (as my kids call it), I found myself struggling to write the REQUISITE END OF YEAR SUBSTACK ARTICLE — something wise about getting through hard things, or something clever like one of those what’s in/what’s out lists:

OUT: Pitting Beyoncé and Taylor Swift Against Each Other
IN: The Creeping Fear of Authoritarianism!

I couldn’t do it.

So I tried writing a list of good things that happened this year, a list of lessons learned from the past year, a list of wishes for 2024…

Garbage.

All of it.

I would add “bird cage liner” but we type on modern laptops from home here, we are not a sassy 1970s newsroom.

I’m in a period of massive transition right now in every possible way — work, family, friends, priorities — and my mind is a vat of soup. (Having soup for brains really does make it extra hard to sum up an entire past year and tie it in a pretty bow to present to all of you.)

It’s weird, this pressure as a writer to reflect back on an arbitrary 365-day chunk of your life and have something astute to say about it.

I suppose you can read through my archives and get the gist of 2023; the good, the bad, the egregiously bad, the hopeful, the silly, the weird. But don’t we all have those things? Is there really a “Things to Be Hopeful For in 2024” list I could share that hasn’t already been written, and written better? A “Ways to Live Your Best Life in 2024!” list that doesn’t sound like girlboss dreck from a decade ago?

I have written and deleted so many truly bad paragraphs this week, it was a mercy for all of us, believe me.

So yesterday around noon, I finally gave up.

I shut the computer and simply decided there would be nothing new to say here before the end of the year. You all would have to understand.

I took my oldest to lunch down the street for some one-on-one time, complete with a final kick-ass cheeseburger and fries of the year. (She had yogurt.) When we came home, we decided the the six of us should stay off the screens and play a game.

Like an old-fashioned, no-screen, people-around-the-table game.

I now owe the kids a few rounds of Telestrations and Over-Rated, for vetoing their favorites; I wanted to try something new. We managed to agree on a new game someone had sent us called I’ve Venn Thinking, in which you have to play a card in your hand with the funniest commonality between two seemingly unlike things, Venn diagram style.

Plumbers + Justin Bieber: Both Make You Wet

Donuts + Grandparents: Always Covered in Crumbs

O.J. Simpson + A Public Restroom:

The game can get dark. It definitely gets silly.

At one point, thanks to a mispronunciation of the name “Gary Bussey” — you can probably figure it out (and then from there, imagine the rhymes it inspired) — we started laughing. Hard.

A hard laugh that turned into a roar that turned into that kind of silent quake that spreads to every limb, steals your breath, and rocks the entire table as it passes through the the whole group like a lightning strike.

Then it happened.

I peed.

Really.

I peed laughing — for the first time ever in my life.

Of course telling the kids I had just peed laughing (between wheezes and gasps) made us laugh even harder, though I’m not sure they completely believed me until I finally ran into the bathroom.

Friends: It was glorious.

It was perfect.

It was the number one best thing that happened yesterday. (Womp womp.)

It would not have happened had I just sat staring at my laptop screen all day, looking for words that wouldn’t come.

Is that a way to end the year or what?

Wishing you all a truly beautiful, happy, and peaceful New Year, friends. I am wildly grateful to you all for keeping me writing, keeping me thinking, and helping build a community that’s been so meaningful to me during a hell of a year. Here’s to you.

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