In spirit of all things blogging and writing more honestly, I knew I would write a post reflecting this past year, but I didn’t know what to say. A lot of really big things happened: I graduated high school, had my first serious relationship, started college, lived away from home, fell in love. I know these are major milestones, but even now I feel pretty neutral about all of the changes. Almost as if they had happened to me, not that I had accomplished them. I know that’s silly. I have worked hard and earned my spot to be where I am today. After creating an adolescence dependent on a generally cynical overview of the world and myself, I began 2014 with barely healed wounds of the past and newfound optimism to improve myself.
And now, after another trip around the Sun, I’ve realized that I can’t just switch off my negative mindset and blindly dedicate myself to positive choices and self-affirmation. Because underneath that pessimistic shell is a core of a person I’m really quite unfamiliar with. As desperately as I tried to distance myself from the past, I again and again found that you can move on and move forward, but it won’t be seamless and it won’t be easy. 2014 was a sort of grey area for my personal development; it’s hard to find a middle ground between fresh starts and being dominated by the past. Are there even such things as “fresh starts”? I moved out, started college – hell, I even cut all my hair off. But there’s no changing what has happened before and there’s no stopping the influence it will have on your future. This year I learned that all we can do is choose how we react to it.
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