New Year

2017 was a whirlwind.

So much happened that my person journal is broken up into two pieces, one that starts in January and one that starts at the end of June, because I felt that 400 single-spaced pages was a bit much for a document. So much happened that, as friends recount stories, I say, “Oh, yeah, that happened this year!” So much has happened that I have multiple print calendars and planners to reference and I still have problems processing everything I did this year. It’s worse than the year I spent less than half of the days sleeping in my own bed.

2017 was breathless.

This entire year was like that time in the fourth grade that I fell off the landing of the playground at church, not the old metal one, but the new wooden one, before they got the new new plastic one. I was gonna slide down the fireman’s pole, this thing that I’d been scared of since I first saw it, and I reached out and I grabbed hold and I was going to slide and then suddenly I wasn’t. The sky appeared and started rushing away from me and the ground came out of nowhere and pushed the air from my lungs and every time I tried to fill them again, a thousand knives stabbed me from the inside and the outside, leaving me wanting to scream but without the air I needed to, which was maybe the most frightening thing of all. 2016 was the fall, 2017 was hitting the mulch and the subsequent fight for oxygen.

2017 was interminable.

They say that as you get older, the years start to rush by. I don’t know who “they” are, but my twenties have been some of the longest years of my life and that doesn’t really seem to be letting up.  This year dragged on. It was a whirlwind, it was breathless, and it kept on going. 2017 was like being trapped in a perpetual hurricane. No, 2017 was like treading water in the ocean with the tide forever coming in. No, 2017 was a never-ending dust storm. Nothing ever settled long enough for me to get my bearings and I started to think that the only thing I had ever been was dusty.

All of this is, of course, slightly dramatic. On a local level, it was like most other years. 2017 was a mixture of good and bad, with fewer personal tragedies than usual, I guess. I settled into a comfortable chaos sometime around September and while I’m glad 2018 looks to be less busy, I don’t regret how full my life was. I am uneasy about how my life intersects with the larger world, but I think I’ll be spending some time unpacking this year for a while yet.

That’s why I made everyone else talk in our year-end video on the vlog.

I’m not really sure what I want to leave in 2017. I’m not sure what I want to take into 2018. I know 2018 is a few days old already, but you have the option every day of setting something down and not picking it back up. I’ve got time. I want to leave insecurity, I guess, and exhausting myself, but I don’t want to carry pure bravado and desperate self-preservation in their place. I want to leave bad thoughts behind and take good thoughts with me. I want to be able to tell the good thoughts from the bad. I want to want the right things. I want to know what it is I should want.

In the end, all metaphors and constructs fail us and so maybe this was never going to be a method of processing that was going to work for me. Or maybe this year was dense and I need to do more work than I thought. Either way, I think I can say, along with most other people, that I’m glad 2018 is here. I’ll read more books and drink more water and exercise more often and sleep better and do my best not to obsess over the things that 2017 wouldn’t let me set down.

That seems reasonable.