Examining Myself

Socrates' words, "The unexamined life is not worth living," doesn't necessarily refer to outsiders noticing we are here, but it sure helps life feel more worthwhile to get a little wave now and then.  But I have had a headache and my mood is finally on a medicinally induced upswing, so it's time for beer and self-reflection.

2013 felt like years.  When I consider events of about a year ago (underground ziplining in Louisville, an overnight trip to Chicago), they seem more like memories of three or four years ago.  To oversimplify 12 months of human existence into a list, I had two breakups, one tumor, two surgeries, the death of my last living grandparent, my brother got married for the third time and my sister got engaged for the first.  I managed to spend all my vacation and personal days within the first quarter of the year with medical appointments and surgeries. I spent a week knowing I had a tumor and not knowing if it was cancer. The day after my grandma died I had to live in somebody else's house alone for three weeks. I've been told I was the most selfless person someone had met; somebody else told me I was the most selfish.  I was called a best friend, a waste of time, and was "baby" to more people than I could have expected.

Life is weird.  The more I live and the more that happens to me, all the coincidences and unlikely events, the more I realize (but the harder it is to predict) that life is freakin' weird.  My life is constantly changing and even more so in my own perception.  My mind can be in so many places and ways so quickly, and all that I know exists changes with it. Some moments I am the strongest I have ever been, and others the most despicable I have ever been.

Last year saw a lot of tears.  I faced some of the most painful challenges I ever have and overcome things I never thought I could or would have to.  I fucked up in ways I thought I was too smart to.  I learned that sometimes going through your biggest challenges... hurt that makes your ego tear and your heart blister, like your existence is on fire... can look from the outside like some sad bitch sitting around in her underwear. The hardest things I overcame had no victory, no satisfaction.  Just the luxury to keep going and meet newer and more humiliating pains.

Hopefully there are also more victories to be had. No matter how quiet, I look forward to them. No matter how much they hurt or how long it takes to get to them.  Measurement by years is arbitrary, and I know I can't catalog myself by them at all.  Even charting events on any kind of timeline is tenuous; so much is constantly happening and overlapping and changing. Still, there is a little comfort that the year 2013 is now behind me.