I had a lot of plans for this first day of 2016. I didn’t do any of them.

I’d planned to wake up early, set some intentions with some girlfriends, jump in the ocean, and then dance on the beach. It would have been a beautiful day.

I made this plan yesterday morning, but the questions I asked on New Year’s Eve changed my today, and I spent my morning creating space and facing a fear who’s rhythm terrified me more than the sound of freezing cold water sliding up the beach.  That fear began (begins) with the word love.

At first, my New Year’s Eve moved slowly. I woke up drenched in doubt, but for hours I refused to take off a single layer. Tension squeezed at my cheek bones. I looked out of my eyes, and felt a familiar collage of lips and eyelashes decorating my face. Many of them hand-me-downs. Some memories. Few do I remember choosing without a second opinion.

I woke up having over slept. You know the feeling. I drank three cups of coffee and then did some push ups on the cold linoleum of my kitchen floor. A thought haunted the dark circles underneath my eyes, and I wondered about love.

Three days before, an idea had ran enthusiastically out of my pen, surprising the thought it had interrupted in my journal. “What if the person who loved me most, was me?” This was not an isolating thought, although (and excuse my assumption) that’s what I thought at first too.  What the part of me that wrote the idea was trying to suggest was that, perhaps, it could be possible to love myself in a way that surpassed any love, no matter how great, that came from other people. Even if they professed their desire to move mountains for me. Even if they danced with me in the rain, and kissed me tenderly on the cheek as I fell asleep. What if, no matter the deepness and sincerity of their love, they couldn’t love me more than I loved myself, because the amount that I loved myself was as infinite as my soul. What would that feel like? I wondered – my pen balancing between my fingers – to love myself that much.

In that moment, pushing my body up off the linoleum, I thought about all of this with discouragement. I couldn’t imagine what that would feel like.

For the last six days I’d spent more time away from my computer than was comfortable, and in that space I’d realized how much I was warmed by luminescent light, and how much I’d relied, my entire life, on my work to love me more than anything or anyone else. I’ve carried my lap top like a heart from cafe to cafe. My life support. The kind that requires sweat and calories burned to keep from levelling out into nothingness.

My greatest fear: being nothing. Since moving to Vancouver, every New Year’s resolution began with a desire to be something.

But this year, away from the fluorescent glow, I’d started searching for a heart beat that sounded and felt very different from the tap tap tap of my keyboard under my eager, and sometimes feverish, fingertips. On New Year’s Eve, sitting on the cold linoleum, I still hadn’t found it. And I’d searched!  I’d looked to social media. I’d looked to an entire jar of peanut butter (devoured in spoonfuls over two weeks). I’d looked inside of warm blankets. I’d looked inside of all these places, because the one place I knew I needed to look was too dark, and I’m afraid of the dark.

But on New Year’s Eve, I decided it was finally time to look there. I closed my eyes, and I started to breathe. For three hours, I eased myself back into my body, and my thoughts fought back, panicked. “Nothing to find here!” Over the last year I’ve been so afraid of leaving my ‘self’ behind as I grew. I desired consistency, and I found that consistency in doubt. I found my ‘self’ in hatred. I found my ‘self’ in failure. These were the feelings I’d associated with who I was, and these were where I returned. Relief, love, came from outside. At least in theory.

But what if love could be my constant? What if love was the thing I knew about who I was?

My plans for New Year’s Eve unfolded the day of.

I met up with a friend – a sister who’s soul connection hit both us hard only a few short months ago – and we sat across from one another getting drunk off Perrier. We were confused at first. How is this possible? We wondered. Our faces were flushed. Laughter erupted frequently. We were doing a clearing. We wrote three limiting beliefs we had about ourselves, and then wrote the more powerful reverse. Then we held hands and, looking into the other’s eyes, we told each other these rewritten beliefs over and over again until the other believed that we meant it – until we knew that we meant it too. We weren’t getting drunk off Perrier. We were getting drunk off love.

After the clearing, I welcomed in the New Year on my yoga mat. Midnight struck in savasana. Only as I write this do I realize the beauty of waking from corpse pose on the other side of such a universal new beginning.

My New Year’s resolution is going to be a little different this year. This year my word is ‘ease.’ This year it is my ambition to be creative, to make things – cool things – with other people, and it is my resolution to love myself, and to find the heart that beats outside of my work.

I’d love to ask this question to you: where does your heart beat?

In conclusion,

Here are some of my favourites from the quotes I gathered in 2015.

May Sarton:

“Now I become myself

It’s taken time, many years and places

I have been dissolved and shaken

worn other people’s faces…”

Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak:

“As the darkness began to descend on me in my early twenties, I thought I had developed a unique and terminal case of failure. I did not realize that I had merely embarked on a journey toward joining the human race.”

Toni Morrison:

“Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.”

John Hirsch:

“The older I grow, the more I realize the incredible beauty of the world and already I’m raging about the fact that I’ll be going soon. I haven’t really drunk enough and thought enough and loved enough and worked enough and made enough connections. I’ve wasted a lot of time. So now, when I’m confronted with this incredible world that I live in, instead of diminishing, my hunger for it increases.”

Cheers to what is going to be a very beautiful year.