That said, there were very real reasons I wasn't using this. I still feel those reasons, but I started thinking about them today. I was on a run by myself, and it was one of those emotional vomit runs since it's been a hard week and I've had to suppress a lot of anger. So often now I run with other people--Josh, my run club, or Thomas--I don't get a lot of time to have those long runs alone where stuff boils up to the surface and I get to just feel my feelings.
As I was running, I was thinking of this year and the stuff that has changed. The places and things I used to associate with happiness and the people that have been lost to me. I've kept a journal every year of my life since I was 13. Of everything I lost this year, am I really going to let this get taken away too?
I also started a new blog, elsewhere, that I publish much more publicly on facebook and stuff. It's not quite the same content as this; this was always my little secret space that only one or two people in my life knew about.The other blog is obviously much, much more public. Still, I miss having this space to process my feelings and unravel what I think about things.
2016 is almost over, thank God. It was such a classic Saturn return of a year. I feel like I changed so many things in my life in such a short period of time. I guess that's a good way to do it. I'm looking forward to my birthday in December and saying "Okay, I choked that all down, what's next?" It wasn't all bad, it was just so much change, so rapidly.
- I got a new job. When I left grad school, I wanted a break from academia. I joked to my writer friends that I was a corporate sell-out. Now I'm fully on a track that's totally different from anything to do with writing. I have a job in software at a Fortune 500 company, and I'm doing great at it. It feels really strong to be working in a technical field after being the arty-writer-teacher type my whole life. I still tell new people I meet that I'm a writer before I catch myself and explain what I do. That's odd, but it's helped me to be working with a bunch of engineers and techheads, too. I think differently now than I did last year.
-We got a dog. Josh and I are in a really different chapter of our lives now together. We're doing a lot of stuff together we thought we'd never do. A lot of weird, cool, exciting stuff. And we're bringing the dog.
-I have almost a whole new friend group. For the first time in my life, I have a squad of female friends I do things with. I know a ton of new people in my town. I can walk into a bar downtown and know almost everyone. That's a strange feeling for a person who leans toward introvert. I thought when Legends ended, I would have all this free time, but now I feel like my life is busier than it has ever been.
-I'm writing, and getting published like nobody's business. My audience just got a lot bigger.
-My closest friend left my life, probably for the last time, which has been a defining factor of the year. It wasn't something I didn't see coming; he's always been the kind of person to quit things if he wasn't afraid to quit them. I don't say that coldly or bitterly, it is just the truth about him, and I always knew that one day would come where his goals were more important than whatever it was I meant to him. His own fiance warned me about what type of man he was when he and I got close, and though I'm still not sure she was right about him, over the years I thought about her words. Still, he was such an incredibly important part of my life. It hurt me that after everything we'd been through, he didn't have the strength to say goodbye to my face, which is something I've had a hard time finding closure about. There's so much I never got to say.
I'm okay about it, though part of me feels like I'll be having stairway conversations with him in my head for the rest of my life. I know he isn't having stairway conversations with me--honestly, he's probably a lot happier directly because of this. And that's okay too. I'm not childish enough to pretend my unwillingness to give up on people is a strength.
-This election was a big deal to me. As a girl who grew up in a culture that eschewed female pastors, that taught that a woman's place was in service and obedience to her husband, that encouraged me not to have a career, that literally told me that my own body was sinful and should be covered up, voting for the would-be first female president meant the world to me. The failure of those ideas, and particularly the people who I thought were my friends and allies on the left, was crushing to me. It feels very personal to me.
I posted on twitter that I felt like 2016 was like the shitty stub end of a cigarette that you started to smoke on a drunk impulse and now just don't want to finish it, but your mom didn't raise you to waste anything. A friend arranged a sort of public support group on Wednesday night for people feeling sick about the election, and I went to try to support her. Hearing the people who were weeping and devastated about this whole year, I felt tired and ready to move forward. My life has a certain momentum these days. A lot is going very well. Tonight, I'm going out to see my beautiful town. I'm going to take my veterans roses. I'm going to bake bread.
So that's some real stuff. I mostly couch everything in a fine level of bullshit that I put up on this thing, but nobody reads this anyways, and it made me feel something to write it. Maybe the person I'm well on my way to becoming will read this in a month or a year and it will mean something to her. For now, I don't know that I'm keeping this blog, but I felt that I owed myself some explanation.
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