If you asked me to name the happiest year of my adult life, I wouldn’t have to think very hard.

It was 2019.

Nothing enormous happened that year. I didn’t get married, have a baby, buy a house, or achieve some giant milestone that would traditionally qualify it as the best year ever. What I had was something much harder to manufacture: I was genuinely content with my life exactly as it was.

I was incredibly secure being single. Not “I’m fine being single until the right person comes along” secure. I mean actually, genuinely happy being on my own. Somewhere along the way, I had finally stopped measuring my life against what I thought it was supposed to look like. I had left so many of my old insecurities behind, and at 35, I felt completely comfortable being me.

Work was a huge part of that happiness. I was on an amazing team in the Middle East Bureau, surrounded by people who had become some of my best friends. Going to work didn’t just feel like going to an office. I got to work on things I cared about with people I genuinely loved being around. Some days it felt like I was going to work and hanging out with my best friends at the same time. I didn’t realize then just how rare that combination was.

My dad and I had also settled into a rhythm with his dementia care. Dementia was, of course, always there, but for a while we had figured out how to live alongside it. He was thriving. I wasn’t constantly waiting for the next crisis. We had our routines, and I could enjoy being his daughter instead of feeling consumed by being his caregiver.

And then there was Josiah, my gay bestie.

Josiah and I were constantly running around Logan Circle together, taking advantage of every BOGO happy hour we could find and generally treating an ordinary weekday like it had the potential to become an event. There was something wonderfully uncomplicated about those days. Work, friends, drinks in the neighborhood, and the kind of friendship where you always had someone to call and something to laugh about.

There was also Sally, my DC bestie, and the kind of friendship built around actually doing things together.

That year, Sally and I took a French cooking class all the way out at Tastemakers, which back then might as well have been in a foreign land as far as I was concerned. We also did a cake decorating class at Milk Bar as she prepared for motherhood. At the time, she was entering this huge new chapter of her life while I was very much enjoying the chapter I was in.

I love thinking about those classes now because they capture something about that year that is difficult to describe. We made plans just because something sounded fun. We learned to cook French food. We decorated cakes. We ventured to neighborhoods that seemed impossibly far away. Friendship didn’t always need a big occasion. Sometimes you just found something interesting happening in the city, signed up and went.

2019 was also the year I froze my eggs.

Looking back, that decision feels completely connected to the person I was becoming. I wasn’t putting my life on hold waiting for a partner to appear, but I also wasn’t closing the door on becoming a mother someday. Freezing my eggs gave future me options. There was something empowering about making that decision for myself: I could be completely happy with the life I had while still making room for a life I might want later.

And, somewhat hilariously in retrospect, 2019 also brought me my first and last love bomb.

I can call it what it was now, but honestly? It was fun.

Maybe that’s another sign of how free I felt that year. I wasn’t looking at every romantic relationship and asking, Is this the one? Where is this going? What does this mean for my future? Sometimes it was simply nice to have someone to go to the movies with.

Someone to grab Chinese food with on Christmas.

Someone to go with me to Enchant DC at Nats Stadium on what I remain convinced was the coldest night in the history of Washington, D.C.

It didn’t have to become forever to have been fun while it lasted.

That was the energy of 2019. I wasn’t desperately trying to get somewhere. I was actually enjoying where I already was.

I also did something else that year I had never done before: I traveled solo.

I went to Tulum for an amazing yoga retreat, my first trip completely on my own. There was something symbolic about it, although I probably didn’t fully appreciate that at the time. I had reached a point where I didn’t need to wait for someone else to go somewhere with me. I could just go. I could get on a plane alone, arrive somewhere new, practice yoga, explore, meet people, and enjoy my own company.

And I had people who loved me.

For my birthday, my friends helped give me an incredible celebration in Puerto Rico. I remember looking around and feeling lucky. Not lucky because my life looked perfect from the outside, but because it felt full from the inside.

That is what I remember most about 2019.

I felt like I had it together.

Not in the Instagram sense. My life wasn’t perfect. There were still bills and responsibilities and dementia and work stress and all the ordinary complications of adulthood. But underneath all of that was this steady feeling that I was okay. More than okay.

I was happy.

Then 2020 came.

COVID arrived, the world shut down, and what I couldn’t have known then was that my life as I understood it would slowly begin to unravel too.

Some changes happened quickly. Others took years. There would be grief and enormous transitions. The rhythms that had made me feel so grounded in 2019 disappeared one by one. Life became heavier and much less predictable.

But happiness didn’t disappear.

In fact, one of the great loves of my life arrived in 2020: Bailey.

She became my pandemic companion, my source of comfort, and eventually the little presence that would stay beside me through some of the hardest years of my life. There were still wonderful moments with my family. There were trips, celebrations, laughter and days when life felt light again.

And now there is Baby J.

She has brought an entirely new kind of happiness into my life. There are our dance parties, her laughter, and all these tiny, ordinary moments of motherhood that I already know will someday feel enormous when I look back at them.

There is something especially poignant about looking at Baby J and remembering the woman who froze her eggs in 2019. She didn’t know exactly how motherhood would eventually find her. She just knew she wanted to leave the door open.

And I think about Sally preparing for motherhood back then, while I was freezing my eggs and wondering vaguely what my own future might look like. Neither of us could have known exactly where our lives were headed. We were just two friends decorating a cake at Milk Bar, each standing at a very different point on the road to what came next.

So when I say 2019 was my favorite year, I don’t mean that everything afterward has been sad. Far from it. Some of the people and experiences I love most didn’t even exist in my life yet.

What I miss about 2019 is the feeling.

At the time, I didn’t know I was living in my favorite year.

I wasn’t walking around thinking, Remember this. You’re going to miss it.

I was simply living.

And maybe that’s why I don’t want to spend the rest of my life trying to recreate 2019. I couldn’t, even if I tried. The people have changed. I have changed. My life has changed.

What I want back isn’t Logan Circle or BOGO happy hours or even that particular version of myself.

It’s that quiet, perpetual sense that my life belongs to me. That the people I love are okay. That I am surrounded by friendship. That I can make plans and look forward to things. That I don’t need my life to be perfect to feel incredibly lucky to be living it.

I had that once.

Which means I know it exists.

And as I enter this new era of my life, I hope I find it again. Not the 2019 version. Something new. Something that fits the person I’ve become after everything that has happened since.

Maybe one day I’ll look back at another year and realize, without having known it at the time:

That was one of the good ones.

Maybe even the best one yet.