how the year went

 Squeezing out one last bit of writing before 2022.

This year has been a pretty crazy one, on par with starting or finishing college for how much my life is changing. But this time it’s not some typical next-stage-of-life transition. A lot of it came from me making choices (or whipping around at the whim of my emotions), which feels bigger.

Some stuff that happened:

• I finished grad school last December, quit the job I’d been working since college in February, and started an internship in April at a company I considered completely out of reach for me.

• Between quitting my old job and starting the next one, I had a couple months to dick around and I did a lot. Lots of time of alone - hiking on the north shore of Lake Superior, staying in a tiny house behind a brewery where the only place to sprawl out was a bathtub, camping in the snow by myself and spending the night wondering if I would ever feel warm again, skiing multiple times a week, wandering around listening to music and appreciating slow time. I read a ton and deepened some friendships.

• I felt some quite deep doubts about my life and went through several brutal cycles of confidence and despair, before landing in a much better place for the last few months of the year. While this was a shit time, not just for me, it was a large part of what got me deeper with people over the past year and I am grateful for that. 

• The internship turned into a full-time job and I moved across the country with my Supreme No-Nonsense Tag-Alonger, my first big move since leaving for college.

• I started writing more “seriously.” 

• At the beginning of the year I was in the middle of a project to write one page a day, but killed it after a couple months because it was sinking my spirit. In that time I wrote 24 one pagers.

• Started the blog - 7 (and with this 8?) actual blog posts.

• 49 little things in various states of completion.

• This is far far more writing than I actually perceived myself doing over the course of the year so I’m feeling pretty pleased with it. 

• My parents turned 60, which we celebrated by taking them to the Channel Islands and saw about 300 dolphins on the ferry ride out. 

• Both of my siblings moved and I visited them in their new homes.

• I locked myself into giving 10% of my income to charity.

• My Supreme No-Nonsense Co-Habitator and I went on our first real trip together since the pandemic to visit a good friend in Oregon, and spent a great week driving around looking at volcanic rocks.

• I went on some lovely camping/backpacking trips: 

• Snowy solo camping on the shore of Lake Superior.

• A German POW camp turned state park, set in a valley between a bunch of farms  - you could hear the cows at night. 

• One of those strange, uniquely midwestern sites where you set up your tent on a freshly mown lawn.

• A spot among huge, awesome rocks in Colorado down a 20 mile washboard road. 

• A week in Yosemite hiking through a snowstorm.

Some things I noticed about myself this year:

• I got to be with people for a lot of their first experiences this year - backpacking, camping in the snow, hiking off trail (they weren’t all outdoorsy things, but those are the ones that come to mind). I really really loved sharing new things with someone else. Many of them weren’t big events, but great nonetheless.

• I’ve got a lot of emotions, but do not have a good theory for myself about how to deal with them (when do you ignore, when do you try to reason your way out of them, when do you trust, when do you rationalize). This is something I want to work on more next year.

• I sometimes get this anxious feeling of “I want to create” or “I want to write about this” and I don’t have the time or the quiet to do it. I started to feel it much more frequently after I started writing “seriously.”

• I knew I loved being alone for stretches, but I really really love it.

• Perhaps surprisingly given my last bullet, the idea of having children stopped sounding so ridiculous to me, which introduced much complication to thinking about life plans, but I’m glad the decision won’t end up being a default in the end. 

Some other lessons I learned this year:

• It’s a miracle humans can communicate about anything. There are so many ways for thoughts to get dropped between the words you choose and the words people hear, especially if you are like me and tend to talk abstractly and vaguely and have shorthand from the inside of your head that you forget other people don’t share. (One of my goals for next year is to be more precise, more often).

• So much of life is out of view. Especially the best and worst parts - for example people’s inner thoughts, or the character of any relationship that doesn’t include you. Your predictions about the things out of view are probably incorrect.

• There are so so many rules people create for themselves that are not actually required to follow. Seeing them and asking “do I care to follow this one?” makes life feel a lot better (most of the time).

Some things I am grateful for this year:

• I have some really great people in my life - they are open and say what they think and are supportive and do things out of love. Especially grateful for my Supreme No-Nonsense Editor.

• I have been extremely lucky - unexpectedly sneaking my way into a job I love, frantically signing a lease on an apartment that has been great, getting blocked off from Half Dome by a snowstorm which turned my backpacking adventure into one of the best trips in my life, not dying in the snowstorm, the list goes on.

• My new apartment faces south toward the mountains, so I get sunrise and sunset over snowy peaks every day if I just remember to look.