When December started, the most surprising thing of all was that it felt like it had arrived quickly.

Marveling at the remarkable pace of the passage of time is pretty standard, but in a year that often felt hellish and brutal, I assumed that reaching the end wouldn’t have caught me off guard.

But here we are, and I am again taking stock of the year that I’m leaving behind and readying myself for this new one.

I had big plans for 2017. I was going to run a marathon. I thought I’d get my way up to weekly vlogs. I was going to achieve some grand writing goals.

None of that shit happened.

I spent much of the year at war with my own brain, which occasionally decided it did not want to go on living. And the vast majority of the time that wasn’t spent set on that was spent afraid of when that resolve would return.

It’s hard to do much of anything when your own brain is trying to deactivate its basic survival instinct.

At some point last month, during all of my year-end processing, I flipped through some of my reviewing and plotting and planning from December of 2013. I was in a similar place to this one — coming off a long, grueling year, and trying to find my way back to myself.

I had this big list of goals for 2014 and I know now that very few of them actually happened in 2014. But 2014 was a really good, important year for me. What’s more: I have crossed many of those goals off in the years since; it just took me a little longer than originally planned. It turned out that 2014 just wasn’t the time for most of that stuff.

There’s this very unflattering picture of me from this past year, running the Missoula Half Marathon, where I am lost in thought and deeply focused on the task at hand. Focus was my word for the year, and if nothing else, I was doing that.

Like many of the goals I built around it, “focus” came to mean something different to me than I intended when I chose the word.

I trained so hard for that marathon only to find myself coming up short on that goal. That sucked. A lot. However, what I did do that day was reach a new half marathon PR.

That was my year: grueling and painful and half of what I hoped and planned for, but I showed the fuck up and accomplished some things worth being proud of.

As I read through everything I wrote down in 2013 I suddenly had this deep in my gut feeling that I am going to be OK. It was this switch that suddenly got flipped. It’s like I have been trudging through the tunnel for a while now, forging ahead because the signposts tell me there’s an exit, but at long last I can finally see that fucking light. It’s real, and I’m coming for it.

And in the glow of that glorious light at the end of the tunnel, I am reminded of all the good that happened in 2017. My wonderful niece was born. I got to do some dreams-come-true stuff in my professional life, hosting a Crash Course series and speaking on a panel at the Smithsonian History Film Forum. I started an accountability group with my friends that helped keep me tethered to something outside the muck of my own head. I came out.

If all of that managed to happen even as my brain became something of a hellscape, I can’t wait to see what happens now that things are getting better in there.

Here’s to another year.