![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Reflections on the unforeseen
Dec. 23rd, 2018 04:26 am2018 was going to be the best year of my life.
I started off the year in a relationship with the love of my life and quickly began relationships with two other wonderful women. I was dead-set on abandoning the cynicism, self-destruction, isolation, and low standards that had kept me stagnant in my depression for years. I was several months away from finishing college and moving to my favorite city in the world to live with my favorite person after two and a half years of long distance. I had a job that I loved and was good at, and a tight-knit group of friends for the first time in ages. 2018 was going to be the best year of my goddamn life.
And then, it wasn’t. Friday nights spent laughing and getting high and playing games turned into hours of staring at the off-white walls of the ICU, trying to tune out the beeps and buzzes of the machines keeping my comatose girlfriend alive. Flirty conversations turned into endless nights struggling to keep several otherwise isolated people I loved alive, trying desperately to talk them down after they confidently swore night after night that this was it, this was the end. The first best friend I’d had since primary school began dismantling the abilities to trust and be cared for that I’d worked so hard to build up. Immediately after my girlfriend and I finally fulfilled our dream of moving in together, our relationship began to crumble until we broke up. All of the things I had desperately clung to to keep myself alive through my worst days - all of the reasons that 2018 was going to be the best year of my life - dissipated one by one.
Today is the 23rd of December, 2018. I have spent most of the past year hating every moment of being alive. Nothing has turned out the way it was supposed to, and many of the most wonderful things I’ve ever experienced have fallen apart. But right now, I am okay. I am happy, I am okay. I do not need to brush over the shit of 2018 to feel secure in the place I am in right now. I no longer speak to two of the women I was in love with at the start of the year and am still hurting over my break up with the third, but I fall asleep most nights with a beautiful human who I happened to meet through a series of lucky coincidences. I am unemployed and insecure in my future employment and academic prospects, but I’m surrounded by people who have more faith in me than I do. The pain of broken down friendships and fears of never trusting anyone again pales in comparison to the love I have for my current circle of friends, a beautiful group of ill and traumatised and sometimes barely functioning people who I would go to the end of the earth for (and who would do the same for me). Right now I feel broken but hopeful, scared but safe, and so, so exhausted. I feel so exhausted that the prospect of another year of existence overwhelms entirely. But I am okay. I am stubbornly, persistently, spitefully okay.
2019 is going to be the best year of my life.
I started off the year in a relationship with the love of my life and quickly began relationships with two other wonderful women. I was dead-set on abandoning the cynicism, self-destruction, isolation, and low standards that had kept me stagnant in my depression for years. I was several months away from finishing college and moving to my favorite city in the world to live with my favorite person after two and a half years of long distance. I had a job that I loved and was good at, and a tight-knit group of friends for the first time in ages. 2018 was going to be the best year of my goddamn life.
And then, it wasn’t. Friday nights spent laughing and getting high and playing games turned into hours of staring at the off-white walls of the ICU, trying to tune out the beeps and buzzes of the machines keeping my comatose girlfriend alive. Flirty conversations turned into endless nights struggling to keep several otherwise isolated people I loved alive, trying desperately to talk them down after they confidently swore night after night that this was it, this was the end. The first best friend I’d had since primary school began dismantling the abilities to trust and be cared for that I’d worked so hard to build up. Immediately after my girlfriend and I finally fulfilled our dream of moving in together, our relationship began to crumble until we broke up. All of the things I had desperately clung to to keep myself alive through my worst days - all of the reasons that 2018 was going to be the best year of my life - dissipated one by one.
Today is the 23rd of December, 2018. I have spent most of the past year hating every moment of being alive. Nothing has turned out the way it was supposed to, and many of the most wonderful things I’ve ever experienced have fallen apart. But right now, I am okay. I am happy, I am okay. I do not need to brush over the shit of 2018 to feel secure in the place I am in right now. I no longer speak to two of the women I was in love with at the start of the year and am still hurting over my break up with the third, but I fall asleep most nights with a beautiful human who I happened to meet through a series of lucky coincidences. I am unemployed and insecure in my future employment and academic prospects, but I’m surrounded by people who have more faith in me than I do. The pain of broken down friendships and fears of never trusting anyone again pales in comparison to the love I have for my current circle of friends, a beautiful group of ill and traumatised and sometimes barely functioning people who I would go to the end of the earth for (and who would do the same for me). Right now I feel broken but hopeful, scared but safe, and so, so exhausted. I feel so exhausted that the prospect of another year of existence overwhelms entirely. But I am okay. I am stubbornly, persistently, spitefully okay.
2019 is going to be the best year of my life.
