It's maybe a little early to be drawing a veil over this year, but screw it, I'm so ready for it to be over. It feels like a year with few professional or personal highs, and against the backdrop of what's been happening out in the world, it's hard to maintain an even keel sometimes. If 2016 was the year of bad things coming out of nowhere (whether celebrity deaths or, you know, Brexit), then 2017 has been the year of bad things accumulating.
At a macro level, the ongoing wrangling over Brexit and the slow march to authoritarianism (and possibly nuclear war) in the US are seriously getting me down. And what's worse is the inability of people to unbend from their positions - the fact that any politician who dares to question the hardest Brexit possible receives death threats is chilling on so many levels. Another frustrating thing is that a number of friends seem to think the problems of 2002 (like Islamic fundamentalist terrorism) are still the gravest existential threats - they never were, but having the arguments just leads to further polarization.
At a personal level, I'm pleased with a number of things that happened, but against the grand sweep of things it's hard to see those as more than whistling past the graveyard. I don't know if that's a result of my setting unambitious goals, or if my perception is skewed, but the fact is that I don't feel like I've made progress on any fronts.
This is a bit harsh, because some of what I've accomplished holds the promise of better stuff coming tomorrow. But some of the rest just kicks the can further down the road. And the loss of my job also colors things pretty severely - longer term it's probably positive that I'm not in that situation anymore, given how frustrated I was by my manager's inability to manage, but losing my job just as healthcare gets harder to find is not ideal.
On the other hand, I'm excited to have landed a three-month contract in London. It came about as a direct result of me telling my friend circle on Facebook what had happened, and it will pay me a lot better than what I was making in my job, while also keeping me in the industry. Personally, it's also nice because I'll be working closely with two friends and will be in London long enough to spend more time with my sisters and to see a bunch more friends who no longer live in town.
The other big positive from this year is the trip to Tokyo. It's a little bittersweet, given that I lost my job just a month after I got back, but at the same time that makes me glad that I chose to do it when I did. The thinking had literally been that I should do it now, before something changed. There's nothing to suggest I'll never get a chance to take another trip like it, but the simple fact is that I'm not planning any trips anywhere until I have a long-term paycheck lined up.
On the writing front, I did manage to get some new stories written, and into circulation. That's a positive, because the more I have to send out the more likely something is to get accepted. And because it's pleasurable to write a story, hammer it into shape, and be able to let it go out into the world while I focus on the next. A lot of writers hate writing but like having written; I only hate the revising part.
And it was nice to get interviewed by my friend to talk about books, writing, and the difference between fiction writing and news.
In any case, another positive for the year just gone is that the year to come can't help but be different. I'm not implying that my 2017 couldn't have been worse, because I think a lot of people did have it worse than me. But, perhaps as with those months between when I graduated from college and when I landed my first job, the lack of certainty is kind of liberating. There's a chance for things to get worse (and the stuff out of my control almost certainly will), but the things within my own sphere of influence can get better.
To lift a line from JFK's New Frontier speech (much in my mind because I just reread DC's New Frontier book yesterday), I cannot fail to try.
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