The Jar. Reimagined.

Towards the end of last year, when the clouds began to dissipate, I sat cross legged in a pitch black bedroom with just the light of the moon as guidance, and I looked through images and videos saved to my phone from the year. It felt as if the hardness of that period had overshadowed the pockets of joy I had experienced. I’m not sure whether it was the loss and subsequent grief, or whether it was the heartbreak and residual anger, or even having to reluctantly leave my day job and the raw disappointment that came with it, or perhaps maybe it was my thirtieth birthday in which I felt a type of loneliness I had never felt before. I suppose it was a mixture of all of that and more, and each negative emotion stuck to me like sticky black tar, it enveloped me and inside I felt myself becoming more and more resentful and affronted. I became uptight, irate and wanted to spend most of my time alone. Time passed and the feelings lifted, the sorrow fell off of me in big globs to the floor and I was left feeling like I was alive but not quite living but at least I felt somewhat free.

I was scrolling on instagram one evening and saw a video of a couple writing down wins in their relationship, and placing them into a kilner jar so that they would be able to pick out those bits of paper when they were feeling bothered by each other and remember their love, and I was reminded of a piece of writing I published a few year back called The Jar. I had watched a film that encouraged me to want to make a note of all the good things that were happening in my life. Nowadays I think we’d call it a gratitude journal but I did just that and I found unparalleled joy in going back over all the seemingly fleeting moments of happiness I had felt that year – I realised that so often we forget the good in the storm of the bad.

And so at the start of January I dusted off a jar I had wanted to use for pickled onions (I’m looking at you Charlotte Jacklin) and I found myself cross legged again, this time bathed in the luminescence of a beautiful winters morning. I ripped some paper out of an old notebook and I wrote the first good thing that came to my head “Landed a job as an Architect at an AJ100 practice”, and I kept going, “Signed to new management”, “Trip to Paris booked”, “Hit 1k on Tiktok” and it felt like I couldn’t stop and then I realised all of this happened just in January and I thought – how beautiful it is to sit and recognise the good, and it also positioned my heart in a space where I’m open to recieveing – what is to come, without being scared of the future. I’m hoping that at the end of the year it will be filled to the brim with odd bits of paper containing scribbles of joyous moments and things. When things haven’t quite gone to plan in life, or we’ve experienced tragedy or even a spate of bad luck, it can often feel as if that’s the trajectory we’ll be on forever and we can then begin to hold onto those feelings as they feel like home – consistent, expected, comfortable. But I’ve found that the joy in life is leaning into the unexpected, respecting those very valid feelings but not caging them, letting them flow freely and accepting the next wash of emotions as things chop and change.

This is a short and sweet piece as I’m a little under the weather but consistency is consistency and I’m trying to let loose a little and avoid chasing what I would consider perfection and instead – just be.