I spent the month of December doing a lot of big, exciting 2014 planning with The Stratejoy Holiday Council and it was an excellent life choice. I am now in a much better place heading into 2014; I was able to lay a lot of bad, ugly things from 2013 to bed. I got a lot of much-needed guidance in terms of assessing exactly how to switch gears.

In spite of my vague talking-around, I don’t think I have been exceptionally secretive about the basic fact that 2013 was a challenge for me. If this is news to you, well, that’s my brief explanation for the months that I went silent. The fun, shareable bits of my life could easily be condensed to 140 characters. What more was there to say? Plenty, I suppose — the correct rhetorical question is “What more was there that I wanted to say?”

In the beginning of the year my grandfather died and two months later I left Los Angeles. Those were concrete challenges that I understood how to talk about. The rest of the year was a very different, internal struggle. It was a mixture of not knowing how to express those problems and not always feeling brave enough to do it, even when I could find the words. Occasionally the problems weren’t mine to share.

Still, there were a lot of wonderful things in there too, and regretfully few of them made their way here, to my repository of feelings-I-am-willing-to-share-with-the-whole-world.

My best friend got married and I cried happy tears like the giant baby that I am. My family, in town for that wedding, ended up having a weird, but serendipitous and wonderful Superbowl Sunday, which may have been the beginning of a bizarre family tradition. I lived out of my car for a month and I never really talked to anyone about it because it was awkward at the time, but I actually kind of loved it. More on that later, perhaps, now that I’ve confessed to this, one of many subjects I felt obliged to keep to myself this year.

My drive home in March was surprisingly therapeutic. My best bloggy friend joined me for her first Coachella. I gave hugs to dearly missed college friends when I went to DC for my brother’s graduation. I spent a few days in Chicago with a couple girls from the short list of Actual Friends that I had in high school who I haven’t seen in years. I got to go to San Diego for the weddings of two of my cousins — one of which I was in — and a bachelorette party. I chopped off over a foot of hair and bleached the rest, an exceptional achievement in the art of “letting go.”

We took a family road trip to Brooklyn to move my beloved little sister into college. I went to Dallas, with two amazing bloggy friends and had the magical fortune to win a stay at a swanky Dallas hotel on the last day of our trip. (Dallas 2.0, coming soon.) In addition to spending the first part of the holidays in Chicago as my family does every year, I got to hang out with the life-faces of some amazing internet friends.

I made many new friends during my two stints as bridesmaid this year and got to check in with a number of amazing, wonderful people throughout the year. It’s hard to sit down and say, “Yes, this is a thing that I am proud of,” particularly in the scope of a challenging period. That said, I am genuinely proud of the fact that I was able to put all of these lovely people ahead of all my other shit when I needed to. It would have been so easy to check out entirely, but I did a good job of being present for them and that’s worth something.

Here in internetland lots of fun things happened! I was this year’s “Funniest Blogger” in the 20sb Bootleg Awards. (Which turned out to be an awkward distinction for the rest of the year. I was much funnier in 2012 when I was singing Disney songs on a river in the middle of Croatia with a random French family.) My beloved Snark Squad grew tremendously — we broke that magical 1,000 likes mark on Facebook and, as we mentioned in our 2013-in-review post, had 350 posts for the year. I’m immensely confident that 2014 will end up averaging more than a post a day which is kind of insane and awesome. I failed at VEDA, but did manage to put up 22 videos in August, about two thirds of which I was genuinely proud of.

I’ve done a lot of big year-in-review work already, as mentioned. Still, even as I typed this out, I had to go back and tuck in a few skipped highlights. There are probably still one or two items missing from this list.

I mentioned a few months ago that I hate the idea of presenting a sugar coated version of my life and pretending that it’s all sunshine and rainbows. Truly, I wish that I would have been more comfortable opening up when things were hard. That said, it’s also important to know when and how to let things go. I’m not entirely sure how to draw that line; there aren’t official rules for this. I do know, however, that all of this is what I want to carry with me.

There is a time and place for dragging ourselves through the hard, ugly shit. Maybe one day I will tell you the rest of it. Maybe not — maybe that stuff just stays with me. Right now, I’m focused on moving forward and these are the pieces that feel worth my energy to take with me as I do that. This is what I want to spend more time reveling in — what I feel I should have spent more time reveling in all year long.

Happy New Year, friends.