Boxing From Mountains (And Valleys)

Again? Already? Fine. 

For twenty years, I’ve sent out Boxing Day greetings. And after twenty years, longtime readers will recognize my musings’ mechanics have become so predictable that an AI model could generate the entire champagne chalet experience (hallucinations on the house):

• Self-deprecating welcome (if you've landed here after googling "champagne chalet" and mistakenly slipped into this realm of reflection, welcome to the repartee!) 

• Fauxpologetic explanation for newcomers and anyone expecting this to actually arrive on the 26th (This email, like time, is a social construct. And as it turns out, I was ahead of the curve in using “day” generously during this lawless liminal state of festive leisure – it’s boxing week now, profanity’ers.)

• Narrative hook or scene that flows from personal anecdote into broad reflection (the more cliché the better) launching into a year’s worth of disparate observations I attempt to wrangle into cohesion

• Meta-commentary (oft presented in annoying parentheticals of sesquipedalian shorthand and obscure asides I alone find funny) 

• Alliteration (often always) 

But see friends, there’s safety in ritual. In predictability. In structure. The repetitive cadence helps individuals feel connected and grounded, providing a sense of stability even when the broader environment feels chaotic. Rituals serve as beacons to guide us through life’s liminality, anchor points in a fall arrest system when shit hits the fan and you’re faced with catastrophe's inevitable "now what" phase. Subtle foreshadowing secured, let’s begin.

In late October, I was on a conference stage in Banff, delivering my standard deck to a crowd of 1500. I intentionally selected the talk track I can nail in my sleep – a tight 20 evangelizing community, espousing humans’ collective power, outlining why most community strategies fail (fwiw, it’s because leaders won’t risk relinquishing control, opting instead to varnish over authentic humanity with that telltale corporate sheen.) In other words, I was up there in full boss mode – heels high, guns out, delivery locked-in – looking, sounding, faking that I had it all together.

All the while, avoiding the macabre irony hiding under my curated polish. I spent the last 20 years becoming an expert on community, espousing its transformative power and value. And I’d spent the last 20 minutes chiding educating the world’s biggest brands: passionately laying out the case for vulnerability. Championing courage to let your community help where you can’t do it alone. Yet here I was, silently suffocating under the weight of my own impossible advice. So at minute 21, I stopped. Sat down. Took a breath. And said: "On October 4th, my big brother Travis died of suicide. I didn’t know whether to start or end with this. Or whether to share it at all. Because this? This is so heavy. But here we are." (Heads up that I reference suicide throughout. If this topic is sensitive for you, please do whatever you need to be kind to yourself in this moment and always.)

Travis was one of those magnetic humans – the type who couldn't get five feet without attracting followers. The type you look at and earnestly think: Yeah, that one could start a cult. When Trav was around, adventures (and competition) were never far behind. He'd nod at a hill in the distance: “dude, let's go climb that” – somehow convincing you it wasn't just an idea, but the best idea. Researchers in Virginia found that if you’re looking at a mountain that you need to climb by yourself, your brain perceives it as 10-20% steeper than it would if you were standing next to a friend who is going to climb it with you. Wild, but not surprising, our perception of the world changes depending on whether we think we’re going through it alone or with someone else. Our brains are more resilient when we’re together. Travis was that person for so many – the one who made mountains look climbable, who made the impossible feel possible, just by being there with you.  

When I found out, my instinct was to be strong. (Side note: I quickly learned that if you want to bring any conversation to an abrupt and awkward halt, you can hardly do better than to mention your brother died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.) So I began redacting Travis from conversations – not to erase him, but because I can't always shoulder the weight of others' genuine care. There's a cost to watching someone's heart break over your loss, and each sincere reaction requires I somehow hold space for their shock and sadness. So I find myself performing this delicate calculus before sharing: weighing their right to care against my capacity to carry it, measuring the authenticity of connection against the cost of emotional output, balancing the relief of being held up against the burden of seeing others hold my pain. Some days, this quiet labor requires more emotional reserves than I possess.

But there's something else; something that catches in my throat: I'm the goalkeeper. The resilient one. The person who always, always shows up strong. Talking about Travis means letting them see my walls crumble, means watching their image of me shift from unshakeable to shaken. In their eyes, I see not just sympathy, but surprise – as if grief doesn't belong on the face of someone they've come to count on for strength. And below it all, a whisper: Have I failed them by being breakable? Have I let them down? Have I let you down? But when I couldn’t hold it together any longer and my facade cracked wide open (I recently quesopomorphized myself as an oozing lump of burrata), people didn't aggressively sniff around like 2010-era foodies at Neal's Yard. Instead, people met me there. They responded with raw vulnerability, revealing their own hidden universes of loss. The unity around my precise pain would be comforting if it weren't so heartbreaking – 47,000 annual deaths by suicide, each touching 135 lives directly. Six million people carrying this specific grief each year – in the United States alone. 

My favorite new word is sonder – the profound awareness that every human carries their own complex universe of hopes and heartaches as vivid and intricate as your own. In revealing my brokenness, I've found myself part of a community I never wanted to join, yet one that makes the weight more bearable. Not lighter, but less lonely. Now when I scan faces around me, I see stories untold, grief unspoken, strength unwitnessed – invisible threads that connect us all in our most human moments. That person taking too long to order a coffee may be calculating, as I have, whether they have the emotional reserves to answer "How are you?" honestly today. 

Perhaps true grace lies not only in understanding but in acting upon the fact that none of us are truly experiencing any of this alone. And though I've admittedly grown weary of performative grief rituals (the vocal pitch of pity haunts my nightmares), one solace in this mess has been observing the quiet ways people have authentically shown up for me. The understated times someone has seen, then silently handled the small things to lighten my load. The miracle of being loved for merely existing, regardless of my state of wholeness or dissolution. Because that's what we're all doing really – dissolving and reforming, breaking and mending, over and over again.

I recently learned that when caterpillars transform into butterflies, they don't just grow wings – they disintegrate inside their cocoon and rebuild themselves. Their entire body digests into soup before becoming something new. I can't quite believe that we live in a world where creatures can dissolve and reconstruct themselves. How ridiculously brilliant all of this “living” is that happens around us every day. All my life I’ve been conditioned to be disgusted by everything about my body that makes me… not dead. Every fluid – my sweat, my blood, my bile, my breastmilk, my tears – gross, right? The brokenness, the mess, clean it all up before others see! But our bodies are so ridiculous and incredible. Take tears: that we can think about something, and if that something becomes too overwhelming to hold as a thought, somewhere behind our face our body turns that thought into water, packed with a blend of pain-relieving endorphins and oxytocin that the normal dust-clearing, onion-cutting variety don’t contain. It turns out, we’re all constantly breaking down and finding our way back to solid form. Different. Changed. Alive. 

So this Boxing Day, my gift to you is not my opinions, but my truth: regardless of the optics of my life, or my job, or the facade I present, I'm not always on the top of the mountain. Right now, I'm in the valley. And saying that out loud is such a relief. I get to be who I am. Human. Maybe I spent all this time telling everyone else to embrace human messiness but was not willing to embrace it in myself. And maybe Travis wasn't, either. But what life taught me in 2024 is that every single person you encounter is staring up at their own mountain, experiencing their own metamorphosis, thinly held together by blood and luck. So give like earth. Be flexible like water. Protect yourself like fire. Let yourself be boundless like air. But most importantly, be here. Stay here. Let others be here with you.

I love you, Travis. (p.s. you’re so vain, you probably think my grief is about you.)

