Another New Year, Dammit - 1-2-11

Another year. I can’t be so naïve as I used to be, wondering with happy anticipation what the year would bring. The old, old exercise of picturing the next New Year’s Eve and looking back on all that had happened. Would this be the year I would fall in love at last? Would this be the year I would go somewhere exciting, do something bold, be the woman I always hoped to be? Would this year I face some challenge and overcome it? The year I know who I am, what I want, where I’m going – would this be that seminal year? Would this be the year I see as the turning point in my life that angled my trajectory up a bit? Would this year my life actually invites me in?

God. How long has it been since I actually asked those questions, when my hope outlasted my winters? New Years 2008, I was giving up on love and dating and my parents bought me The Secret. New Year’s 2009, I was down to breathing in and out in my bed, counting down the minutes until my parole was up. New Year’s 2010, I was shattered. New Year’s 2011, I’m smart enough not to wonder what New Year’s 2012 will herald.

I do want to go forth and reintroduce myself to my life. I want to dig out from my barricaded burrow and see friends again. I want to stretch and start running with something worthwhile in my hands. And at the same time, I don’t want to move my flabbed self, don’t want to go to gatherings where I have nothing of my own life – and therefore of my own self – to offer. Part of me is stymied by the new truth of the falsehood of loneliness I always tried to believe. To accept that there really is no one out there for me, no one to notice me, no one to fight for me means there’s no one to prime myself for. So there is left only me to receive all I’ve worked for. So I am left with work as the only fulfilling thing to look forward to. A project, a job, a mission to better someone’s life. Is it enough? No. Will it be? Yes.

And even though I am trying to choose hope, to choose a belief that good things are coming, I dread the thought of 2011. The only life that ever invited me to its little party was loss and pain and disillusionment.

And I just don’t think I can take another year like the last three. I just can’t.

I mean, there has to be a break in all the bad. There has to be a point where the pain has to end. All those promises about victory and desires fulfilled and purposes found and plans to prosper and not to harm have to come true in this lifetime. They can’t just be for the afterlife. Why on earth would anyone come to God then? If decades from now is the only promise met and want given? There has to be some year in my life where I’m lifted from the rocks and rescued from the waves. That is the seminal year. Not when great deeds are done and great loves discovered. Just when the pain ends.