Reflections on 2015

Okay, this will be a really cheesy reflection post. You've been warned.

This year, 2015, has been the hardest year of my life. I am not asking for sympathy or complaining, I never want to be the person (though I admit, sometimes I sink into self-pity). My year started off with my mom having brain surgery while my friend still battled cancer, I then had a really hard break-up, one of my best friends and I had a rough patch, another guy friend almost destroyed his and myself's friendship, and one of my friends died in September. Throughout it all, I will own up to the fact that I was not one of the easiest people to be around and I became very cynical and very stressed as a way to numb myself from everything that was going on my life. My mental and emotional state was heavily affected by the amount of rocky change I went through this year.

But this isn't a sad post. I want to set up my year so I can explain the amount of change I went through. I grew as a person. I am not the same person I was at the beginning of the year. I still mess up and I still cry and I still get stressed and frustrated easily, even when I shouldn't, but I have grown. Growth can't be measured, so I am not sure how to explain how I feel like I've grown, in all honesty, but I will try my best.

I learned that I can't make excuses for myself. At the beginning of 2015, I cut myself a lot of slack when it came to school work because of everything that was going on in my life at the time. That ended up biting me in the butt at the end of the semester because my grades just couldn't be picked up when it came to crunch time. I learned my lesson. This semester, when my friend died, to be blunt, my world stopped spinning for a few weeks, but everyone else's, it seemed, kept on spinning. I couldn't make excuses for myself because I knew from the previous semester that every grade counted. It was extremely hard. I had a lot of tears this semester, but I had to push myself through it because I didn't have any other choice. No one else was going to do my work for me.

In all honesty, I was probably way too hard on myself. But it paid off (I got better grades this semester than I did previously). I studied and I studied more. I took excellent notes. I didn't let myself fall behind. It wasn't easy. But I learned that sometimes life knocks you down, but you can't let it get the best of you. That was my biggest lesson of the year.

I also had many great experiences this year. I had one of the best summers of life! I visited family in Minnesota, became a CIT II at camp, went to Universal Studios with one of my friends, traveled to Europe (Germany, Austria, and France), and went back to my childhood home of Tennessee for the first time since moving to Colorado. There are bright spots in every year, you just have to enjoy it while it lasts.

Every year, I choose a new word or phrase that becomes my motto or goal for the rest of the year. I didn't have one this year (which I think is a good example of my mental state then). But for 2016, I've chosen the word patient. I need to be more patient. I was very grateful to have so many patient people in my life this year, who didn't take my irritability personally and were always welcome with hugs. I want to be that same kind of person to everyone else, every day in my life. I am not a naturally patient person. I have a hard time waiting for little things, but I also have a really hard time being patient with myself and everyone else. I am hard on myself, and I stress about the littlest things. I have a hard time relaxing. I let that get the best of me and I can get really frustrated with people in my life when I really shouldn't, when I should be patient and understanding of them like they are of me. My goal this year is to be more patient: to not be anxious, to give myself time to relax, to be patient with other people and to help them the way I have been helped, to try and be as forgiving as I can be, to not take things so personally.

This year has been a year of immense change and growth. I've learned a lot about helping people and being there for people and that's I really want to act on in 2016. This is a pretty cheesy post, but I really just wanted to share my reflections and everything I've learned this year. I hope everyone has a good new years! :)