It’s 11:31 p.m. The first day of 2024 is coming to an end.

I am sitting in front of a crackling fire and can hear my daughter laughing upstairs with her best friend. My son is in the kitchen, drinking hot chocolate and looking at his phone. My husband is watching an unscripted Discovery Channel show about people who live in a remote area of Alaska. The name of the show is called Yukon Men, but I distinctly hear a woman’s voice telling the camera, “This is all we got, so we’ll have to make it work.” (According to Wikipedia, the show is centered on two prominent themes: community and survival. I wonder if the producers, executives who decided to call the show “Yukon Men,” have ever met any women because community and survival are kind of our thing.)

I like spending the first day of the year doing what I want most in the New Year. For the first day of 2024, I spent the morning and early afternoon refilling my coffee cup in between reading a memoir and journaling. I hiked through the woods and drank more coffee. I napped. I got in the hot tub with my daughter and we talked about our new year’s resolutions. She wants to stop biting her nails. I want to write more.

Writing is always part of my New Year’s resolutions. Commit to a daily writing practice. Finish my WIP. Pitch more stories, land more bylines. Blog. As the head of content for a PR agency, I get to write everyday, but very little of my professional writing is mine. I write other people’s stories and help them craft narratives about their business.

This year, I am writing more of my own stories …and I have so many to tell.

Since the last time I blogged, I quit freelancing and took a full-time role with the second largest software company in the world. I received a breast cancer diagnosis, watched my daughter graduate from high school and underwent a nipple-sparing bilateral mastectomy in the span of three months. While on medical leave, I moved my daughter into her college dorm, was laid off by the second largest software company in the world, and started a dream job two weeks after my lay-off date.

I underwent reconstructive surgery, and then another one, and then three more. I entered menopause. I turned 50 (FIFTY! It still feels weird to say).

I spent a week at a writing workshop led by a writer whose books I re-read more than any other writer. In a room full of thirty people, I sat next to a woman physician from Cleveland. During the first morning of the workshop, we partner up and she reads a piece I’m working on that includes details from my mastectomy. On our way to the cafeteria for lunch, she tells me that she spent time working alongside—and is now friends with—the surgeon who invented the nipple-sparing, bilateral mastectomy. The entire week felt cosmic.

It just occurred to me that I want that too in the New Year. I want more moments that feel cosmic to the core. I want serendipitous run-ins with longtime friends and crazy good deja vu with all new acquaintances.

It’s been my experience that the fastest way for me to secure all of this—more mornings spent reading and journaling, more hikes in the woods, more time talking about the future with my kids, more cosmic moments—is by writing. Putting in the work to conjure up all the things, even the things that sound impossible at first.

So, here I am, two years, five months and twelve days since my last blog post, putting in the work. It’s now past midnight. The first day of the year is complete and I spent it doing all the things I wanted with the people I love most in the world. Conjuring up cosmic moments.