Day: January 1, 2015

The sun is very bright when I look out my windows this morning. If I only look at the sunshine and the bright blue sky, I might be fooled into thinking it is warm out there. Yet the sun reflects off the snow piles and glints through the icicles that are gradually growing in size from the corners of our roof. It is cold out ther,e and I don’t want to venture forth. I feel the same way about the new year that has just begun. I don’t want to venture out into it yet. I’m pretty sure it is full of cold hard things. Though it might also have bright skies and sunshine. I’d feel better about the coming year if I was able to tell myself a happy story about what is ahead and then believe that story. Unfortunately last year has shaken my belief in my predictive powers.

2013 was a year of transition for our family. The business shifted as we took big steps with the challenge coin project and set up a permanent warehouse location. It was as if the business finally grew up and moved out of the house. That move out coincided with our first child heading off to college, which caused big shifts in our family dynamics as well. Then there was all the mental health stuff that burst open during that year. I reached the beginning of 2014 and I really wanted a year of stabilizing after the year of transition. I wanted it to be the year where everything calmed down. The desire is evident in many of my blog entries as I tried to frame the things that were happening to fit the “life settling down” narrative. There was a lot of “when this one thing is out of the way, then things can really stabilize.” There was an endless stream of “one things” to “get out of the way.”

In some ways we did stabilize during 2014, so I wasn’t manufacturing fiction to describe our lives. In other ways, the year was every bit as emotionally tumultuous as 2013. Much of the tumult was in my head. In hindsight I can see that I longed for quiet stability because I had loads of emotional baggage to process from the transitions of the prior year. Instead I landed in November and December where I had to processes that emotional baggage while acquiring shiny new emotional baggage to add to the pile. Add to that the dissonance of knowing that I have a truly wonderful life, filled with good things, and bright potential. Yet I didn’t dwell in happiness. I spent far too much time just wishing that everything would hold still long enough for me to get my bearings.

So this morning I look out the windows at a day so bright it hurts my eyes. It is the first day of 2015 and I’m reluctant to tell myself a story about what will come in the next year. I know what I would love to have happen, but I have very little power over the pieces that would do the most to make this year a good one for me. I would like 2015 to be the year when mental health issues fade from importance in our lives and stop rearranging my days on a regular basis. That depends on other people growing, learning, gaining insights, and choosing to overcome instead of hide. I only have power to choose what I do, not what anyone else does. I can’t choose what will go well in the coming months and what will go poorly. But I can prevent myself from imposing a narrative on my life and then being hurt when events don’t match up to it.

I don’t know what 2015 will bring to me. I hope for good things. I dread the hard things that are all too easy to picture. Maybe at the end of the year I’ll be able to look back and tell a story about how it went. For now, I need to work on accepting each day as it is rather than spending time sad because the day wasn’t what I’d planned for it to be. If I can do that each day, then I think most of 2015 will feel like a better place than the last few months of 2014.