Retrospective

Exactly one year ago, I wrote the following sentence (http://highsensitivity-emily.blogspot.com/2011/01/knowing-no-ing.html): "I'm going to approach this new year with a new attitude: I'm going to say no to saying no."  One year later, I am proud to say that I stuck to this resolution.  My pride is not a gold medal, and I do not wear it as if it were one.  At the risk of sounding dramatic (a risk I admittedly take pretty frequently), I feel like I have just crossed the finish line, limping and wheezing, having been lapped and re-lapped, and my only medal is the knowledge that I never stopped running.  My 2011 was characterized by personal, professional and spiritual vulnerability.  I took a good look at myself and made some changes that needed to be made; I entered into, initiated and deepened relationships with mixed results; I applied and interviewed and experienced professional rejection; and I came (closer) to terms with my doubt about my place in the world.  It is a place where heartache coexists with joy, rejection coexists with acceptance and cynicism coexists with dogged hope.  2011 was the year I placed experience before knowledge, and paradoxically, it was the year from which I learned the most.

How many times have you made the same new year's resolution?  Does your desire to lose weight or find the love of your life return to you like a trusty boomerang each January?  I think this is the case for most of us.  We like setting goals for ourselves, and we tend to become preoccupied by that one big one that seems to forever elude us.  Why set other goals if we can't accomplish the one that matters to us most?  Here's my problem with this kind of extreme thinking: what about those 364 days in between?  In the course of, say, one week, you may lose three pounds and have a meaningful conversation with a potential mate.  Do these things count for nothing if you end the year a few pounds heavier than your starting weight and still single?  I think not.  A year ago I was unhappily single, and today I am happy to have a better idea of the kind of person I want to spend my life with and willing to wait for that person to come along.  Significantly, this waiting does not involve pacing in an ivory tower; it involves hanging out with a lot of people and enjoying being my fabulous single self for the time being.  My advice to those who are single, heartbroken or strung along is to value yourself enough to value people who don't approach you with a name tag reading "Your soulmate."  Otherwise, you'll miss out on a lot of nice people (and, yes, a few wankers, but they are perhaps the best teachers of all).

Incidentally, I will be adopting the same resolution this year that I did last year: I will continue to be vulnerable for better and for worse.  Does this make me a hypocrite, as I have just indicated the fallacy of the boomerang resolution?  I don't believe so, and this is why: resolving to be vulnerable is essentially resolving to continue running this race known as life.  It is setting a goal to keep living a meaningful and generous life when the goals themselves are nowhere in sight.  It is realizing that the finish line doesn't appear after twelve months of majestic sprints, nasty falls, lapping and being lapped and recurring desires to turn around or stop altogether.  It is telling yourself, as someone very dear to me recently said, "Forward."  Forward.  Even as I write this retrospective, that is the direction I choose.