My wishes for the coming year
You are not resilient for life, at each stage of your life, everything is back on the table and now it's up to you...in 2023.
Resilience is not granted for life, even though we are trained and familiar with it. We must constantly cultivate our desire to play, to live and sometimes, to change levels.
As the year draws to a close, let us look back with indulgence at our past days: each one has been an adventure in itself and a foundation for the day ahead.
Without taking myself for "the late Queen", 2022 will remain in the Pantheon of my "annus horribilis*".
2022 is also one of those pivotal years that we may later recognize as pivotal moments, the end of an era, times of painful loss, but also times of opening up to possibilities we did not know existed.
2022 was a brutal year for the world, where war came closer, the elements got angrier, and climatic, economic, and geopolitical threats became visible and concrete, instead of just looming like distant bogeymen.
In the world of symbols, the events have multiplied, each one more burdensome than the last, and emotional and physical fatigue seizes us all at times.
We are the mirror of the world, which is nothing but an illustration of our inner torments.
At least we think so, without drawing any lesson, nor simply remembering the other disturbing years that have passed, the year 1000, the year 2000, Y2K as we used to say, and all that other cursed years may have carried in the collective imagination.
Collective hysteria, probably, but not only, the threats on the Living are also real.
How real are, for each of us, the dramas that have marked our personal lives and that make us attach to certain dates or times weights or curses: the time of an accident, of a bad weather, of an illness, of mourning, of a loss of job, of a heartache, of a betrayal, of an abandonment, the list is long and personal.
Is it a time of the worst, followed by a rebirth?
I thought my pivotal year was 2014 with my surgical accident*, leaving me a paraplegic, the Paris attacks and the loss of loved ones and a multitude of sorrows.
2020 with Covid brought me back to a more lucid state. The worst is never certain, they say ironically.
Thus 2022 which, I confess to you, was a tsunami with successive and violent waves, of which I will not dwell on the details, but which cumulated all that can destroy the joy of living, even if it is rooted in the body like mine.
If for many of these storms, I owed them to myself or I am responsible for them, others came to land on me without warning: change of place, change of life, break-up, separation, moving in, loss of my family and social references, loss of my environment and of my hard and long conceived and built goods, loss of identity, questioning, abandonment by close friends, betrayals, covid - not to deviate -, fires in my new place of life, and the drama of two ends of life of people I deeply loved, the accompaniment until her last breath of one of them. Extreme fatigue and wear and tear on my being.
And yet I say it again, most of these storms I owed to myself, I owed them to myself.
Let me explain.
This famous resilience that I am credited with - which I still don't know if it is the gift of a divine magnanimous, or just one of the two sides of the medal of my character - obstinacy and stubbornness on the one hand, to the point of dying, which are transformed into strength and perseverance on the other hand, to finally Live, is not delivered with a lifetime certificate. It requires not letting your guard down and not taking everything for granted forever.
My famous character, which was so often accompanied by denial of obvious problems, by refusal to lose or to open my eyes, by the desire not to bend, by the refusal to admit error or to break a perilous commitment, by the violence I did to myself in order not to let go of what was obviously not good for me, by what seemed to be convincing me of my omnipotence matched by the fear of disappointing or hurting others, my character is not without vulnerability and fragility either.
In short, a whole pathos that takes its time to unravel.
Yes, there was certainly a day in late 2014 when a part of me, under the influence of a major life history change, was profoundly transformed or rather changed trajectory.
In 2014, I became a paraplegic and some of my false certainty crumbled. I thought I had faced the ultimate transformation in my existence. I had only opened a can of worms.
In 2017 and until 2020, I was born as a second time, I had this chance. I revealed myself as a writer and discovered my deep nature, linked to writing, a buried childhood desire, and which awoke alive and lively, taking me into another mobility of my being, and demanding from him and from me to surrender to what comes from I don't know where and animates me. I recognized myself there without imagining then that it was only the beginning of a long journey towards the unknown and an unheard of field of possibilities certainly, but also the benevolent tyranny of these possibilities.
Which would lead me to have to submit and surrender to the demands of what I write, to manifest myself, to align myself with it. By opening up to what I did not even imagine, by this choice choice to finally respect and love myself and to reveal myself to myself and the world as such.
And to live beyond what I imagined possible, what society and its norms allowed me to dare, with this triple presupposed disadvantage: Female, So-called "Senior" and 80% Disabled, even if my disability is sometimes invisible. Who became a public woman with a TEDx* viewed by more than two million people.
In 2022, I declared my Manifesto in a book with the title: "Our storms are as high as our dreams, manifesto for not missing out on your life*". Audacity of an unconscious or innocence of a reckless person?
In the end, choosing such a title is like provoking fate.
When you write a Manifesto, it is anything but trivial.
A Manifesto must be palpable and notorious, incarnated, in the flesh. The first transformation, incarnation of a manifesto, is its author.
