Year in Review: 2008

so much has happened this year.
when i think back to last january, i can barely believe it was the same lifetime....i've changed so much as a person, but i suspect that if i really thought about each year as a discrete unit, i would say this at the end of every one.

and no, i'm not necessarily pleased with all the ways in which i've changed.

one of the more important things i've learned is that there is no going backwards. so even though i may not be pleased with some of the directions i've gone, all i can do is move forward from there. for years, i've had this image in my head of your life as a path with many forks, winding its way through the woods. sometimes, you can see one of the divergent paths through the trees, the way your life might have gone; other times, the trees are so thick there's no way to even glimpse it. occasionally, two divergent paths might come together again farther along--but i haven't yet found a way to tell if it's happened, much less if it's going to.

i've hurt a lot of people this year, some more seriously than others. because of this, i believe that all the pain that's been dealt to me has been well-deserved. not all of the pain that i've dealt has been as well-deserved. (most of it probably has not been, but i'm not the karma police.)

i like to think i've done some good, too. strangely, the only instance i can think of that might serve as a clear example of this is the day i skipped class to take a friend to the hospital--which just goes to show how hard it is to write a year in review, because that was in april, and it's inextricably tied to something that became pretty predominant for me in just the last two months or so. perhaps as i get older, i will continue to have this much trouble returning to the past--which probably would not be a bad thing, but then i worry that i will forget where i came from and what i've already learned.

maybe it would be a more useful exercise to try to tell those stories from this past year that i am forgetting.

however, i can't think of the year in terms of stories. i think of it in terms of people and in moments. i could write a chronological list for you of the people i've been involved with, and perhaps a brief sketch of what that involvement was. i could write a series of instants (which is way more fun). but i could not tell you a coherent story about any one of them--at least, i would find it extremely difficult.

furthermore, the summer looks like a void, on the map of the year in my head.

i should be a visual artist instead.