Life has had a very drastic turnaround for me over the past year, and all the while, I've found myself marveling at where I am versus where I once was only a short time ago.  2010 was truly the first year of my life, and it's a grand feeling to have entered the second.  Everything before this is like a dream or a story I wrote a long time ago.  It's hazy, and while I remember the good parts, the sunshiny spots, I think I like the rest of it to feel that way, to feel distant. 

When 2009 was drawing to a close, I could never have foreseen that before the year was out, I'd have thrown away so much bad to gain everything good.  I spent 20 years of my life resigning myself to what I thought I could have, thinking it was as good as someone like me could get.  I know I come off very cheery a lot; I read once that it's part of being a Leo, but throughout all those years, there was not a moment when some very serious things weren't going on inside me.  It started when a boy thought that he would isolate me (among other things) and ended with me a little broken and in the habit of isolating myself.  I would go years without telling a soul how desperately I hated the situation I was in simply because I felt I couldn't share it. 

But I can share it now, and that is for the simple fact that I have learned to love me and to know I'm worth more than the plans I made with losers.  I am worth more than a life of emotional abuse, committing for the sake of having made a commitment, hating the person I'm with, and just dealing with whatever crap someone who, after all, never meant more to me than a burdensome attachment I was somehow forced to deal with could dish out. 

In 2009 at the end of the year, the Wallace State production of Romeo and Juliet was coming to an end and Christmas break was approaching.  I remember I would find ways to stay longer with the friends I'd made there, sometimes staying late into the night or parking down the street simply so I wouldn't have to go home to someone I couldn't figure out how to cut out like cancer.  I took on a job at the library, became assistant editor of the Athens State newspaper, and simply took on way too many responsibilities, much more than I could handle, simply so I could just not be at that apartment with that leech who did nothing but consume my income and fester.  I volunteered for anything and everything anyone mentioned to avoid dealing with the reality of how unhappy I was.  I cried when Romeo and Juliet was over, but I couldn't quite decide why I was crying.  It was a strange feeling to be living the life of the pitiful, disadvantaged girl with a bad, lazy boyfriend who struggled to get by.  I felt like a Lifetime movie and just as distant from it.

My-assistant-editor-self behind the camera right before a post-town hall interview with Parker Griffith, who at the time was U.S. Representative for Alabama's 5th congressional district.

I was in the middle of all that misery, and quite without warning everything simply changed.  Mike asked to visit me and one of my friends while he was on leave for the holidays, to see us before he had to deploy, and from the moment he stepped off the bus in Athens, things were fundamentally different.  The week of his visit was tense: we were both bitterly shy and what might have been romantic moments were cut off with a little jealous intervening, and yet those oh-so-close moments were so intense for both of us, I still blush when I think of them. 

Mike during that visit <3

He left on the bus on Christmas without us having shared the goodbye kiss we had both been plotting in our heads, but before the night was over, we were a couple.  That one decision was like tipping the first domino, and within a matter of just under 2 weeks, I was born to the world I live in now.  I kicked my old baggage to the curb, but someone picked it up and used it to enact a strange sort of drama that left me questioning what I considered once to be the happiest chunk of my life.  But I've come to terms with that and with everything else life seemed to throw at me throughout 2010, from handling school (properly) to weathering a deployment.  Nothing was ever to be the same again, and that's because it was just better.  In 2010, I learned a lot about myself and about the people around me and about the one person who means the most to me.  In 2011, I plan to continue this path of learning and loving and watching with the glassy eyes of a newborn fawn as this new life of mine unfolds before me.