Today while cleaning, I found the notebook on which I wrote the fifty goals I set out to accomplish this year – a list of which I have only managed to keep a handful of religiously, and even I’m being generous with that description. But I digress.
It was supposed to be menial, mindless work. How difficult would it be to just throw the damn thing away? Of course, in perfect Dexter-esque form, I started skimming through the pages, and this, after having just drafted my upcoming goals yesterday (a much more modest list of ten items, this time).
Part of my original fifty was to jot down, rather laboriously – I still believe in the feel of a pen and paper – the best and worst thing that happened that day, everyday for the rest of the year, and much of the pages of the notebook after the list were dedicated to such expressions.
“Unstoppable,” I simply wrote, perhaps, much conceitedly so to my chagrin, under the “BEST” column on the 4th of February, with nothing scribbled on the opposite side. Backreading on the previous days’ entries implied I was on a roll in solving in code, which happened to be another goal on that list.
The writings tapered off at mid-September, which was a conscious effort on my end: “I can’t keep patronizing these negative emotions,” I wrote myself. This, after having first taken, and generally stayed on, a definitive slump on March, as much positivity abound for the first eight weeks. During the third week of April, tired from the commute from Taguig, I wrote, “This is not what I signed up for.”
And yet, as I look back, it’s difficult to not notice how largely one year changes you – hell, how a few months could change you. Screw the fact that things have taken a turn for the worse, but it’s surreal to realize “look, this was how I felt one year ago to this day.” One year to this date, I trudged, armed with all the zeal and passion in the world, every breath hopeful, eyes teeming with excitement, heart racing from all possibility.
And then, in a snap of a finger, everything changes – from doing so much because of passion to caving in and doing nothing to doing so much just to keep the negativities at bay. One bad decision begets another. Too scared to make a move, you let everything fall away, let yourself fall apart. You’re doing things for all the wrong reasons. And then you realize you’re in too deep.
That I’ve dabbled with, and pretty much stayed on the fence of agnosticm by reading too much of and into the Bible, and that I needlessly frustrate myself with people who air-quotes-connect with their family through their phones as they trot lazily on my path and pretty much disconnects himself from his immediate vicinity, and that I get lost in the aimless shuffle and don’t spend nearly as much time in silence and reflection that has made me out of touch with myself, and that I drip with much cynicism and disappointment and bitterness – all of which merit a separate entry, I might add – has been nothing short of a byproduct of this year. I really have changed; I can think of last year, and say “this was me, then shit happened.”
You know how they say things don’t seem to change from day to day. And then you look back on a year and see how much the landscape has weathered away, how unrecognizeable it all is as when you first set out.
Only now, you’ve accepted it, and you’re consciously making amends. And now you’re armed with a zeal to turn everything around, with a perspective from the other side to boot.
And maybe, just maybe, things have never really changed that much, after all.
