Year in Review: 2024

If 2023 was a year defined for me by art, then 2024 was defined by songs. In her book This is What is Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You, Susan Rogers argues that people listen to music for at least one of eight reasons, and mine is decidedly lyrics. But as my writer friend pointed out when he was reading a draft of my memoir, which contains a lot of writing about music, “Lyrics fall flat when there’s no accompanying music.” So if you’d like to listen to the songs that defined the months that made up 2024: you can hear a snippet of each throughout this blog post, or here’s a full playlist:

I want to share how music brought me joy, pain, release, euphoria, sadness, and moved me through this time of life. Because grief is not linear, (I also don’t believe time is linear but that’s a topic for another time) the year 2024 wasn’t a neat little month-by-month forward march away from the grief of losing a long relationship and the life abroad that I loved. There were plenty of times in this past year where it felt so much like I’d moved on and whoosh, down the chute and I had to heave myself back up the ladder. A new month would come and I’d listen to a song on repeat, wearing out the proverbial vinyl, feeling like the song was written just for me.

January

I rang in the new year with a pre-party at a good friend’s house where I tried to create a new tradition of writing shitty things from the year before on a potato and then throwing the potato outside to rot. But I probably drank too much too fast and forgot about the new tradition and the massive potato I’d brought ended up rotting on my friend’s counter. This was the month where my friend and former colleague from the U.S. Embassy Algiers moved to DC and I was there with a big “Welcome to America” sign at the airport. I’ve loved being his guide for American culture over this past year, which harkened back to the job I had in Algeria, which was largely about explaining American culture to Algerians.

New thing I tried: Online dating. I joined Hinge for a few days, I got a sore wrist from so much swiping and texting. I went on three dates with three men in 24 hours. One was fun. Two were rote and I bristled at responding to “What is your top political issue?” right off the bat. I decided that I’m outgoing enough and I go out a lot and I prefer meeting men IRL. I deleted the app.

Best show: Swept Away at Arena Stage in DC, which is seafaring musical based on Avett Brothers songs. I held hands with Jess, who officiated my wedding, while they sang Swept Away, the song I walked down the aisle to in 2012. It was an excellent show, mostly because of the lead performance by John Gallagher Jr. And because this is DC and not Broadway, I waited for him after the show to tell him that his performance was the single most believable stage performance I’ve ever seen. Also invited him to karaoke across the street, which he declined.

Song that defined the month: I Lied by Lord Huron with Allison Ponthier. This is a duet where both a man and a woman are apologizing for their marriage vows turning out to be lies. Oof.

February

Two friends and I had a wildly fun jaunt to New York City, eating Georgian food, going to food markets, shopping. From there, I got myself to the Newark airport and missed my flight to the Dominican Republican, momentarily entering a state of despair in which I questioned my ability to travel alone. Then I pulled into my reserve of wits and got myself on a later flight to a different part of the DR and didn’t miss even a minute of my yoga retreat with my favorite yoga teacher. The retreat began with staring into a stranger’s eyes for three full minutes (nearly impossible) and ended with me having many revelations, including forgiving my ex for ending our marriage. It was a profound trip, to say the very least. I landed back in NYC after four days in the tropics and the city felt so cold, gritty, and isolating. Which was a shock because I half expected to feel that New York is the place for me, what with my big city sensibility and international flair. I had a petite crisis about where I belonged, but I knew that New York wasn’t it.

In mid-February, after a disappointing night in DC, I wrote in my journal “Another night in a town I’m pretty certain I don’t belong in, not with Paris right there, across the Atlantic.” I also had another crisis in February where I was, perhaps for the first time in my life, extremely self-conscious of my outgoing personality, my “powers of perception”, and how I come across to others and I found myself trying to be smaller, less noticeable.

New thing I tried: Forgiveness! Does wonders for your mental health, I’ll tell you.

The book that changed everything: Annie Ernaux’s Getting Lost. This account of Ernaux’s love affair with a Soviet diplomat blew me away for its immediacy and honesty and because I was also having a steamy lil something something that was both life affirming and uncomfortably all-encompassing and emotionally draining. Ernaux published a fictionalized version of the affair and a few years later came across her journal from this time of her life and realized the journal was much more honest than her novel. Getting Lost gave me confidence to call what I was writing a memoir.

Best show: I don’t think I saw any live music in February, but the Simone Leigh sculpture exhibit at the Hirshhorn got me thinking all year about the human form as a jug-like vessel and the innate power we have for change based on what we do with both our form and our humanity.

Song that defined the month: Phoebe Bridgers singing “I buried a hatchet/it’s coming up lavender/the future is unwritten/the past is a corridor” in Smoke Signals.

