A Year in Review

I’ve been seeing a lot of my writer friends (aka random young and aspiring writers that I follow on Instagram and TikTok) do a “Year in Review” blog post or a “Write Your 2022” recap, and for the first time in recent history, I felt inspired to make my own creative contribution. Truth be told, 2022 feels a lot more like 12 years than it does 12 months. I can’t even remember how this year started off and it seems unreal that just a mere six months ago I was still living at college with my closest friends. So much has happened — the good and the bad alike — that I don’t even know where to begin, so let’s start from the beginning.

I started off the year making the daunting decision to break my first ever lease and move in with my best friend. The reason I include this relatively insignificant detail is because it was the first of many big decisions I made this year. During this time I was also taking 10 hours of Spanish class a week…and skipping pretty much all of my other classes. (Mom, Dad…I’m exaggerating for artistic effect…I went to class). But halfway through the semester, my world as I previously knew it was turned upside down when I suffered my first real heartbreak. I’ve chosen not to post anything about that in this space because months and months later, I still don’t know exactly what there is to say about it. Maybe eventually the right words will come to me, but for now, we will leave it at that. However, it was after that happened that I began forward on a different path for myself.

This past Spring I went on a lot of HGW (“hot girl walks”, for those of you that are not hyper-active on TikTok), in the months between March and June — which was easy to do because the spring months in Coastal Virginia are warm and we could see the beach from the porch of my college house (this is not an exaggeration for artistic effect). I spent a lot of time listening to podcasts that empowered me to enjoy living a single life for the first time in years and staying up late talking to my friends as we prepared to walk across the graduation stage in May. My roommates and I bonded over the trauma of having roof-rats in the walls of the used-to-be-frat house we called home. I learned a lot about myself in my final semester of college, but I think I have learned even more since then.

I left campus at the end of May and moved back in with my parents for a few months. I celebrated my 21st birthday and started my first ever big girl job; two pretty big milestones. Come August, after a summer well-spent at home, I made the decision to move out of my parents house and into my own apartment. A space all to myself was something I have dreamed of probably since I was 16 and downloaded Pinterest for the first time. My 18-year-old self is crying and throwing a fit that I still live in Virginia, but 21-year-old me is telling her to shut up and deal with it, there’s still plenty of time to move somewhere new. After a few weeks of living alone, I decided the space needed a little bit more life in it. Enter Stella: a one-year-old black and white tuxedo cat I rescued from the SPCA. She hates when the dryer is running because it’s noisy and loves to wake me up in the middle of the night by laying on my head. She is the perfect addition to my apartment, and to my life.

For the first couple of months in the apartment, I was working two jobs. Remote, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., corporate work during the day, and then on my feet from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. waitressing at night. The first pays my bills, but the second provided me with social interaction in the evenings and friends to hang out with after work. However, after a few months of giving every ounce of energy I have to work, I’ve come to learn the importance of not working 80 hours a week. This was another hard decision that I had to make this year, because for as long as I can remember I have always been a hustler [please use definition one here, not two through five]. I loved a constant go, go, go lifestyle in college and even in high school, but in the past few months I’ve realized how important it is to have time to do nothing. Or better yet, free time to see friends and pursue hobbies and passions. Working 24/7 does not lend itself to a very mentally fulfilling life, in fact, it’s much harder on your mental health when you don’t have time to do the things that make you happy.

For example: this was my first week working just one job, and I had the time and mental capacity to sit down and write something for the first time in months.

While most of this stuff seems positive and uplifting, that’s because I’ve chosen to highlight the good stuff (“when you focus on the good, the good get’s better” or however that cheesy Pinterest quote goes). At the end of the day, I’d argue that 2022 was easily one of my hardest years to date, but maybe that just comes with growing up. Despite all these encouraging life updates, I have spent so much of this year feeling lost and incredibly confused. I have struggled (and continue to struggle) to figure out who I am, who I want to be, and where those things intersect. It’s been difficult to accept that I’m actually not supposed to have it all figured out — I’m only 21 for god’s sake. But there’s a pretty significant learning curve in the months that follow college graduation and while I have always been someone who feels very in touch with “the real world” per say, “the real world” has, quite frankly, kicked my ass this year.

I have had to learn to relinquish the need to be in control of everything in my life. Harder yet, I also had to learn that there are some lessons that you have to learn by making mistakes for yourself. You can’t always learn from your friends’ mistakes, or by reading about them in a book. Sometimes you just have to get out there, face life, and learn from it. While it’s not always fun, I’ve come to understand that that’s just part of growing up. It’s easy to act mature, but it’s harder to actually be mature and make decisions that reflect that act.

However, the light side of the darkness has shown me how absolutely amazing my real, true, best friends are (shoutout to you, you know who you are). For a long time I was blind to the support system I had around me, but I realized that when I needed them, they were there in an instant. Which in turn showed me that you actually don’t have to deal with things entirely on your own when you have people who genuinely want the best for you and want to help you through tough times.

So, there it is. My 2022 all wrapped up in one blog post. While it doesn’t show you all the tears I cried or the belly-aching laughs I had, it gives you a little bit of an insight into the reality of my first few months post-grad and some of the life lessons I have come to learn. Without a doubt there will be more to learn and laugh about in the year to come.

Lastly, for those of you who made it all the way to the end of this, I promise that in 2023, there will be more blog posts.

Happy Holiday, everyone!