With the incoming of the new year comes the annual tidal wave of New Year’s resolution posts and inspirational videos. My dashboards tend to become overrun with excessively cheery, optimistic, and enthusiastic posts which are intended to celebrate and help spark others into pursuing their own resolutions, but they tend to rub me the wrong way these days. Those posts usually strike me as being needlessly over-the-top and have more of a guilt-trip effect on me than a motivational one.
While I don’t say anything because I don’t want to rain on the parades of my friends and family who are in good spaces, my feeds have been driving me a little nuts over the last couple of weeks thanks to all of these posts. However, amid all of the stereotypically exuberant sentiments, there have been a few voices ringing in the new year that feel a bit more grounded, honest, and realistic. Sadly, most of them have been clustering around a theme pretty well captured by a comic drawn by Sarah Anderson (here’s her cartoon site if you want to see more of her work):
I say “sadly” because I find it inherently depressing that this is such a common theme among those who aren’t blithely plowing ahead, but it’s a theme that rings true with me as well. The last two years have been rough and painful for many of us, to put it mildly, and I don’t particularly see much reason to believe that things will suddenly and miraculously turn around in 2018. This isn’t to say that 2018 can’t prove to be a good year, but I don’t see that happening without each of us fighting to make it happen and putting in the work.
I started this blog a few months ago intending to actually post here, both about the garden I started and about my experiences with depression. This was supposed to be a therapeutic tool for me, and I’ve hardly touched it since I wrote up the welcome post. Since August, I’ve started a few different posts, but I haven’t finished or published any of them. Some were about my indoor garden which has since gone through two cycles of flourishing and then dying, once because of some mysterious illness that knocked out all of my plants over night, and once because of neglect from being moved to a back room for the holidays. Others were about a number of emotional ups and downs which were tied to hopeful opportunities followed by setbacks that have felt like crushing blows when coupled with more chronic challenges.
Generally speaking, I’m not one for New Year’s resolutions, but this year I’m going to give one a shot. I had been doing a pretty good job of managing my depression for a while, but over the last couple of months, the depression has been wriggling its way back in. I’m doing my best to stay on top of it, including talking to my doctor to manage my meds, taking said meds, and looking for a new counselor, but I’ve always found writing helpful too when I can get myself to sit down and do it. It helps me quiet the five or six different trains of thought that tend to run through my head at once, and it gives me a venue to work through the emotions surrounding the events and situations that contribute to the depression.
So, with the caveat of a little flexibility since I know that life in my house frequently explodes and that when I get into a topic that I really do need to write about, I tend to write excessive amounts, my resolution is to try and write a post at least once every other week, and actually post it. Even if it’s just to say that things are a bit crazy this week, or that the next post is an emotional one that’s taking a while to write, I’m hoping to really start using this blog like I’d intended to when I started it – as a place to do some therapeutic writing.
2017 was a year of pain, change, and tumult for me. Between political turmoil, a societal climate that was largely toxic towards families like mine, several new medical challenges, and my life being turned on its head in a number of ways, 2017 was a year of significant transitions which will probably be difficult to remember in a particularly fond light.
At the same time, even with all of that pain and change, there was quite a bit of good mixed in with the bad. The results of the 2016 election were crushing for me and my family, but just a couple of months later, I marched with hundreds of thousands of women, men, and children in D.C. who came together to support one another and stand up in the face of hate, discrimination, and hopelessness. I may not be planning on going into the field I have a degree in, but I graduated from an amazing college that encouraged me to reach out beyond just my engineering major and rediscover my passion for education and teaching. I made new and amazing friends who I’ve managed to stay in touch with even if I don’t get to actually see them nearly as much as I want to. The healthcare of millions of fellow Americans was threatened, as well as basic civil rights of individuals with disabilities, but as a result, I spent months in D.C. with my family, alongside hundreds of others, advocating to protect our healthcare and fighting to defend the rights of those within the disability community, which was an amazing and inspiring experience unlike anything else I’ve ever done. The year was filled with out-of-the-blue medical adventures being sprung on me, but I have an amazing family and support system that’s been helping me navigate the medical side of things and acclimate to the day-to-day challenges that come with chronic pain.
Last year was not a great one. I wish that many of the negative points above hadn’t happened, but at the same time, they led to several of the amazing experiences that were the highlights of my year, including the Women’s March and the protests I participated in at the Capitol. It was a year that forced me to grow in ways that I probably wouldn’t have – at least not now and not this quickly – otherwise. Somehow, I suspect that this year will continue the theme of painful growth, but I fully intend to face it down and continue to do my best to find the positives amongst the challenges.
So, here’s to 2018, growing, and putting in the work to make it a good year.
My Therapeutic Garden 