29

My birthday was the 21st, and so this is a little late.  Usually I write these recaps on my birthday, or the day before.  But like much this year, I’m running behind.

I was looking at my entry for my 28th birthday, and I realize this year has many of the same issues, except in sharper colors.

Like my 27th year, my 28th year has been a mess of ups and downs.  Not the gentle peaks and valleys of a sine wave, or the regulated twists and turns of a rollercoaster, but more the stomach wrenching heights and plummets of hanging upside down from one leg, tied to a piece of bungee cord attached to a yo-yo. It’s been spins and twangs, shakes and boomerangs.  I look with a low level feeling of dread to the next year.  When I hit 28, I looked back thought 27 was hard.  Now I look back on 28 and realize 27 was a rosy dream traced in flower frosting.

28: The Reader’s Digest Edition:

After pouring my heart into getting my application to Temple U together for Grad School in Creative Writing, I was rejected.

I biked through N. Philly to a reading with Samuel R. Delany to ask for how I could improve for the next year. He never emailed me back, BUT . . .

Three weeks later, I found out my rejection was an accident. I was accepted with full financial aid through TAing — everything I wanted at the time.

I was also accepted and attended the Odyssey Writing Workshop, six amazing weeks in New Hampshire that changed my writing and became one of the best decisions of my life.

Novel in One Month: 50,000 words yes, but 50,000 words of mostly crap that did not lead me to an ending.

Through an agonizing yet all too fast month in the hospital, my grandmother was diagnosed and ultimately died of lung cancer. 

Her decline in health coincided to the day with my first semester of Grad School, and my first teaching experience. I look back on sections of my first semester of grad school, and they are blank.

End with Vash’s B’Day Triple Header!

When I read this review of my year, I realize that a simple timeline can’t sum up the depth of these events, especially the painful ones.  I’m ending this year grateful for what I have, excited for what I have accomplished, and sad for what I have lost.  I’m not the same person I was when I turned 28.  I’ve aged.  It’s rare for me to look back on a year and be able to define that.  Usually, I feel exactly the same: I have more living under my belt, but I don’t feel older.  This year, I do feel older.  Or maybe just different.  In the course of 365 days, my life has changed dramatically.  I’m now a student again, a "professor" and I am focusing on my writing in a far more professional way.  I have a small but valid publication credit under my belt. I have even more new and wonderful friends in my life.

Even so, I am approaching 29 with a bit more caution. 28 was a flame. It burned brightly, but it burned.

I don’t know what 29 will be, but I am ready for it.  Because I have to be.  And because I am becoming what and who I want to be.  With focus, diligence, and forward motion.

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat." 

— Theodore Roosevelt

"I’ve always thought tests are a gift. And great tests are a great gift. To fail the test is a misfortune. But to refuse the test is to refuse the gift, and something worse, more irrevocable, than misfortune.

— Shards of Honor, Lois McMaster Bujold.