Goodbye 2019 - Hello 2020!
Happy new year! Happy new decade!
This post is going to be two-thirds Photo Week #1 and one-thirds 2019 recap. I haven’t finished thinking and reflecting about 2019 or the whole decade because I realized a few days ago I am very bad at closure. I just wait for things to fade away naturally and I can’t think of something I’ve had actual closure with. So maybe that will be something to work on in the new decade. I don’t anticipate anything exciting happening between now and Monday for Photo Week #1 (or anything that can’t be rolled into the next week’s post, anyways) so… that is the explanation for why this one mishmash of a post exists. And I doubt anyone was really asking for an explanation but oh well.
I started off this decade not sure about what I wanted to do and began the process of leaving behind my high school dream of being a journalist and getting a humanities degree to switching to being a math major. In the middle of the decade I made another career path decision after graduating college and decided to pursue dancing professionally. I am now ending the decade in the midst of another career switch from software engineering to visual effects. For me, this decade has just been marked by a lot of indecision, a lot of confusion, and a lot of dreams dying. I thought I had learned a lot this past year, but looking back on where I started ten years ago, maybe I haven’t come as far as I thought – it seems like I have done so many 180 degree turns in terms of career that I don’t even know which direction I’m facing anymore. And now after writing that I feel really sad about the past decade. I know there were a lot of happy moments and fun times but (besides getting married) was I even building anything significant in my life?
This is the problem with being reflective. I never like the results of spending too much time with myself and my thoughts. Jeremiah says I think too many negative thoughts, but I think I’m being realistic. I don’t want to sound ungrateful. I know I have a lot going for me. But I didn’t exactly achieve my 2019 goal of being content with the space that I occupy because I still don’t know what space that is. And I’m scared that once I think I’ve figured it out I’ll find that it’s not really what I want and the process will just start all over again. So maybe the solution is to stop thinking so much and just do the best I can with where I am. And to not be so scared.
Maybe I will never figure out who I am, exactly, or maybe I am just always changing. But one would hope that instead of just changing to something different I would actually start to change for the better…