I’ve been reflecting a lot on this last year, it’s been such a strange one in my life but for reasons I really love and I know I will cherish for a long time.

2023 was the first year of my life since I turned 14 where I didn’t want to kill myself. And there’s a lot of reasons for that. I left a terrible job to focus on my art and my home, and it did change how lonely I felt but it also made me more available to help people than I’ve ever been. I got to be there for my friends when they were at their lowest and their most lonely.

I spent so much of my late teens and early 20s just waiting for something to kill me, I had a terrible relationship with education, I felt like I burned out before I even understood the game I needed to play. And I think the way I was viewing the world was so fundamentally twisted that I had no options left.

It was by far the worst in 2021 though. January, we were still deep in lockdown, and I had just moved from LA (my hometown, where I’d lived my whole life) to now living in the North East, and I wasn’t handling my first winter well at all. I was stuck in my home and all I wanted was to die, I was so alone living 3000 miles from everyone I knew and cared for. And then I got a tik tok that was like “if you need an emergency shot to keep you from falling into the void, watch Haikyuu!!” And I thought it was kinda silly but I gave it a shot because I’d try anything to feel something. And it worked. And it was the first time I had picked a show for myself that my partner went “meh it’s not for me but you enjoy it” and I realized I can just like. Have things for myself. And so spring 2021 was the season where I watched One Piece, East Blue through Alabasta. And I liked it a lot and the characters made me happy but I don’t think it would mean what it means to me today if I had stopped there and never picked it back up.

At the very end of 2022, I did though. Over a year and a half later. I’d had a terrible day at work (I used to work in a contemporary art museum) and I got home, bought a bottle of wine, a big fluffy pastry from the bakery, soaked in my bath, and picked back up in Jaya. And then I never stopped.

Sometimes I wonder how I would feel about these characters if I had gotten into the series at any other point in my life. It’s such a strange franchise, because I know that I, a 27 year old depressed woman drinking wine in her bathtub in the American north east, am not the target demographic for the show.

And yet, I’ve never NEVER NEVER. met a character in fiction like Nico Robin. To immediately identify with a character, to love her, and then to be shaken violently and told I can’t keep trying to die. That even though I’m so far from home and so far from my friends, there are people who are still here who care about me. And I get to care about them. And it’s been a slow process year because I worked hard on art that may never see the light of day. I built things and I learned new skills and I got to be there. I take sunset walks to the park and I draw without pressure and i dream again. And I still let myself like spooky shit. I have good friends that work in the death industry, I draw abandoned places, I read scary books. I get to figure out what living means for me, and I need to give myself the grace that that takes time too because sometimes it feels like I lost 13 years of my life. All the ones that are supposed to be the great ones.

I think for a long time I thought I was going to be a mom because it’s what was socially expected of me. And in deconstructing for the religion I was born into, I pivoted fully to not wanting to ever have children. And that’s still kind of the case, I don’t want to birth and I’ve taken steps to make sure that I don’t. Now, I’ve got so many options in front of me because there’s another path. Helping my friends, even new people I’ve just met, makes me feel good. Keeping them safe and fed and warm makes me feel good. Making sure they have somewhere to sleep at night, a community that loves them, a hand to hold. THAT is what makes life worth living. To look at where we are in the world, to see where we’ve been and how much tings have changed and all the changes on the horizon, to make art and poetry and love and good food. To dress myself however the fuck I want. To watch the sun set at the duck pond. To show someone else the sunset at the duck pond.

2023 was the year that I watched (most of) One Piece. Jaya to Wano. 2023 was the year that I realized I did, despite everything, want to live. But then, that’s the really hard part. Because now the steps forward are figuring out what living means, huh?