Open Letter to 2019

Dear 2019,

You have been a whirlwind. Not a rollercoaster, no. 2018 definitely had you beat there, which is why I think I neglected you on some level. I thought of you as simply "an intermediary period". Maybe it stemmed from spending Christmas away last year and feeling like my year really started in February when I got home. Or maybe because I believed that since I wasn't at my rock bottom when I had hard days/weeks/months, they "didn't count". In my head, your reign began just yesterday, 2019. Our time together truly was fleeting. However, my image of you is distorted. In reality, you were more than just a waiting period. I experienced things and I have changed. In you, I tallied many of my highest of highs. I felt happy, connected, and inspired. I felt, dare I say it, confident! And then I didn't. Fear slowly eroded away my shiny armor I had built up when I was living in a bubble in the first months of you. My head was the first to be exposed but soon my the rest of my body would follow suit. It was subdued and something I had experienced before, so I wasn't alarmed perhaps when I should have been. Before I knew I was falling, I was back in a hole. It still had my old furniture and a familiar smell. It was comforting and not scary like it when I first got there. It made it so much harder to leave, thus I didn't. I invited others into my hole. They brought ladders, ropes, even built stairs to help me out, still they could not force me to walk up them. People could get to me at their own will, but I could not reach who I wanted to reach from my space below the earth. I couldn't help those outside of the world I was living in because I could not distract them long enough from the fact that I could not pull them out of something that I was buried in, too. It was upon this realization that I began toying with the idea of leaving: walking up the stairs my caretakers had built just within my gaze. I could walk to the steps sure that walking up them would be no different. But their elevation was foreign. And I feared that my endurance could not withstand the distance. So I stayed. I stayed and wondered what I could be doing, who I could be serving if I had confidence in my ability to climb the fucking stairs. So, 2019, maybe the reason I don't recall you as a complete year of my life is that I spent the majority of our time in a hole. But I have done a lot of thinking while I have been in the hole. There was a lot of dreaming taking place under the hypothetical that I would, at some point, climb the fuck out. So I am ready for when I do. I have plans that I only could have imagined given the circumstances you gave me, 2019. So thank you for that, if nothing else. 

Glo