What an indescribable year it has been. Reaching the end of 2023 feels like cresting a mountain, standing at the top of the world, struggling to catch my breath, giddy with relief at having level ground beneath my feet again.
Don’t be fooled: on paper, I basically just spent the last year working an office job, writing, and hanging out at home. Certainly, I didn’t pave any pivotal paths—say, moving abroad, or starting a small business–even though I’m exhausted, as if I actually did those things. There were no outright disasters, no floods, no fires, no deaths, and I remain in good health, as does my family. No, my gains in 2023 were almost all mental. I feel like a completely more mature person than I was two or three years ago. It’s great and embarrassing all at once.
The first of these big, ~~emotional~~ adjustments was finding purpose outside of school and school-related activities. This is huge, because academic accomplishments have been my drug since before I can remember. The feeling runs deeper than simply than worrying about being handed a B or C; grade marks themselves did not necessarily faze me, especially as I got older. Rather, I was addicted to the emotional cycle of academic work. The mystery of being assigned a project; the tension of trying to make it perfect; the hanging suspense of waiting for a grade; the catharsis or pain of being evaluated. Each stage was part of the addiction—even the negative ones. Especially the negative ones.
Because of this, being deprived of academic instruction for a year and a half humbled me in a way that is hard to express without coming across as a person who should be humbled. I’ve had to prioritize hobbies that bring me genuine joy, because they’ve become necessary for my sanity. It’s been a year of exercising, stress-cleaning, and LOTS of writing to cope. It’s also worth noting I thrived in the structure of college courses (maybe that’s the grad school cue I’ve been waiting for, but that’s besides the point right now). It was a perfectly ideal setup, where you could choose all your freedoms except the important one: being in school. To put graduating into another figure of speech (can you see I love them), it’s like coming indoors after being out in a rainstorm, and just now sensing that my clothes are wet.
The second mental adjustment I had to make was reining in my social anxiety, which is a horse that got loose in 2020 and has been runnin’ down a dream ever since. I won’t get into too much detail, but I’ll say I’ve arrived at some . . . . . serendipitous diagnostic information, so to speak. The important things I learned during this year is that there is no metaphorical spotlight pointed at me and there never will be (Black Mirror is one of my favorite shows, of course), I am (strangely) an extrovert, and that I love being with my friends more than anything in the world. This is big stuff.
Mental health improvements are no small feat in themselves, but they get tailwind from my third and final mental adjustment: redefining what it means to exercise. The general theme of my fitness journey until now could be chalked up to literal masochism. No pain, no game, or something like that. Knock knock, it’s fake news! But seriously, this year taught me it is perfectly acceptable to have your daily workout be in pajamas because you are too lazy to put on better clothes. Likewise, from May to December of 2023, my workouts progressed from fifteen-minute “runs” to a steady series of regular running, swimming, and strength training. Swimming in particular absolutely deserves a gold medal for “Best High,” because hot damn, it’s like Xanax, climbing onto the deck after an hour of freestyle.
This post is all to say, I am in the best shape of my life, physically and mentally. Clearly, this is fantastic news. That being said, I am sentimental and change feels heavy to me no matter how positive the new result. In grade school, for example, I always ended up teary while going to bed after the first day of school. The new routine was always overwhelming. Of course, I always ended up perfectly fine the next day, and liked the new school year even better than before. I’m hoping the same happens to me with 2024.
Now that you could consider me an adult in the “real world” (lol), the burden now falls on me to decide exactly what changes I choose to let overwhelm me, and apparently that freedom is a much uglier beast up close than I ever imagined. I mentally identified with “student” for so long, I had no sense of what it meant to just be a person who can just . . . . build a life.
So, if you have made it this far, kudos to you. This is a celebration of my year. If you get anything out of reading this, I hope it’s not that I think I am Buddha. Rather, just remember that baby steps really do accumulate.
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