The longest month is behind us: January. What lingers, though, is everything it carried with it. I know most of us are still reeling from the tragedies that unfolded and the ones that continue to hover in our peripheral vision. I’ve found myself exhaling hard most mornings, making peace with the state of things while holding one question close: how do we defend our freedom?

We need art. We need better headspace.

Freedom shows up in many forms for me right now. I’ve been thinking about this a lot as I work less for others and more for myself. How did I get so lucky? For years, I pushed that possibility aside, afraid that if I didn’t grind constantly, I’d be squandering my future. Meanwhile, others are fighting so we can continue to have freedom at all. Freedom to access healthcare. To learn. To create. And still, it often feels like they don’t want us creating. They want us compliant. Consuming.

Back to January. I don’t want to say it set the tone for the year. We still have every opportunity to shift our reality. It will take work. It will take conflict. But if more of us share our differences and find common ground, maybe peace and love don’t feel so unreachable.

January has been a hibernation month for me. My partner spent much of it in Houston visiting family, which was emotionally heavy for him in its own way. I’ve been tucked away in the woods, house-sitting, keeping quiet company with the animals. The stillness has been grounding.

What I noticed, once I settled into the rhythm of it, was how necessary it felt to slow down and make room for this new sense of self and place. I disconnected from several companies tied to ICE. I’m over a year into gutting my Amazon Prime account, something that felt right long before the latest wave of corporate layoffs. In a small town, voting with your dollars matters. The more people see how corporations and politics intertwine, maybe more of us will opt out where we can.

The biggest shift in my daily reality came when I permanently deleted several social media accounts I’d held for years. I made the Meta exodus. Facebook. Instagram. Twitter, which I will always call Twitter. After managing social media professionally, I finally asked myself: do I even like this? Or am I just doing it because it pays? And if I’m not doing it for work, why am I doing it at all?

The peace I’ve felt this past week has been immense. I’m writing more deeply. Thinking more clearly. January, in many ways, became my creative re-entry point.

“Curiouser and curiouser.”

Somewhere in all of this, I finally picked up The Artist’s Way, which had been sitting untouched on my shelf for months. I committed to the morning pages. Three longhand pages each day, clearing out the mental clutter. I’m committing to weekly Artist Dates. Time with my creative inner child, non-negotiable. Writing. Music. Choreography. Jewelry-making for my shop.

Anything that puts me back in practice.

Along with the Artist’s Way, I also left the thrift store with The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom by Don Miguel Ruiz. Finding those two books at the same time was like the universe saying a deep personal discourse was about to unfold… I just had to make the time to discover it.

As February arrives, I don’t feel fixed. I don’t feel resolved. But I do feel steadier. Quieter. More curious. And right now, that feels like enough.