It starts with me. By transforming what can no longer be. In me. What I owe myself. To become the one I manifest through my words and my writings. I owe it to myself, I oblige myself.
To present myself to the world. In my authenticity.
It is anything but comfortable, but it is vital. It's a compelling truth: I can't be anyone else but who I am. I can't be Wonderwoman anymore.
"Our path is personal and unique, intimate, but also made up of such similar and connected experiences.
We trample them with our feet successively, like ripe grapes in our lifetime, all of us, to extract the must, to elaborate our wine, our grand cru."
The life of each of us is not determined in advance, it is written differently every day and is enriched by the experience of the day before.
There are bridges between us, interactions that mean that the transformation of some can promote the transformation of others.
However, the life of each of us is the unique Manifesto of each of us.
Let me talk to you again about writing, as a metaphor, about my writing that transforms me and acts on me
When I write, I let a space open up in me, a space that is otherwise hidden, but infinite, from which words and ideas that have always filled my being spring. But that I am unable to express before they invade my fingers. Words that are universal and authentic. And in this kind of trance, my fingers follow a part of me that directs them firmly to the letters. They spill out onto the paper.
I am above all a writer, deeply, viscerally. I want to write: it is my way of life, even in the very recent "tsunamis" of this year 2022, which has also seen moments of dazzling happiness. This Manifesto published in August 2022, the birth of a child, new and benevolent meetings. 2022 has been "horribilis" only because I am still unaware of its true purpose and the gifts hidden from my still too linear mind. And this, these paradoxes of life, I now see them clearly.
This path, writing, is also my resurrection. My change of "level" is done with writing.
It is my path that writes me, my writing that structures my life.
I didn't expect it, but what I write now "forces" me: to live consistent with what I've written. To make decisions that I feared or did not allow myself to make. And some of them have amplified the violence of what I experienced in 2022 without my being able to escape it.
Writing has a price! It leads me, once the words are assembled, coming from the deepest and most authentic part of me, to align my life with what I pose as a Manifesto.
Literature, all books, testimonies, manifestos or novels, demonstrate our absolute human capacity to see further, bigger than ourselves. To see differently, to see better, to feel, to sense something else, to discover, to imagine, to develop, to transform. This is what all those who write probably share.
But this possibility of seeing "bigger than oneself" is not exclusive to literary creation: it is also offered and accessible to everyone, writer or not, reader or spectator, when the time comes to find and rediscover "who I am" fully.
Illustration of this fluid and liberated way in which a transformation of oneself towards "greater than oneself" can be self-generated, impose itself on our beings.
When the title of a book has announced the verb, of which the mind is not yet aware. In an obviousness which passes by the feeling of the body, which never lies, and carries all.
So what to wish for 2023 :
To manifest ourselves again and whatever the cost, whatever the risks and bad weather, because to manifest is to live, elsewhere than in the anaesthesia of a absorbent cotton. It is to stop surviving or underliving and above all, to truly incarnate.
It is to finally open your eyes well beyond yourself, to unfocus, to widen your vision, to unfocus.
To open our eyes to our personal history, in depth.
To leave the world of clichés, to let go of cosmetics, superficiality, social appearances, to empty the excess, to sort and clean, to remove masks, to purify oneself, to return to one's intimate base.
Open your eyes to the unknown and meet it: to differences - gender, age, personal situation, disability, illness, culture.
And remove the cloaks of invisibility that society places on all those who do not present themselves "as they should", in the dictatorship of the agreed norm.
Opening my eyes forces me to be who I am, opening your eyes forces you to be.
And with your eyes open, you don't have to wonder anymore because the light floods you and inspires you! With your eyes open, your heart will open.
No effort, when it's right
If not to take care of myself, of my fears, without playing the braggart.
Yes, a child in me is still terrified.
Yes, a memory in me remembers a trauma.
Yes, a loyalty in me is reluctant to open up.
Yes, a betrayal, a deception is still alive.
A mourning is to be finished.
Let's respect ce respect this part of us, visit our shadows, soothe ourselves!
Let us not impose on ourselves what we would not want to be imposed on us.
Our shadows are one side of our light. Our fears, the reflection of our audacity, the two sides of the same coin.
Let us accept our vulnerability, our imperfection.
And sometimes the ordeal that we did not expect or no longer expect, will come later or not, fertilize something, let's accept the mourning and also the loss, the losses, our upheavals chosen or not. Difficult choices.
I am no longer in control, but I am in control of my choices.
Everything is uncertain, therefore everything is possible on the chessboard of life, let's do it!
Chaos is fertile: our chaos, our mistakes, our defeats are only the source, sometimes painful, of our self-knowledge.
Chaos carries within it our secret dreams, deep in our heart, lurking, ready to bloom. It is also the source of the discovery of all our possibilities and our ignored dreams.
I don't wish you comfort for 2023, as you can imagine, but I wish us a brainstorming session, an upheaval of the world, and hidden treasures for sure.
And even more of the unexpected and the incredible in our lives.
Happy New Year.
Nadalette