Looking Back on 2019

The year, and the decade are coming to a close and with that I want to remind myself of what’s important and what I love. I may sound like a broken record, given my post from October and that I haven’t posted since. But I have to remind myself that this whole site and the projects are about progress over perfection. The only way to achieve progress is to keep going even when you have failed. Especially when you have failed yourself.

I’m currently working on a piece about the lessons I have learned from the education system and particularly from my university education. I will link that when it’s completed. But for now, I’m leaving this here to remind myself that I have made a lot of great changes this year and if I keep my commitment to myself and keep posting, things can only go up from here.

My Goals from 2019

Last year at the beginning of the year, I made a few goals for myself relating to different spheres of my life: family, health, and career. I want to reflect on each of those goals and prepare myself to make new goals for the coming year.

Family

Last year I wanted to reconnect with my family. Since I left my family home to take a gap year abroad in 2015, I had felt a rift form between my family and I and I felt it was important to put a concentrated effort into changing that this year. If there’s one thing I’ve experienced this year, it’s that almost anything can be improved with just a little bit of consistent effort.

So, I wrote letters to my family members apologizing for hurtful things I had done in the past and attempting to reconnect. (If this blog is any sort of proof, I often find it easier to sort out my thoughts and feelings in writing rather than through speech) But, after that I made the effort to call consistently and make trips home.

I planned a trip to Boston with my siblings and ran a marathon with my dad. I visited home for my mom’s birthday and spent a weekend in my sister’s freshman dorm.

Overall, I feel that this is the part of my life that has improved the most, which is good because I feel that it’s also the part that is most important. I think, I often expected relationships with family to be easy or come naturally and when they didn’t I was disappointed. But even (and sometimes especially) family relationships take work like anything else.

Health

I made a goal of getting fit at the beginning of last year and was disappointed when I seemed to be heading in the opposite direction of that goal. But like with family, health and making the right choices doesn’t always come naturally.

Things started to change when I actually implemented a plan and was cooking for myself and working out consistently and I noticed a lot of progress. Unfortunately, like the blog in general, November and December were a slump in my routine. But now that I know what I have to do and how, I’m confident that I can build it back up in 2020.

Career

I spent a lot of 2019 worrying about what sort of career, if any, I would be able to have with a bachelor’s degree in linguistics. So, one of my goals was to figure out what I really wanted to do with myself after I’ve graduated.

I haven’t exactly figured that out, but I have figured out what type of work environment I like which is a step in the right direction. And, I’ve let go of a lot of my anxiety over not having everything figured out yet which is even better.