It is almost spring, and depending on who you ask, it has already started. For me spring is like resetting my year. When I visualize my life, major chapters always begin and end during the spring. This spring I am taking the initiative to make change in my own life. This is historically accurate too, we see this across the centuries old traditions in countries like Persia, China, and even Greece. I remember learning about these things in elementary school. Then of course this really meant nothing to me, and it wasn’t until later in life that I realized that reflected how I saw my own life.
Three years ago, I read thirty one books in a year. This was deep in my love for reading but since then my interest in actually consuming literature has dissipated. I guess, to an extent, I feel like a fraud. I constantly repost things about reading, or about novels that have influenced me in some way despite it having been a while since I actually read like my life depended on it. So I am trying to read more in this chapter. Hand in hand with this is my writing. Six months ago I wrote every day. I constantly carried a journal with me, took voice notes of writing ideas in the shower, jotted anecdotes on napkins. Now, even when exerting an extreme amount of effort, it feels like I am choking the words out of myself and coughing them up onto the keyboard, hoping to make some sort of sense. I want to return to that version of myself, the one who put her foot in the door and asked for a position at her local newspaper, who was so thankful for an opportunity to say something she had written was actually published. On paper for the world to see.
This season isn’t only about resetting things but also reflection, as cliche as it sounds to say. Reflecting on my last year, the last chapter,I have to say there is a lot of room for improvement. To perform better professionally, academically, and personally. Somewhere, between complete carelessness and stomach churning anxiety is a happy medium, a place full of success, and I just have to find it. I look forward to this time until next spring, because in a year I will end this section of my life, and I want to look back on this time as the start of something, not as a time full of regret and worry.
I am so thankful for every experience since last spring, and I look forward to every single one until the next.