The year of renewal: 2019.
It’s cliché to say that the year has been full of change and growth (are there ever any years that aren’t?), but 2019 was a big one. More than any other, it feels as if this year has been pivotal in building foundations for the future. It feels good to step forward into the new decade with the momentum of 2019—but it’s also terrifying. When you know that the things you have always wanted for your life are so close they are just around the corner (so close, in fact, that some of those things may actually already be here), you become even more scared to fail; to lose it all; to look like a fool and to make the mistakes the little voice inside your head taunts you with.
This is the first year I have felt truly stable in Canada. This January, I will have lived here for 3 years. The first two were filled with what felt like a revolving door of changes: moving house 4 times; making friendships with people who were inevitably going to leave; ending a 6-year relationship with the person I moved to Canada and spent most of my 20s with; managing health issues and hospital visits; switching jobs 4 times (two of which I worked at the same time and had nothing to do with my chosen career path, but were perfect jobs for what I thought was a 2-year sabbatical from my previous life); meeting and falling in love with my current partner, with whom I share a home and with whom I adopted a dog we named Freya (you can read about her at this post).
As someone who is a deep and reflective thinker (read: overthinks many situations to varying degrees) and a habitual and organised planner (read: has difficulty with the unknown and the unexpected), it was unnerving to feel unanchored and unsure of all that I was previously sure of (if you like, you can read about that anguish in my 2018 year-in-review). Looking back, I can see how part of my pain and insecurity was due to having experienced so much change and instability in such a compressed period of time. The bigger part, however, is due to my own shortcoming in how I looked at some of those situations, and my tendency to take personal responsibility for things that are beyond my control, or to feel down about myself or a situation where a different attitude would probably have been more helpful.
There is something to be said about rooting down and feeling grounded, and how deeply that can affect you, your interactions with people, and the way you think about yourself and your life. At the start of the year I started paving the way for grounding myself once more: seeking out a job in my career; seeking out more freelance clients; making plans with J for the future. All these plans, once little seeds, now bear fruit.
Now, riding that space between where major plans and ideas are becoming more solid realities, I also navigate the close relationship between excitement and fear. For now that I know I really am capable of achieving what I set out to achieve, I am accountable for my successes and my failures. I cannot blame external circumstances for my happiness—or lack thereof. Taking charge of yourself and your life and forging your path with intention is terrifying. There are many risks and there’s the possibility of things not quite working out as planned, as well as the possibility of realising, after having spent so much emotional & physical energy on a goal, that it was not what you wanted after all. There’s the fear of disappointing your loved ones, but there’s also the fear of disappointing yourself.
2019 was the last year of my 20s. When I was an early teen I had set many lofty goals for this decade of my life that I put a stupendous amount of pressure on myself to complete according to a certain timeline. It is only since having moved to Canada that I conceded, finally, that everything has its own time, and that I need to trust the timing of my life. It caused a lot of unnecessary stress and heartache having certain expectations from myself and my life that were not only unrealistic, they also locked me into this idea that my life would amount to nothing if I didn’t stick to the plan. While my 29-year-old self has made peace with all that, perhaps my 12-year-old self is still coming to terms with it all. I do not look back with regret, because for every one of those milestones I may not have ticked off the list, I gained many other significant, valuable and memorable experiences in the last decade that will help me to be better prepared for all the things that I still want. Not meeting certain timelines for our life does not make any of us any more or less of a person.
Like I said, it can be difficult forging forward with intent; not living your life according to other people’s dreams or expectations; turning your back on things you thought you wanted but end up not being ready for when they come, or realising it wasn’t what you wanted after all.
I’m not going to write about what I goals I hope to achieve in the year to come. What I have wanted for my life has remained consistent for a long time—now, it’s just about continuing to work towards those goals without being overly concerned or overwhelmed about if and when I will get to them; without giving my happiness away unnecessarily. If I can finally work on that, I’ll be ready for anything.
Photos below: winter in Canmore, and winter in Vancouver, B.C.
