You were a good one. Not that 2017 was a particularly hard act to follow, but I honestly didn’t expect the abundance of happiness and growth and challenge that i got out of the last 12 months. New Year’s is a weird time to me, and has always been a weird time. I’ve always regarded this as my favorite holiday, because it’s like getting a chance to start over and cut ties with the past. But the more new years I live through, the more I realize that if you’re living right, you don’t need a holiday to feel brand new.
The thing is, no matter how anything is at any particular moment, it can always change. And as scary and terrifying and literally anxiety-inducing as that is, it’s also exciting and spectacular and invigorating, and that unpredictability is one of the greatest forces I feel pulling me forward through life.
Perhaps not everyone everywhere has felt this way at some point, but many of the people I have known growing up (myself included) have struggled to find reasons and purpose in day to day life. I know that feeling of getting to the end of a year and thinking, “well, I guess that’s it then,” and wondering if anything really changes or gets better. But things do, and I wish I could share that with the people I know because everyone deserves the sense of internal gravity that comes from knowing you have control over the direction your life is headed in.
I found myself at dinner with my family tonight, something I used to take for granted, and I realized this might have been my best year yet. Maybe it’s just because this one year contained both the end of high school and the beginning of college for me, and those were both things I had long anticipated. I saw Hamilton on broadway, my extended family came to town for my graduation, I was in my last musical, I chose a college, I saved up and was able to go to France, I settled in somewhere new, I made memories I wouldn’t trade the world for and spent time with friends (new and old) and family, doing things I love and trying to make the best of the things I didn’t. A lot of my favorite moments this year sound stupid to put into writing, like my senior prom or my graduation party or halloweekend at a college, but they really were some of the best times.
In a way, it’s sorta sad. Like I’m 18 and what if this is where my life peaks, with minor amounts of substance abuse and some good concerts. But I don’t think I’ll let that happen. Instead this idea that things were really, actually good this year makes me excited for next year. I will always have bad days, and I can’t help but cry myself to sleep every now and then, but the existence of suffering and tragedy don’t have to weigh me down. I want to tell that to my friends back home over and over again until they punch me for being a broken record, because sometimes I think that we absorb a lot of ideas subconsciously just by hearing them over and over again and maybe if I say it enough times I can help things change for them too.
I don’t know. I never seem to know, but honestly I couldn’t care less. Maybe all this effort and all these attempts to make more out of my time will amount to many more december 30ths full of sharing ridiculous memories over dinner tables and inarticulate blog posts and endless hours of thinking about how weird life is. I hope everyone gets to have a happy new years, if not this year then the next, and if not then, I hope you don’t ever lose hope in having one. New year’s eve three years ago was probably, at the time, the most miserable experience of my life. It’s a night I still bring up to my therapist, and still remember even after all this time. I didn’t think I’d ever have a happy new year’s eve again because of the things that happened, but here I am, a few attempts later, living in spite of it all.
In the end, isn’t that all that matters? Being able to be here and see the clouds change color before the sunset and know that tomorrow is another story, that next year is another chapter, that even if I look back and only see the path I took to get here, there’s still an infinite number of possible roads ahead of me.
I like that.