--------

Poet Hollie McNish inspired my wikipedia rabbit hole into caterpillar disintegration and so much more, so I dedicate this to all of your incredible faces and the wondrous tears behind them.    

butter knife

my heart has pumped for forty years 

without me even asking

and you tell me to keep my elbows off the table

use a different knife for butter

caterpillars don’t grow wings

they disintegrate completely

re-emerge with hieroglyphics at their backs –

meet me there, in this world

where caterpillars disappear themselves

and teardrops can be conjured out of thought

we are all magicians here,

so lay your head upon my shoulder

tears do not run out any more than kisses do

so kiss me, 

the body is a wizard

and rain today is pounding on the streets

and there is air inside our lungs 

as ancient as the first oak, and fireflies 

make light inside their abdomens,

and you,

you once fed through your belly button

so do not tell me not to laugh

one teaspoon of a neutron star 

could balance the entire human population

and once upon a time, inside my savage skin

in a room made of blood and luck

i grew a whole human child from compliments and kisses,

who now stands as tall as me, gigantic

and every day chameleons are changing colour

and flowers, stronger than cement 

burst through cracks in pavements

where man made explosions once obliterated 

every living thing, so do not tell me 

to stop dreaming, as if it’s too late,

our eyes, from the very second we are born,

know exactly how to form water out of hope

Boxing With Babushkas

“Owen! Noa! Theoooooo! Let’s go. FAST! C’mon. We are in a hurry. FASTER. PLEASE.”

These words, in various sequences, are tersely snapped so often they’ve hit semantic satiation-status. (At least that’s what I’ve surmised by the frequency at which they temporarily lose all meaning for the listeners.) But on this particular day, while my two boys grumbled yet dutifully obliged, my daughter stood stock-still, looked me straight in the eyes, and said with cavalier, crone-like confidence: “Fast is NOT my favorite speed. Try slow. Slow is my favorite.” 

This. This is the energy I’m bringing into 2024. 91-year-old woman energy. That intoxicating IDGAF-spirit that only emerges from truly not giving any. To be unapologetically yourself. To unflinchingly speak truth to power. To move through the world with certainty and conviction. To let them. And somehow, my 4-year-old daughter tapped in 87 years early, which I find equal parts hilarious, maddening, and inspiring – and earnestly want to channel in my own life. So naturally, I shared this revelation with two trusted confidants: could we unleash our inner Margarets,* Mamies, and Esthers today? One responded: “[son] knocked a chair over and hit an 80+ woman, who whipped around and exclaimed ‘And how the hell are you?’ Life goals.” The other replied: “Help me do that!!!” then recommended I make this my Boxing Day topic.

So here we are dear friends, we’ve made it to Boxing Day #19 (which has formally morphed into a state-of-mind, not a day, based on the scrubbed send-date data). And whether you’ve been a ride or die since “high fives in ‘05” or landed here after googling “champagne chalet” and mistakenly slipped into this vortex of formulaic fortune cookie wisdom and wordplay, I’m happy you’re here. For real. Considering we’re firmly in that lawless, cheese-fueled state of nothingness between Christmas and New Year where time exists only in mimosa units, I’d recommend you pour yourself a flute of time and stay. Slow down and savor, even. Become the couch. 

Slow is not something I’m great at. Those who know me well or have had the pleasure of traveling with my “arrive at the airport with just enough time to walk on the flight”-archetype will appreciate the understatement. Japan’s Shinkansen bullet train reaches speeds of 198mph. It earns every accolade thrust upon it and is truly an exhilarating way to travel. Shortly after leaving Tokyo Station, you start whizzing past the bucolic Japanese countryside and before you know it, almost impossibly soon, you’re at your destination. What you missed in between? No time to know – you’re onto the next city, whizz. Next adventure, whizz. Next challenge, whizz. I lead a Shinkansen life – complete with a team of people managing my schedule and optimizing my routes to support it. Exhilarating and accolade-filled? Sure. Also, almost impossibly soon, Owen is 10. Whizz! We are conditioned to do more and get more and have more and be more. To hustle. To grind. Grit and tenacity were tattooed on my brain in middle school as the definitive markers of strong character and success. And at a time in my life when demand for my attention comes at an all-time premium, slow feels like a luxury I can’t afford. The timer never stops running, right? All you will regret is not reaching harder for the things you actually wanted while they were still in front of you, right? But what passes by as I’m hurling toward my next stop at 198mph?

