Today is December 31, 2016.
Today is the final day of the biggest year of my life.
I say biggest with complete intention, as it was far from the best and not even close to the worst. As with all things, time should always be revered with a healthy dose of perspective.
This has been a year of losing. I lost my marriage. I lost my sense of family completion. I lost a dog. I lost my favorite shoes. (RIP black ballet flats that went with every single thing I've ever owned. You're sorely missed.) I lost so much... I lost self loathing. I lost sadness. I lost the stone that I've carried around in the pit of my stomach for so many years. I lost tears, and possessions, and a phone, and anger, and hair, and stress, and so so many things I'm forgetting because I've lost their memory.
This has been a year of finding. I have grown and changed and found myself for the first time in a very long time. I have found love, true love, love like I've never before known. I've found dignity and self respect, creativity and worth and value in every moment.
Perspective.
Rather than list off all of the New Year's resolutions I'm going to once again fail to give life to beyond January 2017, I'm going to do this. I resolve to continue growing and changing and finding and losing and living my very best life with my very best friend and my newfound respect for those I hold dear. I resolve to kiss more and hug often and cry with tears of sadness and joy every chance I get. I will find trailing threads of suffering relationships and weave them back into the fabric of my being, and cut the few remaining threads trailing from relationships that need to stay in the past.
I also resolve to write. The fulfillment and joy that comes from emptying oneself through words has been left by the wayside for far too long. I will write every single day. Here, on this blog, for myself to read and reflect upon, and for the scant few of you that I share it with. Some days will be a sentence. Some days, a novella. Poetry, prose, stories, laughter, enlightenment... whatever it is and whatever it may be, I will put it here somehow.
Beginning tomorrow, I will join the flocks of people resolving to change something in their lives, grow and become better in some way. Lose weight, focus on the positive, do better, be better, feel better. love better... all of those things that we promise ourselves to do in order to gain insight into that existential base at the very bottom of our hearts, that core question of time and life and its meaning, that feeling of necessity that pushes us toward becoming something more than we are every single day. Whatever that core is, that drive and deeply complex wonderment at what we're doing here in the first place... I resolve to build upon it as necessary, and do my particular brand of growth and change with gusto and passion. Not every day, no. But as many days as I can. The best I can.
