new year

new year
I don’t usually reflect on past years or think much about new ones come January. Mostly because the calendar year seldom signals any change for me. I think more in terms of the school year, or my age. This year is the first that I’m not in school, and the first in four years that I haven’t been busy with exams and papers. 2006 was also an “important” year: we graduated, I left a city and group of people that were my home and love and escape and reality for four years, I committed and applied to medical school, A. and I loved and traveled and broke up, I moved into an apartment in San Francisco, I started my first full-time job and derived a new sense of failure and also a new kind of fulfillment, I found myself more distant from my family than when I was 3000 miles away. I was able to organize my photographs and mementos from the past couple of years, I had more time to keep in touch, I had to choose what I wanted to leave at home and what to take for my new place. It was difficult, because I wanted my place to feel different from college but I hadn’t accumulated or done anything new yet, and I felt a step behind my new life. For these and other reasons I can’t quite discern, this year is the first that feels like a new beginning, or at least a time to think about what I’ve been and what I want to be.

Perhaps this comes from learning more about myself and people this past year than I have in a long while, maybe ever, and growing in ways I didn’t anticipate. It’s scary, and comforting, to think there’s so much we don’t know. So what is it that I learned? Nothing novel or anything I haven’t thought before, but the thing that was special about 2006 was it wasn’t mere thought, it was actual experience (even if much of that experience happened internally).

The last stretch of Harvard in 2006 was so much more difficult than I foresaw, and so was post-graduation, not because it was bad but because it was so full of everything and many times I felt too small to hold it. No other year have I seen my flaws more deeply and clearly, things that worked against me and what I wanted for others. Getting fixated on little things, being stubbornly self-contained, not being able to get past things and improve, taking advantage of some love and not even recognizing other forms. It's amazing how you can be so aware of your faults but still struggle so much to change. I do think that this happened because of the challenges I accepted and created, and so, it was a byproduct of something necessary. And the faults aren't so bad when the ones you care about seem to like you anyway, and when you know that you, like everyone, are fine and can always keep trying. It was the best surprise to know someone who pushed me to make these efforts, not with pressure but with the steady force of just being there.

And I tried really hard this year. Seems like an odd phrase because I can't quite follow it up with concrete phrases of what I tried really hard to do. Sometimes to stay the same despite everything, and sometimes to be better because of everything. Vague. Through it, I found that I am capable of reaching out after all, and the people who you really love and trust will be there waiting for you. These are few and rare, and thus all the more deserving of the inner effort it takes for me to ask for them. It’s okay to need things from people. I didn’t feel weak, like I feared. It sounds so obvious, but I really did feel more human, at my most broken and torn and confused. I hope that I’ve given a lot of myself. It will always be my nature to keep certain things close, not because I don’t want to share but mostly because I’m not naturally good and open with explicit expression. I also find more and more that this is the way a lot of people are, or at least the people close to me, and that everyone wants/needs signs that you care and want to know before they reveal themselves. And I care and want to know, and there are other people who do too, and they’re worth it. There’s still a long way to go, and all this was the main theme of the story I wrote for creative nonfiction this past semester. It ended: “Still scared, but feeling more capable, I continue.”

At the same time, it’s okay to feel and be alone. During certain moments, it was hard to be away from the bustle of school and the cove of company that keeps me busy and warm. It was odd because before this I’ve always been fine with being alone, but I guess this was a different kind of alone. Feeling loneliness then was new, and though sometimes that did make me feel weak, I ultimately grew to see it again as a human vulnerability. As lonely as that was, I’m glad to have gone through it. Knowing that some things exist independent of environment and other people was something I couldn’t have really felt otherwise.

I’m also glad to have been immersed in college and then be removed from it in the same year, as hard as that also was. Because even though I can’t avoid defining some things as inextricably tied to the college phase and that time in our lives, I can see better now how we are beyond that, not just now after graduation but even within those confines. Yes, the people I know and love do define my college experience, but they themselves aren’t wholly defined by the experience, and neither am I. One of the things I’m most thankful for is the perception of life as a thing that stretches and expands. It helps me find the balance between appreciating what’s past and what’s now, and what can come.

I’ve never made resolutions either. I always thought that kind of thing should be an ongoing process, but I can see the benefit of having a defined time and reason to say, I’m going to do something. I’ve also seen how unrealistically ambitious I tend to get when making lists of to-do. So this year I made some concrete resolutions that will be hard but not impossible: learn to (somewhat) play the guitar, cook a new recipe each week, and get to know San Francisco even more. And those harder conceptual resolutions? I resolve to try to remember all this, to be open, to be more patient and take things one at a time when I’m overwhelmed, to be good to other people and less self-involved, to be the “sort of person upon whom nothing is lost.” I suppose it may be a cop-out to say that my resolution is to try, but 2006 taught me that it’s quite a hard thing to just try, and I don’t want to overlook my own weaknesses in making too bold of a resolution.

So this year, in summary? It has been my happiest, my hardest, my loveliest, my saddest, my best, my favorite, my most. It’s not the last.