I know I will miss these caricatured versions of the growing faces in front of me. I’ll miss the lasts as much as the firsts: the last bedtime story, the last bubble bath, the last mispronunciation (RIP leggybugs, marshpillows, hanitizer, and “hold you”). “Mommy” certainly is not long for this home’s nomenclature. They too are hurling at Shinkansen-speed toward their destinations, with stops at each next stage of their own becomings, leaving outlines of their smaller versions behind at each station. I was reminded by a friend during a particularly hard week that in 20 years, I’d give anything to be this age again, exactly this healthy, and airdrop into my life just as it is today. To savor the senses – the sights, smells, sounds, touches – that will all fade with time no matter how tightly I grasp. A core sentiment of Japanese culture is mono no aware. Literally “the pathos of things,” it describes the bittersweet appreciation that everything is temporary as it’s the ephemera itself that makes life so infinitely precious. (Irony not lost that the pioneers of the world’s fastest train also pinpointed the poignant emotion of transience, the beautiful sadness in the passing of lives and objects.) Whether experienced on a figurative park bench or whizzing by at 198mph, seasons in life are not to be mourned, but cherished in their impermanence. My friend reminded me this too shall pass, whether I want it to or not, then urged me to “go do more main character shit before it’s too late.” And no one does main character shit like old women.

Culturally, crones get a bad rap. The dictionary’s first entry greets you with pleasantries like “an ugly, evil-looking old woman,” “a sinister, cantankerous witch” or my personal fave and winner of most relatable: “the withered hag.” This is no surprise considering its etymology – crone comes from the early 13c. Anglo-French carione, meaning "dead, putrefying animal corpse.” [i.e. once aged out of fertility and child-rearing, women become gross, useless carcasses. Cool, cool. Long live the patriarchy!] But the second entry starts feeling (less cynically) familiar to my lived experience: “an archetypal figure, a Wise Woman.” “An old woman of great power and strength whose life wisdom comes from both her age and the many things she’s lived through.” There we go – the crone is the matriarch. The babushka. The granny Orca. Moana’s tūtū Tala. The mythologically revered and formidable bearer of ancient wisdom and supernatural vision, ruler not only of regeneration but of the underworld because she has no fear of death – which means, of course, she fears nothing. Native American mythology, including my own Potowatomi tribe, is filled with tales of an ancestor called Spider Grandmother, who weaves the web of creation from which all other living things emerge. She symbolizes the interconnectedness between all things, imperceptible strength and resourcefulness, and the power of mind-body-soul balance (fun fact: dreamcatchers are crafted in her honor). Numerous other myths around the world depict spinning and weaving goddesses like Lauma, a mythological Latvian doula who spins the cloth of life. Like old women, spiders can inspire awe and fear disproportionate to their size. 

To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, so while society collectively converges around the cultural blight of withered hags running amok and the present danger of glabellar lines to fixed foreheads, I’ve become fixated on channeling my inner crone – the badass old lady who dwells within me, molded by matriarchs, whom I hope to someday fully become, crow's feet and all. In a society that fetishizes youth, I choose fearing nothing over staying forever 21. To be both fierce and compassionate. To bring the strength and discernment to know what must end for something new to begin. To try slow: less doing, more being (it is Noa’s favorite, after all). And to welcome the innate uncertainty of life, not by lamenting impermanence, but by basking in the beauty of change itself. 

