Personal Year in Review: 2006

I think the following Murakami quote provided the inspiration and impetus of all my changes in 2006:

Time weighs down on you like an old, ambiguous dream. You keep on moving, trying to slip through it. But even if you go to the ends of the earth, you won't be able to escape it. Still, you have to go there - to the edge of the world. There's something you can't do unless you get there.

My Year in Review 2005 concluded with this statement:

I don't know what is in store for 2006, other than that I am happy with where I am. I don't feel the need to move or find a new job or improve on anything. I'm content. I bet not too many near 25 year olds can say that about themselves. So I'm proud of myself.

I can't believe I was able to write that, then read a book two months later and have everything change. However, even when I wrote that I knew I wasn't being completely truthful. I was already seeing a counselor once a week and back on fluoxetine by this point, so clearly my life was not all daisies. (Sidenote: Seeing all the cover-ups on my blog from 2005 is one of the big motivators for me to be disgustingly open on my blog this year. I'm sick of pretending.)

I read Kafka on the Shore, the book the above quote comes from, in Feb/March of 2006. I believe I read that quote nearly a thousand times. It was like a shot in the gut. I felt like I hadn't been to the edge of the world yet, and as a result something was missing in my life. I had been living a stagnant life for a few years, not pushing myself to do anything. I had given up. Acquiesced. I knew something had to change but I wasn't willing to make the necessary leaps. My life in San Francisco was mostly easy: I had a great apartment, a boyfriend, a dog, a good job, a routine. It's very easy to get into that pattern and not take the difficult steps to push yourself to be better. This quote continued to eat away at me, which lead to me visiting Chicago in early April.

I took a weekend trip to Chicago, and told everyone it was a test. A test to see if I wanted to move there, but I already knew that it was a done deal. I didn't really need the vacation, although taking the trip and saying that it was a test made it much easier to explain to the rest of the world. As it was, I felt people thought I was insane enough to drop my boyfriend (whom my family repeatedly told me was the best I would be able to get), leave the city I had wanted to live in forever, and move to a city I never wanted to live in. At some point my priorities had drastically changed. I realized that the city I live in isn't as important as the company I keep. And I missed my Chicago friends. My relationship was a farce at this point, looked great on paper and great to the outside world but I was miserable. I had sacrificed too much of myself and didn't get enough in return. I had lost my sense of self, and knew that being near some of the most incredible people I've ever known would help me more than simply moving out of my shared apartment and living alone and single still in San Francisco.

So I ended my relationship. Dating someone for 3.5 years may not sound like a long time to some people, but it was massive to me. We lived together for three of those years. We shared experiences few of my friends have shared, such as moving across the country alone and unemployed, the robbery, the dog, the transition from college to career. It was terrifying to leave the person who's known me best, who has been there for every up and down for almost four years. And it doesn't matter if other people think it's silly that the relationship had such an impact on me. All that matters is how I feel about the experience, and it was a very intense time in my life that I will never forget, that has forever shaped my future. And I walked away from it to start all over, like so many people do but so few of my friends have done. I felt extremely isolated.

Moving to Chicago has been magical for me. I forced myself to follow the Murakami quote - to continue to push myself, to do things I hadn't done, to reveal things nobody knew before, to be exactly who I wanted despite the consequences. And for the most part this has worked. I've become wildly in love with my friends here. They are all such amazing and supportive people, even when I can tell they really don't want to deal with me at all. I get so queer over them sometimes. I never had a close family, and never will, so I consider my best friends here my family. There's nothing I wouldn't do for some of these people and I hope they know that.

However, despite having a new-found love affair with my friends, I continued to struggle internally, and still do. I am scared that nobody will ever want to be with me again. That I have somehow done something to make myself un-dateable. I try to tell myself its just the people around me - that the single ones are all single for some obvious reasons. But then I see these women who I don't think are all that awesome, and they have guys falling all over them. I'm constantly wondering what I'm doing wrong, and why nobody would want to be with someone who has their shit together and is pretty damn awesome (bragging, I know). Every passing month that I'm single adds to my concern that I'll be alone for quite some time. I'd like to have a boyfriend sometime soon, but I want to go into it cautiously. I think I'd actually just like to know that someone on earth is interested in me. This solitude lead to many weekends where I wouldn't get out of bed unless Audrey had to be let outside. I couldn't move for days on end. My loneliness was suffocating. I still get this feeling, mostly on Sundays and at bar time when I wander home alone while all my coupled-friends get to go home together.

So 2006 was a year of strange juxtapositions. It was a year of feeling intense love for my friends and also feeling intensely alone for only having friends and no boyfriend. It was a year where my ego was stroked like mad, between getting an awesome new job and having many people fill me with many compliments, yet to be stuck feeling ugly, boring, and damaged during all the niceties. It was a year where I had to totally lose myself and everything I had to figure out who the hell I am and what I want out of life. While 2005 may have been the easiest year of my life, 2006 has been the hardest. I don't want to say worst, because it wasn't. Many amazing things happened in 2006: I made new friends, got a great job, traveled, became independent, listened to new music, saw new movies that changed my life, and so on. Conversely, I went about 11,000 dollars into debt, went into the worst depression of my life, had more awkward moments than I care to remember, and all the rest of the totally obvious reasons why this year was difficult.

I want to stay on this path of independence and discovery for 2007. It's frightening and frustrating and infuriating, but it's the only way I can get to the edge of the world.