[As I continue to catch up, I realize I never posted this from my birthday. Again, things are better now, but I’m posting this how they were.]
Wow, it feels like I was just answering these! (Granted, I didn’t do mine from last year until like halfway through this year. But, anyway. Here we go again. Yet again, I am having a lot of trouble answering them, but you know what? We’ll just get into it with the answers.)
1) What Are You Proudest Of From The Past Year?
I don’t wanna be the biggest Debbie Downer in the universe or anything, but I’m finding it hard to say what I’m proudest of. Because for me, the year has just felt like a near-constant struggle that I am desperate to find the end of, but I can’t un-fog my brain and be different and make everything better.
I just sat here for a few minutes with my head in my hands legitimately asking what I even did this year.
I guess if I had to pick something, it’d probably be getting a job on The Daily Show. It’s been a dream for probably somewhere around half my life, and I did it. So, that’s cool. (It had to do with luck and timing as well. So, it’s not like I completely accomplished something huge or whatever, but everything has at least *something* to do a little bit with luck and timing. And anyway… I guess that’s the thing to be proudest of from the year.)
2) The Opposite Of Q1 – Biggest Lesson, Or Regret, Or However You Want To Look At It…?
I don’t even know. I’m just struggling through as best I can. I’m doing the best I know how. And I’m sorry I don’t have a true answer to this. I regret a lot because I don’t feel capable. I guess I “regret” spending days/nights holed up in my apartment crying. But I’m in therapy. I’ve read a bunch, talked a bunch, tried a bunch. I really feel like I’m pushing to do the best I can. So, I regret it happened, and it’s sad. But I don’t know that I see a lesson in it, because I just didn’t feel capable in some moments of doing anything more.
3) What’s Your Biggest Goal For The Upcoming Year?
This is the one answer I feel confident in. It feels both like a giant goal and a totally non-giant goal all at the same time. It’s kinda nebulous while also being clear to me… What I want is for sexual assault to become like open-heart surgery in the done way to me… I know they’re already similar in that they’ve affected my life so much and affected school and there are all these parallels. But I want them to be the same in that I don’t get chocked up when I talk about my time at the hospital. And I don’t think about it very often at all. It doesn’t cloud my daily thoughts.
Sometimes it still might come up – especially if people are talking about healthcare and I use it as a personal example of how important healthcare is… Or, I might be reminded of it by a TV show, podcast, or movie or something about someone being sick. It’s not that I never think about it, or that I never talk about it, but generally I can watch something about someone being sick while being brought into their world – I’m not distracted with my own experience. Generally, I can talk about open-heart surgery whenever relevant, however much someone wants without having nightmares that night, and without being able to only think about that for the rest of the day or week, etc.
I know it’s always gonna be there. And I do still wanna talk about assault and our culture and all of that, but I don’t want it to run my life. I want it to simply be something that happened that I can talk about like I can anything from the past. I hope that kind of makes sense? In my head, I know what I’m going for, so hopefully it came out of my head too.