There is beauty in life and, so long as we live, there is beauty in death. The cherry blossom blooms intensely, yet only for one week each year. As the flowers die and petals drop, blossoms blanket the ground like soft, pink snow. It’s the profound appreciation of their transience that draws crowds, standing in awe of their delicate nature, capturing their utmost beauty between the precipice of life and death. To be truly at peace under the cherry blossoms is to know mono no aware. We must embrace change as it rises with the sun and whizzes with the Shinkansen because we too are like the cherry blossoms – beautiful not despite, but because of our impermanence. This year more than any other, I’ve learned that while you can’t control the waves, you can track the tides and grab a surfboard.  

I’ll leave you with the babushkas of Chernobyl – a resilient, spirited group of elderly women who defiantly returned to their ancestral homes after the disaster, and who are now outliving their compatriots who stayed behind in the "safe" and "non-toxic" cities. In her TedTalk, Holly Morris explains “It’s not that the women haven’t suffered enormously, or that nuclear contamination isn’t bad (they have and it is), but the babushkas’ unlikely survival raises fascinating questions about the palliative powers of home and the tonic of living a self-determined life.” Tl;dr: these tough old crones are thriving because they’re happy. And they’re happy because they do exactly what they want. That is the level of IDGAF-spirit I aspire to. I can’t help but reflect on the strong women who shaped me – fierce, loving, loyal, force-of-nature-type women – who are so clearly reflected in the company I keep today. Descendants of our Spider Grandmother. They remind me to breathe and to “try slow.” That I haven’t met all of me yet. That there is so much more life left to live. And when I tap into my own inner crone, when I ask myself what my spider grandmother would do, that radiant, ancient being rises, catches me with her fearless gaze, and weaves the same powerful message every time: live.

--

*Dedicated to the legacy of Margaret Ann Hilley, who "loved fiercely and without reservation, was stubborn as hell," and shaped some of my very favorite people on the planet. And who, by the interconnectedness between all things, played a significant part in who I am today and who I will become. Thank you, Nana.

Boxing Day JOMO

I was recently driving Noa to preschool when she asked: “Mama, do we live in Washington?” I replied that yes, we do live in Washington. Momentary pause. “Why do we live in Washington?” This is my third go at three – I should’ve seen it coming. “Well,” I reply-sighed, mentally stockpiling patience for the next 11 rounds, “because that’s where daddy and I choose to live.” The silence lasted only a beat before she confidently replied: “Well I choose ice cream.” Stunned, I simply nodded to both affirm her choice and declare defeat. We rode silently the rest of the way. May we all bring Noa’s energy into 2023. 

This year, a slew of competing priorities piled up and deferred my annual reflection ritual. (For newcomers, I do this thing every year where I forgo sending gifts and instead send all of my opinions. Welcome!) Sure, distractions are at an all-time high: the champagne chalet has been discovered, infiltrated, and colonized. I currently have a lapdog in the form of a 6-year-old sprawled across my legs, his body buzzing with frenetic youth. My own pocket vibrates, my wrist illuminates, my coffee mug connects to bluetooth, my headphones abruptly decrescendo, uncannily sensing that I may want to hear something in the background (I don’t), and my laptop protests low power faster than it did in the past, which is particularly relatable. 

Yet even beyond discarding distractions, at a time in my life when demand for my attention is at a premium, opportunities abound, and focus is a luxury, I’ve had to get better at saying no to good things. This is hard. And it goes directly against my elder-millennial, people-pleasing, hustle-culture camarilla. But what I’ve learned through well-intentioned multitasking-fails is that focus is not saying yes to the thing most worthy of attention, but instead saying no to the hundred other things, good ideas, and compelling opportunities that exist in resounding chorus. Akin to picking my battles, it’s picking what I protect – shunning unnecessary over-exertion, unshackling myself from the burden of “should,” strategically underperforming, selecting carefully. There’s Noa-level intentionality in saying no; it’s powerful precisely because it preserves the opportunity to say yes.

