2013

I spent the last few moments of 2013 with my aunt and uncle and sister. We stood outside their (my aunt's and uncle's) house, counting down 'til 2014 officially began.

The first words I spoke in 2014 were, "Goodbye, 2013, you miserable sod! Hello, 2014, which hasn't had a chance to betray us yet!" This tells you a great deal about what 2013 was like for me.

The main reason I think 2013 was a miserable sod was because it was the year my mother died, and having a parent die is basically a miserable event. Even though I had an underwhelming emotional reaction to it (my lack of feelings made one of my psychologists realize that I lack empathy and view people as animate objects), I had a tremendous mental reaction to it, and the chaos that ensued in my life soon thereafter (which involved me spending a lot of time sleeping at other people's houses, writing poems about these little sporadic flashes of memory and feeling that hadn't really happened until now, and wanting to write a novel but not being able to concentrate on any one thing long enough to do so) is probably still affecting me.

My lack of an emotional response to my mother's death (and my unintentional insensitivity towards the suffering of my family members around me) made me realize just how unempathetic I was, and it gave me yet another thing to be unhappy about in regards to myself. (I wasn't unempathetic or messed-up enough to be a sociopath, but there still wasn't a term for what I was, and it's always irritating when you're definitely Not Quite Right but there's not a term that accurately covers it or that you can't use without a disclaimer.)

It didn't help that my ability to feel good about myself went significantly downhill in 2013. I've never particularly liked myself (although I've had grandiose expectations of myself, which could be connected to my recent suspicions that I have narcissistic personality disorder, which might be something I'll talk about later). But 2013 somehow just gave me more to hate. I went through a math class that was particularly difficult. I got out with a B, but I didn't feel like a B was good enough for me, and I'm still trying to deal with how dissonant my family's pride over this B is.

The only thing about 2013 that was really at all good was in my writing. And it wasn't that writing was a refuge or an emotional safe-haven or anything, because it wasn't. I've been writing too much and too long for me to find solace in it. By this point, it's just what I do, and sometimes I enjoy it, but I can't just suddenly have my heart healed by something I "just do". Finding comfort in writing, to me, makes about as much sense as finding comfort in myself, because, by this point, I am writing and writing is me. But I do find something that's not exactly comfort in writing but rather purpose, a sense of accomplishment, affirmation. I find these things in the fact that I have something to work on and that I'm doing things.

I had a lot of poems and fiction accepted, and I got paid very well for much of it. Notably, I got paid $25 for a poem, which was accepted by Southern Pacific Review (which is from South America - Africa is now the only inhabited continent on which I have not had work accepted, aw yesss). $25 is actually a bit of an astounding amount to be paid for a single poem, and I felt very good about it.

I also started writing a novel. I don't want to talk too much about it on this blog, because the last few times I really talked about my novels on this blog, they didn't get finished, but this one really does look like it'll get done, given that 1. I'm extremely invested in it and its characters and 2. I've gotten my friends extremely invested in it and its characters. (Fun fact: I've got a friend whom I text about the novel while I write it. I tell her what's happening to the characters and what aspects of character development are going on so far. She cries, I laugh.) The novel is essentially one of the things that's keeping me going at this time, because it makes me feel like I'm doing something slightly worth doing, and it gives me a fictional world and set of people to obsess over. I mean, it gives me a fictional world and set of people to obsess over while being productive. Because I naturally obsess over fictional things and people (this is why I'm in so many fandoms), but being a writer gives me the ability to do so while being productive and doing something that society more or less thinks is cool.

I don't have a proper set of New Years Resolutions, but I do intend to finish writing my current novel (my intent's to get it finished in January, actually, during my winter break). Also, I'm going to do more poem and fiction submissions and try to get more acceptances. These are the sorts of things I would be normally doing, but I'm going to keep doing them. In 2014, I'm going to try to keep doing my usual business and do it well. And given that 2013 was a pretty mad year, I honestly think doing my regular thing this year is an improvement from what I did last year.