Saturday was the second anniversary of my first post to this blog. I feel like I should do something to mark the occasion, but I am not quite sure what to say.
That is sort of a running theme with me lately. When I started this blog two years ago I had just graduated from college and I wasn’t sure what was about to happen next, but I was excited to tell stories along the way. Since that time, this blog has done a lot of great things for me. It has introduced me to some amazing friends, and it even got me a job. At times it also served as a wonderfully cathartic space.
This time last year I had this anxious feeling like I had been spinning my wheels in the mud and I wasn’t going anywhere. Living at home was stressing me out, and I wasn’t yet sure how I’d be able to save up for Paris. But I had this wonderful little archive to serve as proof that things had changed (in ways both good and bad).
Two years after I started this blog, I am writing a confused entry from a tiny apartment in Paris, so I don’t really need that record to confirm that things have changed. Still, it has a nice way of putting things into perspective.
Especially now, as I prepare to move out of this apartment, and I know that in two and a half months I will once again return to my parents’ house.
Yesterday I attended a graduating students/new alumni cocktail event at my school. I will not actually complete my MA until late this year. Unfortunately, as a winter graduate, my choice was to walk very early (now) or very late (next May). Since I have a younger sister graduating from high school and a younger brother graduating from college next May, it seemed like an unreasonable burden to place on my family and myself, given that I have a choice.
It is weird to hear all this talk of finality. It was strange to watch the people who started this program in January 2011 or August 2010 talk about this university. Awards were given out and I stood on the sidelines and clapped for people that I have grown to know, respect, and appreciate. I have not been here long enough for any of that.
When I finished my undergrad I was so excited to participate in the various sending off moments, but there were others that gave me tiny pangs of regret — places where I felt my time could have been better spent. There were things that I wish I could have been a part of.
I didn’t feel any of that this time. I made a lot of choices this year and I can’t say I am proud of all of them, but those aren’t my regrets.
My regrets are the ten pounds I put on from eating macarons and brioche suisse from the bakery around the corner and the fact that I still can’t speak much more French than my name, a food order, and profusely apologizing for my inability to speak French.
That being said, this little blogiversary is a good time for me to take stock, because this date is only significant to me. These birthdays mean something to me; the trick is deciding what. It isn’t something for me to discover; there is no predestined meaning here. It is all pretty silly, trivial, trite, whatever. It can only have the value that I choose to invest in it. I get to decide what this symbolic date’s passing means to me.
The short answer is that I am still working it out, and that this post is kind of silly because it doesn’t deal in any sort of conclusions. Neither does life.
And oh, there it is! The canned wisdom. But this post isn’t for you, dear reader. I appreciate you and all of your comments. I appreciate, more than I can say, the support that you give by leaving comments that encourage me through the hurdles and help me congratulate myself when my inner critic isn’t willing to allow that. I thank you for the shameless little ego boost I get from subscriber counts and page views. Those are all very nice and much appreciated. I can only hope that something in the thousands of bullshit words I have spewed onto the internet over the last two years resonated with you in a way that has made this worth your time.
As for the question of why this matters to me: this, like my graduation on Thursday, isn’t a conclusion. I think about myself graduating from college two years ago and how far my life is from what I thought it would be now. The thing is, I never would have imagined this.
I have missed many marks, the most obvious of which, right now, is my lack of certainty. I have no more figured anything out than I did two years ago or six years ago when I graduated from high school. I’m not sure that I even want to think about what six years ago me would have expected of present day me, because I’m sure I wouldn’t even know that person. The person that I would have dreamed up, the being that would have sprung forth from that 18-year-old imagination would be an absolute stranger to present-day me.
All I can say is that there are no such absolutes. That there are no such concrete answers. That after all this, I have learned so much about myself and the world around me, but none of it brings me any closer to a sense of certainty.
This blog is probably the only thing that I have committed myself to since graduation. Since graduating from college, the longest relationship that I have formed in my life is with this blog.
This “birthday” is an acknowledgement that dates like this, moments of this nature — my blog anniversary, my “graduation” — are not meant to represent conclusions.
So I bring you now to the cliche crescendo, for which I will not apologize because this post is, again, for me. Cliched but true. It’s one of those little life lessons that I need to learn over and over again: As much time as I spend beating myself up for missing the various marks I’ve set for myself, it is a worthwhile and perhaps even essential enterprise to take a moment to appreciate those milestones.
There isn’t much to be gained from dwelling on all the shit that I wish I would have done this year (not that I won’t dwell a little anyway). Instead, I can try to process some lovely advice I received recently. A dear friend told me that I will look back on this and think, “I moved to Paris and I survived and it was wonderful.”
That’s mostly true. And even where it wasn’t wonderful, it was educational and that’s worth something. Regardless of how much it feels like I am spinning my wheels at times, a lot has happened in the last two years.
As for all the regrets and the bullshit? All there is for me to do with THAT is move forward and try to do better in the future. Thank you, little blog, for two years of helping me vent, share, meet people, commiserate, and sometimes just post stupid gifs.
In that spirit, I leave you now with gifs of celebratory-looking people:
