“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” – Seneca

I love clean slates. New year, new quarter, new month. New job. New Beginnings. Any of it. All of it. There is something truly poetic about the symmetry of a new beginning. The possibility of it too. It’s delicious.

But what’s funny is that I’ve never put much stock into how a new beginning comes about. I’m a hypocrite. I ignore all the symmetry about it. I celebrate the birth of the new slates where I had zero participation in the laboring.

I celebrate the get-off-scot-free-clean slate. I like the get-off-scot-free-clean slate.

The thing is though… I truly am ignoring half the equation. I’m celebrating the flow and ignoring the ebb, when in reality the momentum is in the wave itself.

So that’s what I’m doing here – celebrating the end so that I can savor the beginning.

I like to say that I’ve been writing since before I could write. Rewind my life back to 5 years old and I’m sitting on the carpet in Mom’s bedroom, brushing my freshly washed hair and reciting the next chapter of my story into the tape recorder she bought me.

And I never stopped.

In all the beginnings, all the endings, all the middle-ings. I wrote. I write. I will write.

So there’s a sense of guilt that crops up when I start this blog at 31 years old. After all, I’ve been writing for 26 years. Where has this been all that time?

I’ll keep the thoughts there, because they’re real and human and even if I can talk myself out of them, I still feel them somewhere in my gut.

This time though, I feel the ending in the beginning like two sides of a quilt. If I tried to separate them, I’d unravel the whole of it.

Last month, I said goodbye to Lux. To the Sound. To Talmarav and Wren and Smith and Cove and the Kings, the Keepers, and all their secrets. I spent nine years with her, with Lux. I know her like I know myself. I could count her breaths for you without having to listen for her exhales. But the thing of it was, I stopped seeing Lux and started seeing words on a page. I got so lost in the Process of it all that I forgot why her story mattered to begin with. And so I did the work – I went back to the beginning, her beginning. I gut-checked. And her story is still real, still beautiful. Still important.

But the thing I never realized, was that the message I so desperately wanted to shout into the story void by writing her book, mattered most to me.

I needed to hear her story.

I needed to feel it, bleed with it. Reel and break and learn from it. I am the one person whose life it was destined to change. And, oh, how it did.

So, I let go. I unclenched my white-knuckle grip and let her be. I stopped picking her apart because her job was done. Tenfold.

And today, now, aswespeak, I am in the Beginning again. And it’s far greater than any clean slate I’ve ever known.