March

This was the month that I decided I’d move into my current apartment: A gorgeous, large, window-filled two-bedroom in a historic apartment building in a stately yet lively part of DC. Knowing that I’d be leaving the sad attic apartment and living in my dream apartment brought a new sense of calm. And those feeling of intense self-consciousness subsided and I was back to embracing the bigger parts of my personality as well as my closet full of patterns. In fact, I put on one of these patternful outfits for one of my favorite events in the city – the National Gallery of Art’s monthly party – and went by myself. I was moved by seeing a painting of which I have a print hanging in my apartment – Henri Toulouse Lautrec’s “A Corner of the Moulin de la Galette”. In it, a woman is having a drink by herself at a cafe. Never mind no one looks very happy in this painting. This was the start of me doing many, many things solo including bars, concerts, a trip.

The movie that changed everything: One night in my attic apartment, I watched Poor Things and was rapt watching Emma Stone’s character answer the question “What if a woman came into her sexuality completely unaware of any societal expectations?” In the final scene, the protagonist is showed contentedly reading a book whilst sipping a martini and as I finished off the final briny sips of my own martini, I asked myself isn’t reading and drinking a martini alone on a sunny day a picture of my own happiness?

Best show: I saw the Lehmen Brother’s trilogy at the Shakespeare Theater in DC, which is three actors playing countless characters and recounting an immigrant family’s multi-generational story (leading up to the collapse of the Lehman Brothers in 2008). It made me think a lot about the power we all have to craft our own narratives. We do have control of our own stories, all of us, but especially those of us who are good storytellers. Also, a Grouplove concert at the 9:30 Club was just the feel-good crowd dancing I craved.

Song that defined the month: Frazey Ford singing “‘I’m sorry that you don’t like your life/but I’ve fought for my own victories and for the beauty in my life. My joy, my joy, my joy takes nothing from you” in Done.

April

Early April in DC was lovely: warm weather, live music, more than one dancefloor kiss, a lot of interior design work, that day where we all put on eclipse glasses and laid in the grass and the wonderful phrase “path of totality”. In mid-April, I flew to Pittsburgh where a good friend’s son had just been born via surrogate and together the three of us – him, his baby, and me – flew to my friend’s home in Los Angeles where I stayed and did what I could to help him with those disorientating early days of parenthood. It was wonderful to see someone I’m close with get something he wanted so much and to see the start of the his life as a dad. During a sunny day in his kitchen bopping around with his baby, I felt peaceful about the life I’d be returning to in DC. Still, on the last day of April as I packed up my boxes in the attic apartment – the first time in 12 years that the State Department had not organized my move – I lost it. For more than a decade, so many decisions were made for me: Which country I’d move to, which apartment I’d live in, which health insurance plan I’d have. And suddenly I was responsible for making all the decisions in my life.

Best line: My mom and I tend to watch an old movie together each time I’m back home in Michigan and in early April we watched Now Voyager. When Bette Davis’s controlling mother is chastising her for turning down a marriage with a rich man, the mother says “What do you intend to do with your life?” And Bette Davis says “Get a cat and a parrot and live alone in single blessedness.” So many times in this month and then later in the year I’d hear the phrase “single blessedness” and think of my independence as a gift.

Song that defined the month: Aaron Espe’s Making All Things New.

May

I moved into my dream apartment on the first day of May. After the movers left, I almost had a big cry out of gratefulness but had to pull it together because Jess stopped by with food and champagne and we toasted and I ran off to a concert and dance and sang and drank and returned home to a place that was all mine. The beginning of the month was a never ending barrage of errands. Six trips to the DMV to get a zoned parking sticker for my street, trying to re-build a shelf I once loved, and then junking it and realizing that some things, once broken, cannot be repaired. I turned 40 in May and planned a few days of “things Emily likes to do in DC” themed activities, some of which I was in a great mental state for and some of which I was not. The night of my actual birthday, I left a concert in tears and thought about how each success seemed to be just a partial success and everything seemed hard. Shortly, after, I hung all the art in my apartment and it made the place home. At the end of the month, I departed for Italy with my friend Brandi and even as I left, I looked forward to returning to my apartment.

Word of the month (nay, year!): In May, I got my first tattoo, cursive text that says “create” on my inner forearm. It’s my credo: To create art, connections, the life I want… etc etc etc.

Song that Defined the Month: Ways to Go by Grouplove. Because even though I moved into my dream apartment and was a good way toward creating the life I want, I realized I still need to figure a lot of things out.

