It has been a long, tired and trying year. I cannot express that enough. As if I had challenged 2014 to do me worse than 2013 did, the year came and hit me harder than anything I anticipated. In the first six months alone, my heart was broken by at least 10 people for 100 different reasons, my career went into dark places and my academic life suffered more than it ever has since I’d started school. I was down, I was out, and I had been kicked by people who promised they never would.
Now, I’m not going to bore y’all with the soul-curdling details but I’m going to leave it with this: it was probably the best thing to have happened to me.
For a while, self-doubt and fear took over and I broke. Just splat! all over the place. Initially (of course), I didn’t know how I would deal with it all. I wallowed in my aimlessness for much longer than I wanted to, and naturally, I said nothing to anyone for quite a while. But after a couple of confrontations, pages & pages of writing, much time to myself, and finding some time with one of the best people to have entered my life; I realized how capable I was of picking up the pieces of myself.
I am a strong, fiercely independent, headstrong person. Always have been. And it took two antagonizing years for me to figure out just the capacity I had for being those things. In January, I’m faltering more than I ever did leaning on faux pillars that sucked the life out of me. Like most people, I’m just trying to find my place in the world and I thought for a good second that everyone holding my hand and everything I did was helping me get there. And almost naturally, I began to second guess myself and who I was in exchange for someone I wasn’t sure I wanted to be. But it didn’t take long to find that the toxicity was reversing the growth I crave. By July, I’m standing up on my own — stronger than before and finding the will to hold myself up the way I always have and kicking away everything holding me back.
“You’re better,” I was told towards the end of the year by a good friend of mine. It was nice to find that I was right: there was a difference.
And it’s like all of my preaching and advice to others coming back to hit me in the face. As if I found myself again (and can really say that I’m here to stay). A reaffirmation of my beliefs — I had it right all along and I’m doing just fine.
And I realized it was time to take the wheel back because this is my drive and no one else’s.
2015, you’re mine. No if’s, and’s or but’s because we’re doing this my way. Like always.
Take a shot and aim, Ruzelle. You always get there.
(P.S. I graduated (hence my lack of posts recently)! Exciting, right?)
Ruzelle Almonds 