Now, I recognize that intentionality, discernment, and saying no are clearly not novel ideas this season. They’ve been thoughtfully chewed on and digested by the zeitgeist with a fervor usually reserved only for Timothée Chalamet’s red-carpet looks and our collective desire to suck the gingerbread-spice marrow out of every brittle winter day. Whether we metaphorize trees, mysticize retrograde’s Saturnian energy, or idolize Joan Didion, we intrinsically understand winter’s familiar cycle of death and renewal. Of intentionally letting go of things that don’t serve our goals like a tree drops its leaves – not to ignore or offend the past, but to wholeheartedly embrace the present. To prioritize our needs in the particular season we’re in. To be in a perpetual state of becoming, growth, and evolvement. 

So it’s a strong yes to more no. Let’s pour into ourselves! Put up boundaries! Practice JOMO with wild, guilt-free abandon! Because in Joan’s words, “to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves – therein lies the great, the singular power of self-respect.” And while I’m a devout disciple, I do sometimes find myself in conflict with my own job title. Community is another nebulous buzzword of our time. On one hand, community has become inextricably linked to our performative, FOMO-laden feeds and FYPs (social media isn’t community, AMA). On the other, community is scientifically proven time and time and time and time and time again to be the investment most worth our time. I recently told my husband that I haven’t stopped being social, it’s just hibernating. But when does hibernation become isolation? We casually juxtapose the barrage of content telling us we’re lonelier than ever with all the rah-rah boss-bitch energy around avoiding humans, banishing phone calls, and cutting off contact #BecauseBoundaries. Staying in as a “radical act of self-care” is as radical today as living, laughing, loving all things vanlife. In this climate, has my own delirious obsession with JOMO become a convenient excuse to avoid the intimacy required for community-building? And is it ironic that I spend my workday earnestly espousing the power of community, only to guiltlessly relish my screen-free evenings alone?

Maybe. But also, the word community needs to have a heart-to-heart with Inigo Montoya. Community is not an audience. You, for example, are not part of my “Boxing Day Community.” (Victims, yes. Especially if you’ve made it this far. But community? No.) Audiences are spoken to, communities speak to one another. Audiences consume, communities contribute. Communities, by their very nature, go against existing social structure; they enrich as they get smaller, more niche, more intimate, more vulnerable, more human. The Latin noun Communitas characterizes a liminal moment – communities form when people move from an area of commonality into an exclusive group because of an experience they share together. Community not only requires boundaries to thrive, it does not exist without them. And through this lens, preserving your yeses by saying no, being discerning in what you choose, what you protect, what you nurture, and what you let go of in the process is as critical for community as Ticketmaster's demise is for Swifties. It’s not a nice-to-have, it’s essential. 

Seasons, too, are liminal. And it is precisely in their dissolution of order, their momentary unknown, their fluid, temporal nature that make the communities they root so rare, so precious, so worth protecting. 

So at this moment – when the characterization of connection has become performative, when there’s limitless information but with the limited context of 30-second snippets, when yet another technology hype-cycle threatens to “disrupt everything” with artificial approximations of human expression – this moment, right now, is a great time to prioritize our separate peace. To have our private reconciliations. To keep our circles nourished and vibrant, and small if we must. To consciously identify the border between what’s real and what’s perceived, what’s lived experience and what’s simulation. To assign unanswered texts their proper weight, calling ourselves back into the space of being more human than machine: Less scheduled, more present. Less technical, more messy. Because, to paraphrase the coiner of JOMO, being in control of what moves us, what we’re obligated by, and what attachments we have to fleeting experiences is not an authority we should willingly concede to the arbitrary whims of apps on our phone.

My hope for all of us in 2023 is that we radiate the calm peace of satisfaction wherever we are. To have the discernment to prioritize the season we’re in. To trade our fear for joy. And to not miss our lives by chasing the belief that there is some moment more worth our presence than the one we’re in right now. 

All this to say you’re receiving this on the 31st because I chose not to prioritize it until today. 

Narrator: And Noa, unflappable, chose ice cream. 

Happy 2023