June

In early June, was traipsing around southern Italy with Brandi, soaking up views of stunning rocky cliffs in the Amalfi Coast, walking up a lot of stairs, eating seafood pasta, and drinking Aperol spritzes. It’s a stunningly pretty place that makes you feel beautiful when you’re there. Aside from the fact that I was sick for much of the trip, it was wonderful. And it again gave me confidence that a life of traveling and experiencing the world wasn’t tied to my marriage. It is still available to me.

Returning to DC, I felt so comforted by my apartment. But it was an emotional month. So many decisions to be made on my own. A guy I was becoming close with stopped talking to me with no explanation. I was broaching what a friendship would look like with my ex. My elderly cat Gus moved in with me, after being apart for him for a year but I wasn’t sure how much longer he’d make it. I went to an Alanis Morrisette concert and unabashedly bawled my eyes out right when she took the stage, just totally overcome by her presence (there’s a reason she played God in Dogma!) and also feeling the presence of a childhood friend who is no longer living but who loved Alanis. Cried and sang with my hands above my head as if I was at a church revival over the true genius that is the song Thank You which thanks the hard things in life for what they gave us. Thank you disillusionment? Come onnnnn.

Favorite new art: I brought back from Italy a Moor’s head vase, as I fell in love with the tale that a woman, scorned by her lover, a Moor, chopped off his head and planted basil it. I set this head next to a much larger man’s head I have, a fellow I call Fritz, and it makes for a quirky vignette and likely the start of a new collection.

Song that defined the month: Thank You. And Thank you Alanis, you’re a gift to the world.

July

A few weeks before, I’d finished writing the first draft of my memoir, which started as the diary I kept in the one year after my husband left me. I’m extremely proud of what I wrote. And the writing of it got me a good way through my grief and certainly helped me process. The only way is through! I went a few weeks without writing about my daily existence and I suffered. I opened up a fresh Google Doc, titled it “The New” and started writing again in mid-July. It’s how I develop ideas, recognize patterns, have epiphanies. I need it. In late July, I went to stay with a writer friend at her oceanside home in Maine and took at look at my memoir with fresh eyes and started the editing process. It was a good creative trip but also I enjoyed kayaking on the ocean, hiking, and being out of DC during the muggy doldrums of mid-summer.

Favorite new art: I bought a vibrantly colored painting by a local artist Heather Jones titled “A Moment of Self-Possession” that looks either like an arched doorway (love me an arch) or a woman’s shoulder, depending on your perspective.

Song that defined the month: It was the dead of summer, there were a couple of men to come out of the woodwork in this month, a first date with another, the vague promise of future romance, and the night my friend Colby and I got on stage at a “Broadway rave” and belted out our favorite Grease song. Kills me to be so on-the-nose but sometimes summer is that way.

August

After seeing the musical Nine at the Kennedy Center, which is about an Italian movie director who mines his own life for art, I wrote in my journal: “The only art I’m interested in is the deeply personal kind. If an artist isn’t drawing from their own life for inspiration, then what is even the point (of life or of art)?” I also saw Rachel Bloom do a sort of storytelling/standup and it was inspiring to see an artist draw so completely from their own life and interests to make something singular. It’s a message I talk about with my writing group from time to time: Create something that only you could create. I spent a week with my family on Lake Huron in a part of Michigan referred to as Up North and it was lovely swimming, jogging, beaching, and bonding. While I was there, I had dream that I went back to work at an old reporting job and I felt like I was giving up my creative life for an office job and then my practical friend Hana showed me the salary and it was $333,000 (not a realistic reporter’s salary!). My sister told me 333 is a divine number and sure enough, it’s a number that signals one to trust intuition and it relates to creativity. It felt like a sign to have faith in focusing on my creative pursuits.

Song that defined the month: I found this old song called “Tezeta” by the Ethiopian jazz musician Mulatu Astatke and wistful on each listen. Makes sense as tezeta means nostalgia.

September

In September, I put down Gus, the lovably persnickety old cat who had been a constant in my life since I met my ex in 2011. (His sister Boj died a year earlier). His passing really highlighted a part of my life that is over – the part that involved being married with two cats and moving to a new international location every few years. An end of an era. I can still hear his meow in the hallway. The month was also filled with social activity, many museum and gallery visits, parties, so many concerts, workouts, hikes, a visit from my mom and aunt, design work and a growing sense of restlessness in me, especially around the full moon.

Song that defined the month: There was a night I went to a St. Vincent concert by myself and I wasn’t feeling it. Sometimes I find concerts in DC a little flat. The people in the crowd with too much space between them, barely dancing, seemingly not feeling enough, but how can I really know what people are feeling? (This was NOT the case when I went to the big techno club at the end of the month to dance with my Algiers-era friends to DJ Snake, who’s Algerian). After the St. Vincent show, I went home and felt deeply sad about all the things in my life that once existed, but no longer exist. I had a craving for the dramatic country music of my youth and I listened to Garth’s classic about how love is never a waste.

