Hey guys, it's been a while.
Today, I turn 22 years old. Old to some, young to most, 22 is a new chapter in my life that I'm excited for. I'm grateful for the things I've been able to learn and to do so far, and although I don't know what the next year has in store for me, I hope that I'll be able to have fun and become a better, kinder person.
Twenty-one was a good year. I celebrated my last birthday in Mexico. It's so strange to look back at how things were then compared to how they are now. This past year of my life has brought highs and lows, triumphs and frustrations. In this post, I want to talk about some things I've done this past year and some hopes I have for the age of 22.
Towards the end of last year, I came home from Mexico and hung out around my house for about six weeks before I started school in January. That time feels like a blur. I don't really remember what I did, except that it included watching the third season of
Stranger Things and sleeping a lot. It was a simple time, as I just had to wait for school to roll around.
Eventually, it did roll around. I started college at the beginning of this year, and it's been an interesting ride so far. College is a lot of fun. I really like my school, Utah State University, for its atmosphere and its culture. The city, Logan, is small and comfortable, almost like a town you'd find in a Hallmark movie if that movie were about how to save the beloved Logan Canyon from commercial development or something like that. I've loved living here, and it's been good to go to school here. Utah State feels like home, and I think I've been able to work on finding what I want to do and who I want to be in my life, and that (while sometimes stressful) is exhilarating.
The first half of last semester was a lot of fun. I spent lots of time with friends doing a lot of fun things. I took road trips to southern Utah and to California, and I got to learn about myself along the way. I reconnected with old friends and made a few new ones, and life was looking good.
But then things changed. Less than a week after my trip to California, my school announced that all classes were going to be going online for the remainder of the semester due to safety concerns over COVID-19. At that point, we didn't know the magnitude of the coronavirus, and we didn't realize that we'd be living through a pandemic for months to come.
I think that's one of the things that 21 has taught me: you can't ever really know how things are going to go. You can hope. You can plan. You can think ahead. But you'll never really be sure of the path that life will take before it takes it. That's what makes life exciting, obviously. If life were perfectly predictable, it wouldn't be interesting at all. The unknown is what allows you to remain engaged, and it's what allows you to change things overnight if you want to. Your life isn't predetermined, and that's pretty cool.
But that fun spontaneity is one side of the coin. The other side is the reality that things might go a lot differently than you want them to, and you might be left with your hands in the air wondering "What did I do wrong?" Sometimes, you don't do things wrong, and life just deals you a hand you're not particularly fond of. So what does that leave you to do? Well, you play the cards you're dealt in the best way you can, and wait for better cards to land in your hand in the future.
So that's what I did. School went online, and I moved home. I wasn't happy about it, but also I was grateful that I could move home fairly easily. I know that this pandemic has caused a lot of people a lot bigger headaches (and heartaches) than what I have had to deal with, and I by no means think that I have any claim on any share of meaningful suffering. Did I face setbacks because of the coronavirus? Yes. Frustrations? Absolutely. Uncomfortable isolation and unseen mental tolls? Of course. I couldn't land a job during the summer, in large part due to the pandemic. But also, I didn't
need a job, at least not to survive. I was grateful that I could be supported by my parents, and still have a decently good amount of autonomy over how I spent my time and who I associated with.
One of the blessings about spending an extended summer stay at home is that I was able to become closer with people I wasn't as close with before, and we found things to do to keep us sane and keep us safe. I'm grateful for the group of friends I spent time with this summer, because they truly turned what was set up to be an awful time into something not only bearable, but genuinely enjoyable. Like I said before, this summer was one of those things I couldn't see coming beforehand, but as I look back on it, I'm happy about the things I was able to do and the people I spent time with.
And then, school started again. This semester has been unique for obvious reasons, but it's been good so far. I have good grades and I'm enjoying my classes, and I'm grateful for the measures USU has taken to try and keep things as normal as they can under the circumstances. I'm no fan of online classes, but my professors have been pretty good about making things work. Attending class in person once a week instead of three isn't what I want, but it works.
I guess that's another thing that 21 has taught me: sometimes, you just have to make things work even when circumstances aren't ideal. Flexibility is a criminally underrated characteristic. Things will probably turn out differently than you hope or expect, but if you're willing to adjust and see/do things differently, you'll be able to find a way to achieve some semblance of what you wanted.
21 was a good year. It was different than what I wanted to be, but ultimately I wouldn't call it bad. Would I have loved to live in a coronavirus-free world, a world where I could hug people without fear, one where I could have taken the trip to Italy that my family had been planning for nearly a year before we had to cancel it? Would it have been cool for things to go how I thought they would have? Yeah. It would have been pretty cool. But you can't change the past, you just have to take things as the come and go with it. So overall, I think 21 was what it needed to be in order for me to get where I am.
Maybe where I am isn't where I need to be, but it's on the path there, and I'm happy to be taking that path. I'm happy for the friends that I have that truly, truly make my life so good.
Of course, there's no way for me to know what 22 holds in store for me. But I hope that whatever comes this year, I'll be able to learn a lot and laugh along the way. It'd be naïve to assume that every day will be perfect, but I hope that both the good days and the bad days will help me focus on what's important, and I hope that I can find a way to make the world, or at least my little bubble in it, a little bit brighter.
Thanks for following along, and I'll talk to you soon.
