Hope

Well, it's the last day. Once more, Holidailies has provided me with a place to dump thoughts, even if not all of them were terribly brilliant. I enjoy writing during this month, and who knows, maybe this time I'll even update more regularly than every 6 months or so!

After such a stressful year, I've tried to take the last two weeks to process what has happened and come up with a direction to go in for the next year. One of the curious things about humans is our general resiliency. We may have terrible experiences in one year, but still, at the end of that year, we have hope that we can do better, something will go our way. Some call this foolishness because it can never be perfect. I call it brilliance; without this hope, we would be dead in the water. 

Those with no hope never go anywhere, they never change their lives for the better. They may look like they're trying sometimes, but ultimately you can't move forward unless you can see an actual path to walk on. 

I try to enter each year with a lot of hope. At the beginning of 2016, my main hope was to survive school and accomplish the goal of completing my teaching credential. Maybe the other stuff surrounding that didn't go as planned, but as an overarching goal, it worked. I accomplished the goal and did a few other things besides. Almost won NaNo (winning would have been an actual miracle of extended time in the day), managed to write here 30 out of 31 days. Got more involved in the soccer world digitally and in person, which was basically my only hobby aside from school.

There were definitely things that I wouldn't like to repeat, but then again, that is a source of hope. Hope that I can do better in certain aspects. Aside from my major goal, The Thesis, my hope is to make sure I'm physically and emotionally healthy enough to get good focused work done without my brain self-sabotaging for days at a time. My hope is to write some fiction, lest I tend towards a soulless existence like I do. It doesn't have to be good fiction, it just has to function as my way of processing the world, as it has always been. I will need that in my life, undeniably.

My future goals include building relationships with professionals in the area and bolster my contacts in schools, so that when jobs come up I know where I need to go. My hope is to actually have relationships with my friends that include more than a sad, "I miss you..." "Me tooo..." every week or so. Despite my introverted nature and my tendency to take jobs that put me in casual contact with a lot of different people every day, I do actually need some of that small group or one-on-one friend time. I may or may not have forgotten about that need at points during the year, always to my detriment.

There is always something to improve on. On my good days, I don't take this as a terrible thing. Not ever being perfect is a part of being human. My hope is to have the good days outnumber the bad ones, even if I have to force it sometimes. 

Here's hoping that I'll be able to record some of that journey and share my road with you.

Until next year.