On the one hand, life is a series of cosmic ironies: I once expressed confusion at someone saying that a particular year had been a bad one, and they were happy to see it go.
On the other hand, the screaming void continues to claim our sanity: I wrote posts in 2016 and 2017 saying how crappy the year had been, and now I'm doing a third.
In fairness, it's been slightly less crappy in some ways than the previous two years. I started out by going to London for three months, earning some extra cash and seeing friends and family. In a way it was a perfect vacation back into my old life between 2006 and 2013, right up to and including the fact that I was living next door to a friend's old place.
(I even ran into his old flatmate, and was thinking about that guy again recently. What struck me was how mature, even serene, the guy seemed now - he has a wife and lives in a nice house that he owns, in a neighborhood that's improved immeasurably since 2006. I'd like to be like that one day...)
And I've ended the year in an interesting new job, that's really stretching my creative boundaries in a lot of ways. The main negative for me is that I'm not writing as part of the job description, apart from a brief or slide deck here and there, but it takes some important strands from my previous full-time employment and lets me examine those more: stuff like working with startups and finding out about tech sectors that aren't gaining a lot of investment.
But to be honest, the stuff in between was pretty heavy-going at times. I managed some freelance work during the summer, but between those jobs found myself spinning in circles a bit - when you're not on a schedule, what's to stop you from playing web Solitaire all day? Turns out, it's my own willpower, which... well, wasn't always up to the task.
Jokes aside, I felt even more trapped in the house than before, when I'd been employed but working from home. When you don't have anywhere to go or anything to do, there's not much point in even leaving the house, and I could feel how that was spiraling into progressively less awesome things. So yeah, the new job came just at the right moment.
Personally, it was again a fairly blah year. A couple of friendships came to abrupt (or abrupt-ish) ends, and the dating was hamstrung by being both poor and resident at no fixed address. It doesn't help that I literally had one of the worst dating experiences of my life, which I'll be happy to tell you about IRL. And yeah, the looming 4-0 didn't help with looking at my dating life, or with feeling any less behind my friends.
There were other positives, though. The time in London, as I mentioned, allowed me to revisit parts of the UK I hadn't been to in a while, to see friends I hadn't seen for ages. And it was easy to bolt on my yearly trip to Italy, which despite having shitty weather was much more pleasurable than I'd expected it to be (in addition to giving me the idea for a new short story).
I also managed a couple of fun road trips, at opposite ends of California. Back in July my dad and I went on a road trip to southern Oregon, where I got to experience Ashland, Crater Lake and various other natural wonders (along with an impressive load of junk food). I even got to experience the pleasure of introducing my dad to an area of natural beauty that he hadn't seen before, the Avenue of the Giants.
Meanwhile in October I had my Joshua Tree trip, which as I said was a fun experience in pushing my own boundaries. And all the driving put a nice big dent in my podcast backlog, which is also nice, I guess.
Writing-wise, I don't know how much "progress" I made, but I was pleased to meet my goals and come up with new stories. I also started working with a freelance editor on some pieces, which helped me tighten things up, but also gave me heart that I'm on the right track with them.
I also went looking for help with the dating and fitness stuff, finding some awesome ladies to coach me at both. On the dating side I get some cheerleading and suggestions for places to try and meet more ladies, while on the fitness side I've learned how to properly stretch key muscle groups, and I'm pretty much able to touch my toes again (!).
So... despite the title, and how I started this blog post, I actually feel a bit hopeful for the year to come. It might evaporate on January 2nd, or it might turn into an unending parade of awesome, but it feels like the important thing is to take some action and ask for help (which was my big lesson of 2017, after all). I'll see how that goes next year, and what these actions turn into, if anything - but at any rate, I'll be sure to report back in twelve months.
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