October

In October I hosted my first cocktail party in my new apartment and it was a cozy and lovely night that made me feel really lucky to have such a good party apartment and so many friends to fill the apartment with. Near the end of the month, I traveled to Costa Rica, which contains five percent of the world’s biodiversity and to say I felt the lushness of all that lifeforce would be an understatement. I had a spiritual experience that strengthened my belief in the interconnectedness of all things and in my own energetic powers. Back in DC, I attended a Kamala Harris rally and was interviewed by a French publication. Told the reporter that I was confident Kamala would be our first female president.

Book that inspired me: Again, an Annie Ernaux book, this one called “The Use of Photography” in which she and a lover take turns photographing the piles of their discarded clothes, the rumpled bedsheets the morning after their trysts and then they each write about the photo. I appreciated this concept for how it tries to turn something ephemeral into something more concrete.

Perhaps it was being on the Pacific Ocean in Costa Rica but I was really feeling this beautiful harmonizing song called “On Board” that makes a staggering number of seafaring puns. The number of times I belted: “Ships were not built to be safe; and in all my life’s mistakes you were not one/Because all I’ve ever done is love you/ to the bottom of the deep blue/sea.

November

I sensed it the moment I opened my eyes and wanted to stay asleep but eventually opened my laptop and confirmed what my gut knew: Donald Trump had won the election. I cried. How could someone like him be elected twice and is this what America is? I walked around my apartment bereft, tried to capture in photos my mood and the mood of the day (inspired by Annie Ernaux). Someone drove by my apartment playing the Florence and the Machine song “Dog Days are Over” and when I got in my car to drive to a yoga class, I blasted Florence’s “Free”. Over and over and over and over, windows down, and as I drove by the Naval Observatory, which is the vice president’s home, I sang out “There is nothing else I know how to do, but open up my arms and give it all to you!” Then, I went for a hike in the woods and thought about something I’d recently learned: all of the colors of a leaf are always within the leaf. It’s the lack of chlorophyl makes the green fade and the other colors appear. America didn’t suddenly change: All of its parts were always right there.

Best books: This year I read Elif Bautuman’s The Idiot and Either/Or, respectively, the freshman and sophomore years of a Harvard student in the 1990s. I so related to the protagonist’s way of making connections between seemingly unlike things and searching for intellectual and philosophical explanations for emotional situations.

Song that defined the month: For Thanksgiving I was in Michigan with my family and as we went around the table saying what we were thankful for, I shared a line from song I’d been listening to that says “If you want a garden, you’re going to have to sow the seeds.” My parents, my nieces, and most especially my resilient sister, were all doing the daily things to create the lives they want. And so am I. When I decided I’d stay in DC for the long run, I knew I wanted it to feel like a more creative place than it did in 2006-2012 when I worked here as a reporter. So I actively sought out art and artists, started a business that is creative, began a daily writing practice, set up a cool studio in my apartment. And lo and behold, my life looks a lot like the one I envisioned a year ago. So this month’s song is Crowded Table by the Highwomen.

December

One night in December I went out for Afghan food with former colleagues and friends of mine from Algiers and we continued our cozy night at the Greenzone, a Middle Eastern bar in my neighborhood. There, while dancing to Lebanese music, two guys said “Emily from Jerusalem?” and it turns out they were colleagues of mine from the then-U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem, where I lived for three years. We had a great time catching up and the whole night left me with such a feeling of connectedness – to the people I befriended in the various places I’d lived and to the me that I was then. Even to the me I am becoming.

Mid-December hit me with the flu and a sinus infection and then it was back to Michigan to celebrate a cozy Christmas. My sister and teenage nieces came back to DC with me and I had a ball showing the suburban girls the city life: Shopping in Georgetown, ice skating on the rink at the National Gallery of Art, & Juliet at the Kennedy Center followed by a late dinner at Le Diplomate.

Best book: I sailed through Garth Greenwall’s Small Rain, a poetic yet accessible philosophy on life and love, told by a man with an unknown illness in a hospital for a short time.

Song that defined the month: How many times have I belted Angie McMahon’s Making it Through, especially the line: “I didn’t know then/that out of ash and destruction/the ground will grow things.” At the end of the song, there’s this gorgeous meditation on how time is supposed to run out. Things die. Other things rise from the ash. It’s all a cycle. “Light, dark, light again.”