Goodbye 2013

2013 has left a mark. It has been one of the most life-altering years of my life since 2008. It has forced me to decide who I am in ways that have often left me confused, nauseous, scared, and sad but mostly... hopeful. This year, more than any, I have finally had to find the strength within myself and not the supportive people around me to decide who I am, what I want, and what I deserve. In a lot of ways, that's a big step for me (not that I'm close by a long shot). It's the first time I've been healthy enough to make that sort of decision and not immediately cower behind it when life got hard. It's the first time that I chose to be healthy not because the people I loved wanted me to be, but because I finally allowed myself to think that maybe I could start loving myself instead of letting others do it for me.

Which is funny, when you consider how much of this year I spent hating what I saw in the mirror. The events and circumstances both in and out of my control have taught me things about myself that weren't always kind. I have many flaws and I have many weaknesses. I can be selfish, I can be lazy, I can be self-centered, I can lie, I can let my illnesses control me, and more often than not I isolate myself from the world around me. Some of that is because I hold on to the bitter “lesson” I learned from a young age-- that people are cruel and not to be trusted-- but most of it is because I want to minimize the affect my faulty existence has on the people around me.

This because in all my messed-up-still-trying-to-figure-out-who-i-am-in-my-almost-mid-twenties glory, I still have never felt that just wanting something good for my life was reason enough to deserve it. Somewhere along the line I convinced myself that everyone who has ever had real happiness was a person that was inherently morally better or just more well equipped than me. So I stopped going after things and started going through the motions with only one goal in mind. Find stability. It doesn't matter if you have to settle or what you give up, just get your head above water (which, at times, was actually extremely hard. I still have my floaties on). So I settled for any happiness that stumbled into my life (and I have been lucky and blessed, because I have known a lot of it) and screwed it up more often than not. I have not been the person I should have been for a lot of people, and I am sorry for the hurt I caused them because of it.

The funny thing is, right now I find myself looking up to who I was when I was seventeen. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of reasons I thank God I am not still her. Despite what I tend to forget, I have come a long way in healing that broken girl. But at the same time, she had something that twenty-three year old me forgot how to feel. Passion. She felt things exquisitely, and as much as she hated life she also found beauty in hope. She had the energy to change her life completely and move to another state like it was nothing, like it was going to be the best adventure she had been on so far. She was excited about college and making her own career, she was excited about finding the perfect person who was just as romantic as she was, she was excited about traveling the world and seeing much more than middle class America.

I compromised her. While I don't regret the path I have been on, because there is no way I could have survived life without the people in my life to give me so much support, help, and healing; I do wish that I had found a way to do everything without losing sight of that girl. I wish that I had held on to that drive to keep changing my life, to keep molding, to keep pushing for more against all odds. Because this year of 2013 has taught me how very, very hard it is to be forced into change. When you have little to no options and you keep trying to hold on to what you should be letting go the odds stack up against you very quick.

Because in the end, it turns out that life demands more than a will to survive out of you. Life demands that you do not live solely for the sake of breathing, but for hope. For family. For friends. For experiences. For change. For future. For helping others. Life demands that you own up to all of your ugly but that you recognize your beautiful. It demands that you let go of the idea of “perfection” that society clings so heavily to, and that you live your life with messes.

This isn't the first year that life has tried to teach me this. But it is the one that I've had no choice but to listen.

2013 has been hard. Having a four and a half year relationship end can be humiliating at best, heart wrenching at worse. Losing two jobs over health problems is only slightly easier, but no less ego-damaging. Losing the one asset and transportation you have because of your own egregious financial mistakes is mortifying. Like I said, it hasn't been fun looking in the mirror lately. But that's okay. I am allowed to dislike who I am as long as it drives me to be better. In a lot of ways, I feel like I've been in an incubator since I moved here. Waiting, growing little by little, and healing. I'm still pretty new at this. I don't quite know how to fly, and I tend to stumble when I walk. But I'm out of the incubator.

2014 has a lot to live up to.