Something Like Progress

So this is the New Year - a time for reflection, for looking back, and for looking forward, resolving to do, or not do this and that, a time to begin, a time to end, a season for all things. All things must pass, and so we march forward bravely into another year.

Ugh.

Years of therapy have taught me the basics of self-reflection, but goddamn I hate it. It involves – and in order to be effective, necessitates – honesty and courage, a desire to dive into the deepest water and open one's eyes to the strangeness down there. I would prefer, always, to wade through the shallows. But this is a New Year, and I have resolved to face it bravely. I have dived as deep as I know how, and oh, the things I have found.

***

The central theme of this year has been loss. This is not all melancholy; with loss comes change, after all. This is something I have come to accept.

But still. I lost my two best friends this year – one to suicide. I pause at this word, suicide. It's the hook that catches my mouth. But this is lurid, and in looking back, I wave goodbye, finally. I have, I hope, dived the depths and washed myself of his blood.

The other friend I lost to something far more mundane – a flawed friendship that simply collapsed under the weight of too much. Too much pain, too many expectations.

I turned twenty-eight this year, and will turn twenty-nine in three months. I am in the process of losing my twenties; which is to say, I will soon lose the freedom to fuck up.

I lost, or rather let go of, my belief in god. There was a kind of ecstasy to it, though it still feels like a loss sometimes, late at night.

My cat was ill. I didn't lose him, but I thought I would.

There's more, I'm sure there's more. There's always more, with me. It's always something, with me A whole catalog of loss that I have, all year and every day, wallowed in. How many nights spent crying this year?

***

I read over the above and smile. That girl, up there, is not me, not anymore. I wrote it to remind myself of how much I have changed – or rather, how much I plan on changing. All because I had an epiphany:

I like being happy.

Weird. Unprecedented. Strange waters, if you prefer. I am striving for happiness now, and there is, again, a kind of ecstasy to it. I am not interested in loss. Now, I am only interested in what is.

I am only interested in being happy, now. I know that I will feel differently at times. I am prone to melancholy, I know this. But I am striving for something new this year.

So this is the New Year, and I feel so different. I feel baptized and naked and new, as if by emerging from the water, shaken and unsteady, I have been birthed a second time. Washed clean of the blood that covered me, and striving.