Hello, 2020

This time of year usually warrants a period of reflection, and naturally following, disappointment (as well as pride, but, let’s be real– more often than not, it’s the former). Unresolved resolutions. Unaccounted for broken hearts. The cutting pain of unexpected loss. Sometimes these things erase in our minds the significance of all the good.

The wave of nostalgia that the end of December brings usually forces me to go through my old Instagram posts throughout the year to visually reflect on the past 365 days. The past few years have battered me brutally, if I am being perfectly honest. I have always been open about my mental health and emotional state on my social media, also creating a timeline of vulnerability I have been able to retrospectively look upon. 

My depression in the past few years has dug an irreplaceably deep trench in me. Of course, as the saying goes, ‘the highs were high, and the lows were low’. For every night I spent in an existential crisis, there was a day that I spent in full happiness. I have known the most absolute and truest sense of joy to myself, but of course that included getting acquainted with the cruelest reigns of depression.

During my family’s annual resolution making / yearly reflection time, we start by reading our reflections from the previous year, and then giving a reflection of the current year. I ended 2018 with a hurting heart and a bucket of tears constantly on the verge of tipping.

In fact, according to my yearly Instagram end-of-the-year post from 2018, the year was:

the hardest year of my life. my depression was the worst it has ever been. i spent many nights feeling bitter and all alone. i spent even more nights doubting and crying and fighting my heart.

I won’t go too deeply into that, but it was pretty bad. Let’s fast-forward, shall we?

ending the year in my beloved PDX

2019. For the first time, I have felt so completely OK. There is something wonderful about the middle space between deep sadness and inexplicable joy– it is a space of being content, feeling peace, and settling into normalcy.

When it came to be my turn to reflect, I didn’t feel my usual raging wave of emotions. Rather, I felt quite nonchalant. Shrugging, I said, ‘I don’t know. It was a pretty good year, I guess’.

I mean yes, I’ve loved and I’ve lost. I fell inconsistent with my fitness at times. I’ve still spent nights crying in my room. But coming to think of it, the weight of these darker moments hardly feels heavy enough to define my year. They were the types of pain I needed to make my year the ‘pretty good year’ I ended up having. These painful times were more often than not the result of me letting go of things for my own sake. And it sucked going through these things, but it felt better than it hurt to be at a place where I could not only recognize what I needed, but was able to act accordingly for myself. 

As we go into the next decade, I don’t feel like there is a better headspace I could have entered this next year with.

The 2010s was the decade of hurting, loneliness, self-pity, and people-pleasing. However, this year has molded me so far from the shape the majority of this decade has left me in.

This year, I took on a leadership position in my service fraternity, took a coding class, met my favorite athlete in the entire world purely through coincidence, moved across the pond, turned my semester abroad into a year abroad, visited 5 beautiful countries, and got to join a leadership program focused on girls’ empowerment with one of the biggest football clubs in the world (as a friend once said, ‘this sounds like some job you made up when you were 10’. What an honor it is to begin fulfilling my greatest dream in a city I have dreamt of since I could talk).

I’ve met so many people along the way who have had an unparalleled impact on my life. To all the people I have met along the way, in between the darkest nights and the sunniest days, thank you, thank you, thank you.

What a year. I am so excited to meet you, 2020.

Let this be the decade of healing, balance, and overcoming.

xo,

Karis

“Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love.”

Ephesians 4:2