lifeserial:

lifeserial:

lifeserial:

lifeserial:

lifeserial:

The new year provides the cleanest sense of a fresh start that I can find. For a person with OCD, one that struggles with the impossible hope of perfection, it has extra weight. I’m always talking of perfect and how it doesn’t exist, and I suppose it’s a broken but necessary record for me to play because it reminds me of deep breaths and curbs the urge to feel so crushed by any small or large misfires. In that way, I should not be so excited by the illusory fresh start, the New Year. It’s bad for the part of me that seeks perfect. It says, “Maybe this time you’ll get it right.” That’s how I go haywire, and it’s right from the beginning.

I know all this and today is but another day. Yet I’m wound and wound around a fresh start, unable to help myself.

Revisiting a post from January 1, 2013.

I’m not feeling a ton of weight today over the idea that I’m about to turn a page or round a corner. Did I do everything right in 2014? No. Am I going to be exactly where I want to be in 2015? I don’t know. I’m not sure how to get there. Everything is just blending for me. It isn’t a next time I’ll do better and never feel this way again feeling. It’s only I get to keep on going. I don’t know if that is on account of getting older. I don’t know. I’m not entirely half-lidded, laid back and at peace with everything right now. All of the bad things don’t get pushed off the table at midnight. Tomorrow I’ll still feel like I don’t quite have a handle on a few things. I’ll feel like I will just have to keep going, at times more blindly stumbling than confidently walking.

I don’t know if 2015 is going to be my year. Maybe March will be my month and the rest will suck. In reality, things don’t fit as neatly into compartments anymore; I can’t package things into this month or that year. I’m conscious that time is passing, and there is also a part of me aware that the clock doesn’t stop and restart. It’s all the same story.

Revisiting a post from December 31, 2014.

So now the original post is two years old. Another year has gone by and in passing has made the last update less recent. Because now there is this: It’s the 2015 edition.

This is maybe my most favorite thing on here, a place to return each year like a ritual. It’s a reunion. I wish that I was journaling more. I suppose then I could have these moments on any given day of any given year, give myself the ability to look back at a letter three months from now and so on. But I know on this date distinctly—the eve of a new New Year—that there is this one. So I scroll back and dig it out, a time capsule from the earth. I have to say it is getting more fun the older the original post gets. I am further on my journey.

I think I am doing well. I am getting a better handle on the idea that life really is just one long (short-in-the-grand-scheme) story for each of us. I still have my obsessions and the things I want to hold onto, some things I want to fixate and polish, other things that are already so shiny that it feels like small death to notice evidence of their inevitable creeping fade. Yet every moment is a teacher, nothing gold can stay, on and on and on and on…

Letting go is the best thing that I can do for myself. Letting life be, saying, Well that is a thing I am working on. I am working on that. to my self-esteem is a gift. As long as I am learning and trying my best to appreciate some part of every day, that’s enough. I feel I am onto something.  

Revisiting a post from December 31, 2015.

And so, again.

I have always been grateful for my life, but this year…I enjoyed life. For the first time in awhile: Happier. Not wildly, aggressively trying to get my arms around happiness at every moment; not trying to mold my days to be exceptional as if they were wet clay in need of direction. Just content, able to be a bit more calm, still.

I finished writing a novel this year, a thing I’d begun to think would never really be possible for me in any year. At all. Ever. Finding a routine of working on it felt like the best exercise. Exercise, and an exorcising. (If nothing ever comes of this project, it was still a worthy exploration. It made me feel the way I have missed creativity making me feel, and it restored a sense of purpose that I haven’t felt in a long time.)

The outside world was garbage, but in it I found new appreciation for my family and my community. 

And so, I guess I want more.  

Revisiting a post from December 31, 2016.

It all sort of washes together in my mind, like water poured down a painting that has not yet set. 2017. I remember most the feeling of running in place this past year, and when I think of myself during that chapter of time, as I think of myself now, I don’t see great changes. 

But I am good, and I know some years are better spent planting seeds.

Revisiting a post from December 31, 2017.

There is a part surprised that I am still here, still doing this year after year, not swallowed up, snapped off, blown away on a dry Santa Ana. I am still here. 

I think every year I look back for happiness as if all along I’ve been maintaining one of those cartoon thermometer posters, as if I’m a charity trying to reach its goal: Help Matt collect enough happiness by midnight on December 31, 2018! Make it a good year! Donate now! My success judged by a new level colored in in bright red marker. A good day pushing that slick wet shade higher and higher, higher. But is happiness to be collected that way? No. It doesn’t accumulate I don’t think. It is only waves. A tide comes in, a tide breathes out. Feelings wax and wane. I’ll look at them one by one then, moment to moment, whichever.

I had good days and saw progress, felt hopeful and encouraged. I had long days that did drift toward despair, uncertainty puddled in my stomach. I continued to submit my work to literary agents in 2018. We went to Switzerland, and I won’t forget it. I visited plant nurseries more and more; I turned our house into a green one—life on every ledge and sill and even draping from the ceiling. I try my best to keep them all alive, as I do to keep myself alive, healthy, content. I am enjoying the challenge. Learning. 

I remain grateful for my family. Ah, my team. We grew it by one in September, by planned whim. Two dogs now. My guy. Me. Then the world.

I hope I will write more in 2019. I want to. I feel inspired to again, because in this moment I feel like I’m not yet done. The entry from 2016 reminds me of that—the joy of making pictures out of words. My confidence is fleeting as ever, but there are also new cracks in my doubt, places where some lightness shines through. Like the realization that it is still a pleasure to make things, even if they don’t get fully seen. I’m better knowing I tried.

(via lifeserial)