Life Update: Stuck In Old Ways

 New year, new me. The mother of all New Years cliches. People have been making New Years resolutions, promising to themselves that they'll change their ways and become better people. This year will be my year. This year I will start taking care of myself. This year I will not let myself down. And two weeks later, they have already forgotten about all of those promises.

New Years is one of those holidays that doesn't really make sense to me. Or more like I don't feel any sort of way about it, I don't have a personal connection to it. After falling ill, I had to stop drinking, and being a Finn, New Years was always about getting drunk, so the little meaning the holiday used to have disappeared too. There's no specific way I "celebrate" the year ending and the new one beginning, the moment just comes and goes while I'm lazing around with my best friend, and that's it. This year was no different either. 

Exactly one year ago, I was feeling confident that the upcoming 12 months would treat me with kindness, and I would find my way in life after the traumatic break-up from my ex. That I would get better, start feeling better, taking care of myself again and graduate as a Bachelor of Arts. 2022 was going to be a good year. My year. Things just couldn't any worse than they already were. 

Funny how rare positive changes are for me. 

I'm not expecting anything from this year. I have hopes, a lot of them actually, but I'm not really expecting any of them to become reality. That might make me a pessimist, but I don't think it'd be unreasonable for me to be one at this point in my life. I'll accept this year as it arrives, no matter what it brings my way. What other choice do I really have?

numbers.

In a lot of ways, I feel like I never grew up. Time has passed me, and I was never able to follow along. The numbers in my calendar are getting bigger and bigger, there's only one zero in them anymore, and instead there's two twos now and it's confusing me. It doesn't make sense to me, how I feel like the year is still 2012 even though it hasn't been 2012 in eleven years. Each New Year's Eve that I live through takes me further away from those times, but that isn't comforting to me. Instead, I feel like each New Years distances myself from the real me, and I am losing the connection to who I really am. I become a shell of who I once was, a ghost of a person I was supposed to become but was never allowed to. A shadow and a memory of something that withered before it had the chance to bloom. 

Ten years ago, in June 2013, I graduated from elementary school. I am excited to see what that anniversary will be like for me. It feels like it was just yesterday that I stepped out of that school building with one thought making me smile wider than the brilliant grades in my diploma.

I will never be coming back here.

Whispering from the past,

ichigonya