Thoughts on 2010.

I was thinking about the year that just passed, thinking that it feels like more than a year has passed. Every year so far has more or less felt this way. I wonder when this will stop? When maturation ends, I'm guessing. Well. As long as I'm young and stupid and there are unexplored parts of existence, each year will offer up new experiences for me to inspect and then to hoard as evidence of having lived at all.

This particular year, new directions and new mentalities. First high, first unsupervised extended stay in foreign country, first apartment, first music festival, first solo trip to a city to visit friends, first blatantly illegal act (speeding not included), first audio piece produced. Unpleasant landmarks, too. First blemish on my academic record, first visit to therapy, first complete failure to live up to extracurricular expectations.

First time being pulled over. First full week of cooking for myself. First attempt to sneak back into house in a drunken state. First fuck buddy.

Fourth failed relationship. Second time getting too close to a friend despite predicting consequences. First tear shed over almost-failed friendship. Umpteenth avowal never to get attached again.

The fallacy of the story-teller: I like to think of life as cyclical. Junior year of high school was transformative; I think my third year at college has and will continue to prove so as well. I think therapy helped in that regard. I think I know myself better than I ever have before. I think I know what I want, or at least how to start knowing.

What I want is not a perfect GPA. Neither is it, I suspect, a perfect life. Nor is it complete self-reliance.

But I'll spare myself the embarrassment of having to shove my meaning into hackneyed words. :) Time to eat dinner, anyway, and to savor the last couple of days of break.

FutureMe.org.

I occasionally send my future self emails. This is one I got today, from end-of-sophomore-year me:

Hi,

Life is a series of sadnesses.
True or false? Why always emotionally true?

Melancholy sneaks up at endings, transitions, destabilizations and uprootings.

Who are you? Are you still scared of being yourself? Are you nervous about the future? Are there prospects?

Learned this year: relationships involve more sacrifice than you knew; people are more difficult than you expected; school is not everything but the rest of it matters more than you understood before.

Forgot this year: selfhood, independence, solitude.

Summer: fully recover from relationship; read and write and fully involve self in literature; understand self-development.

For happiness, perhaps try to really know the importance of the things you care about. Stop being fickle. Stop being easily infatuated. Be level-headed. Avoid panicking.

Most importantly (and the thought that weighs most heavily right now) -- be over this last mistake, completely. Over it. Not even doubtful of any of it. It's not enough to be able to rationalize happiness. Coming to peace must be instinctive, must be earned.

Best friends: A and B and C. Has this changed? Hm.

Hope you're doing well. If not, things will get better. I promise.

Ever more so,
Me

Looking back, I think I was dead-on with this summer. And I should take my own advice: No rashness. Make decisions carefully.

I'm very ready for this year to be amazing.

Tibet.

My last computer access for quite some time.
I'm leaving for a six-week service project in rural Sichuan in five hours.
I find myself at the cusp of something thrilling and daunting. I don't know if I can handle it. I have such crises of faith.

I took a walk with a good friend today and we talked about the momentum of life. I find my life to be like a book to which I constantly forget the opening chapters. But once I spend time remembering the beginning, I've already lost track of what's actually happening. So much to wrap a mind around.

The point is that we learn something from everything, so I need to think about everything.

Reflection, reflection, reflection. Then, when I get back here, I will right some wrongs, make a few important decisions, be a better person. Good, solid plan.

Here comes a feeling you thought you'd forgotten.

In Twelfth Night, the social order comes undone--women fall in love with women, gender becomes malleable, nobles marry servants, servants imagine that they could become nobility. To parallel the end-of-Christmas festival after which it was named and at which it was performed, Shakespeare's play effects a mood of licensed disorder--and things get more than a little crazy.

Life mimics art. Not that our last day of classes (affectionately called LDOC by all those who care) is the same as Twelfth Night, but in a way it performed the same function: loosened everyone up, broke social customs, made everyone rethink friend circles and habits. People I knew in completely different ways found their way to my room and met each other and mingled, we played a stream of trashed up music, tried our best to stay in a comfortable stupor (difficult to maintain for more than five hours straight), etc. Rarely are so many people so willing to get completely messed up, and rarely do we all find ourselves so devoted to having a good time. In the end, I came out with new and unforeseen conceptions of everyone, of social relationships, of how life could be if only academic stress didn't interfere with the living of it.

And the effects have not worn off. Reading period has been a time drain: last night in the library until sun-up with hardly any work done (talking, instead, to good and new friends--rehashing the year in perspective), today four hours at dinner off-campus and bantering forever.

Now to study? But how could I? LDOC is still in the air and with it a sense of non-urgency. At the end of this journey, I feel very much the way I did at Oxford last summer--looking back on a period of my life with a vague sense of having grown in as-of-yet still inexplicable ways. But that time I was only able to construct the narrative months afterward (at the expense of having by that point already made a few missteps), and I hope I'll be a quicker study this time around.