Life & Place · A Decembers list
The hard seasons, and what carried you through them
There was a stretch you don't talk about much. The winter the job ended, or the year the diagnosis came, or the quiet months after the funeral when the house was too big.
This is the list for those chapters. One at a time, in your own words — what it felt like, and what got you to the other side.
Free to start. Private from the first word.
Where this list lives
This is a list in Decembers — the place a life gets written down one question at a time.
Decembers asks the questions no one thought to ask, keeps the answers in one permanent Chronicle, and holds them on one Timeline that reads in order. You answer. Decembers does the writing.
- Lists
- A list for every kind of life, and every turn one takes. Pick one and start answering.
- Timeline
- Your answers arrange themselves in order. Seeing a whole life laid out this way is something else.
- Inner Circle
- Not social media. The few people you name are the only ones it is ever shared with.
Begin with one list. The rest follows.
One line is enough
Write down the winter you lost the house, and back it all comes — the space heater, the calls you dreaded, the neighbor who left groceries on the step and never said a word about it.
The record of a hard season is thin. A date on a death certificate, a final paycheck, a discharge form. None of it holds what the days were actually made of: the way you couldn't sleep past four, the meals you skipped, the one friend who kept calling when you'd stopped answering everyone else. That texture is the whole story, and it lives nowhere but in you.
No one sits down to write a chapter about the worst year of their life. It's too much at once. But a single line — the name of the person who anchored you, the habit that got you out of bed — that you can set down. Then another. The people who come after you don't need the polished version. They need to know you went through it, and how, so that when their own hard season comes they'll know it can be survived.
How it works
- 01
Pick this list
It’s waiting, already written. There is no blank page to face.
- 02
Fill in what comes
A year, a line, a photograph. Five minutes or an hour.
- 03
Invite who was there
They add what you forgot. You decide what stays.
- 04
Share it, or don’t
One quiet page for your Inner Circle. No link, no feed.
What ends up on this list
The loss you didn't see coming
A parent, a spouse, a child, a friend gone too soon. The phone call, the drive, the first holiday with the empty chair. Write what the grief actually did to your days, and what — a routine, a dog, a grandchild — first made you laugh again without meaning to.
The season of failure
The business that folded, the job that let you go, the marriage that came apart. Set down what it cost and what it taught you: how you rebuilt, who stood by you, and what you'd never do the same way again.
The stretch of doubt or illness
The diagnosis, the recovery, the long uncertainty when you didn't know how it would go. What you leaned on, what you prayed or bargained for, and the moment you first believed you'd come out the other side.
By what carried you through
- A person
- A spouse, a sibling, a friend, a stranger who showed up — name the one whose steadiness you borrowed until you had your own again.
- Work
- The job or the task that gave the day a shape when nothing else did, even when your heart wasn't in it.
- Faith
- The prayer, the congregation, or the quiet belief that held when the ground gave way beneath you.
- A routine
- The walk, the coffee, the drive, the small daily thing you clung to because it asked nothing of you and got you to nightfall.
- Time
- The plain fact that the calendar kept turning, and one morning the weight was an ounce lighter than the morning before.
- A place
- The porch, the lake, the kitchen table — the spot you went to when you needed to feel like yourself.
Other lists you may like
Start with any one of them. Every answer lands on the same Timeline.
Begin
A record that the worst years were survivable, because you survived them
Someone who loves you will one day be where you were. Start with a single season — just its name, and the one thing that got you through it.