2019: A Decade In Review - Happy New Year
I cut my hair today.
For the past three years, I haven’t really cut my hair, not since about mid-2016 or so. I feel like I had some sort of fascination with long hair, and the opportunities long hair presented style-wise. The person I wanted to be at the time had long hair, so in an effort to become closer to that person I grew it out. For a while it was awful, I couldn’t tie it back out of my face since it wasn’t quite long enough, but I couldn’t have it down either because it just hung over my face and looked awful. Eventually, I got it long enough to where I could have started experimenting with different styles, but I never really did. I dyed it once and had it trimmed a couple of times, but I kept it long because some part of me was clinging to this forgotten ideal of the person I wanted to be. Then it became a struggle. Brushing it became difficult to manage, and I still wasn’t figuring out how to do anything with it besides tie it back in a bun and forget about it. It became shackles and a reminder that the person I had wanted to be remained just out of reach purely out of my own refusal to act. It was a burden, on top of the fact that washing and drying it was a pain in the ass every day.
Coming into 2020, and especially moving into the next decade, I wanted to move away from the idealized version of a person I never was. I want to move forward by turning a critical eye to myself and deciding who I want to be through an understanding of who I am now. It’s a difficult thing to do, considering how vicious my sense of self-worth can be, but I’m coming to understand that who I am now won’t last, probably through the next few years, and definitely not through to the next decade. I need to create something sustainable, something that I can strive for and even if I don’t succeed, it’ll leave me in a position to continue to improve.
The last decade for me was defined solely by my lack of foundation. When the decade started I was depressed. The depression turned to suicidal thoughts around half-way through High School, and those thoughts stuck with me ever since. It became impossible to lay a foundation for future growth because I was always under the assumption that my future didn’t exist. I grew up making temporary solutions to problems, I never saved money, I didn’t go to the gym, I didn’t take care of myself. I had difficulties studying for exams, and even going to class, because in the back of my mind I was always convinced that I wouldn’t last through the next month, or the next year, the idea of being alive at the end of the decade was a complete mystery to me. My Dad had asked me once when I had just finished High School “where do you want to be in 5 years?” I didn’t have an answer for him. In my mind, 5 years in the future didn’t exist. At the time I wasn’t even sure who I wanted to be a week from then.
I’ve never really told anyone about that. Not my family, maybe some of my friends had an inclination during my particularly rough years, but I never said it explicitly. It wasn’t something I wanted to burden my friends and family with, because I knew it would make people worry, and I knew it would make them sad, so I kept it secret. I’m realizing now that it prevented me from getting help for what is a very serious issue, and one that could have easily ended my life at any point in the last 6 years. I didn’t talk about it with therapists even, because somewhere in my brain I thought if they heard about those thoughts they would have to tell my family because i was “a danger to myself or others”, and I didn’t want my mom to have to shoulder that extra worry. Moving towards this next decade, I need to set my foundation, I need to lay the groundwork for a future that I’m still as I write this trying to convince myself exists. In order to do that, I need to be honest about it, with myself, and with my friends and family, and I need to get help so that I can start to move past it and build a future for myself. I have a lot I want to do in 2020 and especially over the next decade. I can’t let it slow me down.
So I cut my hair. I did it this morning. Even though I guess technically it would have been more symbolically appropriate to do it tonight as the clock ticks over, but I wanted to start my day with momentum and carry that forward as we move into the new year. One of my resolutions for this coming year is to cast off the old ideas of who I am and focus on finding who I want to be. If I want to have long hair then I can grow it out later, but I need to take affirmative action instead of waiting passively for things to change. I need to force them to myself through actions I take with my own power. All my resolutions for the new year are about taking back control. Losing weight, writing a book, finding a therapist, eating healthier, drinking more water, taking better care of my hygiene. This year is about taking back my life from my Id and laying a foundation of good habits that I can grow on as I move through the next decade. Things that put me on a path towards someone who can accomplish all the things they wanted to accomplish. Over the next decade I want to re-learn piano, take my Japanese proficiency exam, start learning Korean, go back to university and get my degree, finish multiple novels, make a graphic novel, have a piece of art featured in a gallery, start a Twitch stream, and most importantly I want to do all of this while I run a DnD game for my friends. It seems like a lot, but a decade is a long time, and I plan to make as much use of it as possible.
Someone on Twitter recently asked “Describe in one word how you want your 2020 to be”, and I came up with dozens right on the spot, meaningful, happy, important, noticeable, strong, healthy, etc… but the answer I gave, and the one I think sums up my intention in the truest sense is “significant”. I want the coming year to mean something, maybe not to other people, maybe not in the grand scheme of everything that’s been happening, but to me. I want to feel significant, I want my actions to have significance, and I want to come out the other end with the knowledge that what I did had an impact. This is going to be a year of building. Going from whatever rock bottom I’ve been wallowing in and even if I don’t quite get out of it in the next 365 days, at the very least by the end of this I want to have the resources available to me to start building my way up in 2021. In the end, that will be significant enough.
Maybe that’s more personal than you’d wanted to hear, but that’s what I needed to say. At the end of the day, this is my blog, and if you don’t want to hear my personal thoughts, then fuck off and leave me in peace. Happy New Year, and here’s to a new decade, a fresh start, and a pretty hungover shift tomorrow morning.