re-thinking my creative accomplishments of 2024

a birthday celebration

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I don’t know about you, but I find it hard to appreciate my accomplishments. The to-do list is never ending, the goals are ever mounting, and I tend to tick one thing off the list only to jump to the next without taking time to really appreciate what I just did.

And then, there’s the question of what counts as an “accomplishment” in the first place.

What if, instead of conceiving of “creative accomplishments” as something produced, we counted a milestone, a lesson, a realization? An action that was intentionally taken to support or shift our creative practice?

How might our reflection on our work change if we didn’t measure value in “progress” or “production,” but in a deepening of our relationship to Creativity herself?

And so here, on my birthday weekend, I want to celebrate what I personally consider to be my 5 major creative accomplishments of the last year — and invite you to do the same in the comments.

In no particular order…

let’s pretend we’re having a nice dinner together and sharing what we did this year // photo by my love meg jones wall of 3am.tarot

1. I actually rested this summer after a major surgery.

I had a hysterectomy this summer that I actually took time off for. I am counting this as my primary win of the year — and there’s a reason.

Those of you who have been reading for a while know that this was my second major abdominal/pelvic surgery in the last two years. My appendix burst in December 2021, and I was hospitalized for several weeks while they tried to control the infection and prevent sepsis (months later, I had the actual appendectomy so they could take out the scraggly little fucker). But that initial hospitalization happened the week my final edits for my first book Heretic were due. Nightmare!

In spite of my editor, my agent, my partner, and my writers’ group — people intimate with my creative process — all telling me TO REST FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, PRIORITIZE YOUR HEALTH JEANNA THE BOOK CAN WAIT, I still got back to the book as soon as was humanly possible. Internalized capitalism is a bitch. And the way I know I went back to work too soon is that I cannot actually remember doing that last push of Heretic edits. I just know that when I sent those edits to my editor Jenny [Xu, now at Atria], she was basically like, what the fuck is this why have you been working on the book I told you to rest silly goose. The edits were good, apparently, but at what cost?

That experience ultimately heralded a significant transformation in my creative process. Those months have directly informed not only how I currently work, but also how (and what) I teach.

This is to say, when my hysterectomy finally got scheduled this summer, I knew I was going to take time off. Real time off. Like at least four full weeks time off. As a self-employed person, it was a big financial strain, but I preferred the fiscal cost to a long-term physical one. Giving my body the time and space it so desperately needed to recover was necessary. And I firmly believe that I’ve only been able to come back with such a vengeance because I didn’t push too hard or too soon.

Rest — and not feeling guilty about rest — is one of my major creative wins of the year.

2. I closed the door on academia for good — in the best way.

I was invited back to teach memoir as a Visiting Writer at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa this summer. Cornell is my alma mater, Iowa is my home state, and it was a full circle moment in so many ways. And there were many highs: I got so much time with my dear friend

lyz

and got to see relatives I haven’t seen in an age. Meg and I made new queer tarot friends in Iowa City. There were house parties and backyard campfires. We spent one memorable evening traipsing through an enormous cemetery under the stars. I am always going to cherish that month — and especially the fact that Meg was there, too, that she got to so fully experience the place that is the root of my heart.

And also.

i took a picture almost exactly like this when i first visited cornell as a prospective student at 18; it was so wild to be back a whole lifetime later, at 36

I hadn’t realized, as we got ready to move out to Iowa for an entire month, that I still had some unanswered questions around academia. But of course I did. Teaching is the one thing I truly loved in my PhD program. I’ve long been wistfully envious of friends and colleagues who landed university jobs. I’ve daydreamed about getting a 1-1 or 2-2 lectureship schedule in a creative writing department at a university. Maybe after my second book, I can actually apply for those, I’ve told myself.

But the biggest lesson from my time in Iowa was that academia is no longer for me. It was an unexpected but bone-deep confirmation.

I love teaching, true. But as I was buried under grading, I realized that my last few years teaching what are essentially continuing education classes around astrology, creative writing, and publishing have broken me — in the best way. These days, I’m used to teaching people who actively want to be there. Who are desperate to find time to write. Who have a load of life experience under their belt and want to use it. I’m used to teaching and holding space for writers who want to show up to the work.

And, bless, but that is not most undergraduates — however smart, however talented.

What a valuable confirmation of my life’s current direction. And how freeing, to release such a major What if? of my life to the wind.

3. I embraced collaboration — a style of working that is not my comfort zone.

Who all here is a Saturnian, Type A oldest daughter? If there’s anything I know about us, it’s that we are used to carrying the group project on our back. And if I learned anything early in life, it was that I was the only one I could trust to get the job done.

But I’m in my late 30s now, and y’all: that is a very exhausting way to live.

This year broke the dam of my resistance to collaboration with the birth of several major, long-term shared visions with people I dearly love. For the New Moon in Sagittarius this year, I wrote at length about my journey to collaboration with my love Meg Jones Wall of 3am.tarot (with our forthcoming 6-month container, The Grove),

Over the years, I have been the one who chafed at merging our professional work. I’m the one who chafes at intimacy, period; perhaps unsurprising, given that I am a child of “no is a complete sentence” Saturn and my love is a child of “but what if this other thing!” Mercury. My independence — from my abusive ex-husband, from relationships with women who didn’t understand my creative work, from my mother’s continued desire for enmeshment — felt sacrosanct, like a fortress I had to vigilantly guard, else I’d fall into old, unhealthy patterns. And so I was the one who, early on in our relationship, told Meg, no, we aren’t going to live together and I never want to get married again and I want to keep our professional lives entirely separate. Meg, both a wildly open-minded Gemini Rising and an I-can-wait-anyone-out patient Scorpio, just said of course, my love to all of it.

We also embarked on the major collaboration that is the podcast Call Your Coven with our dear friend

Rebecca Scolnick

; we are currently on hiatus but will be returning with a January 2025 forecast!

Where there is trust and creative intimacy, there is the makings of a strong foundation.

4. I got 5 new tattoos.

Because I’m so used to being around tattooed queers, I don’t perceive myself as being heavily tattooed. But compared to the general public, I am definitely in that category. I have one of my hands done, for chrissake.

Why do I think about tattoos as being a creative accomplishment, when it’s not art that I personally made? Because my body is an art project that I am perpetually making in my own image. When I have tattoos I love, I feel more confident and more comfortable in my own skin. Tattoos are both honored reflections of my former selves as well as manifestations of my Favorite Future Self.

Getting tattooed helps me reclaim my body (from my family, from Christianity, from varied societal -isms), and also helps me better love and appreciate the parts of myself I struggle with. The experience — whether I am deep breathing through a 5-hour hand tat or shooting the shit about Making Art in NYC during the third session of a major arm piece — is almost spiritual. No, fuck it. It is spiritual. Desire made manifest. The internal conception of self made visible on the skin.

I also view my tattoos as a collaboration, and so trust and creative intimacy are key here. Every person who gets tattooed is different, but I personally like to develop long-term relationships with artists. I’ve been getting work from Brian Steffey at Fleur Noire for almost six years now; at this point, Meg and most of my friends have been tattooed by him, too.

stencil laid for Hand Tat 2025

I’m also three (3) tattoos into working with Jes Valentine, founder of Haven, whose neo-traditional girly-pop bubblegum ladyheads make my Barbie heart sing. Working with tattoo artists I trust, who are putting something so permanently and visibly on my body, has hugely impacted my own understanding of what it is to collaborate and co-create.

5. I finished a book proposal for new non-fiction, and my agent and I will be going out on submission with it after the holidays.

Because sometimes, creative accomplishments do look traditional, took MANY years to come to fruition, and should be celebrated. The book obviously hasn’t sold yet, but I have faith that it will find its people. After all… the topic of said project has already found its people here in this newsletter.

More on that front soon. <3

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The project of my life — that is reflected in this nearly 6-year-old newsletter — is bridging the gap between spiritual practices and creative living.

I so firmly, absolutely believe that Creativity wants to collaborate with us.

That Creativity does not have to be “productive” within a capitalist system to be good or even — dare I say it — to be useful.

That Creativity comes in seasons, and that each of those seasons, whether a flourishing spring or a quiet winter, has something to teach us.

That waiting for inspiration to strike is like waiting for a stranger to knock on your door and ask you on a date. You’ve got to show up, be present, and deliberately engage (whether through inputs or outputs) to deepen the relationship, and the intimacy therein.

The older I get, the more I write, the more I understand that most of my creative growth is in the journey. In the process. In the messy middle. There, in the tangled web of the second act, or the next sample chapter of the book proposal, is where I screw my courage to the sticking place. Out of that difficulty comes a deepened trust in my creative process. A reminder that this is where artistry develops, like a carrot underground.

I’m so, so grateful to be in relationship with Creativity. And I am also, every day (but especially here at the end of year, when I am in my reflective birthday season), appreciative of you, those readers who are still here, for letting me share my own journey with you. Thank you for allowing me into your inbox.

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What are your creative accomplishments of 2024 — traditional and otherwise? Share with the class!