Image courtesy of Micurs. Licensed under CC BY SA 2.0.

“But I do think that 2012 showed me that I can do a hell of a lot in a pretty short span of time, and that no matter what 2013 brings it cannot possibly cover the insane emotional ground of 2012′s travel-dead dog-malaria-cancer-job hunt extravaganza.”

— Me, this time last year. Sucker.

I am very, very ready for 2013 to go crawl off and die in a haze of fireworks. Because this year? Was awful. Thinking about it the other day, I realized that in the last 12 months my mother died, I spent 6 months lost and sad crying in my car just constantly, I spent 5 months working overnight in a shift that kind of made me crazy, and I had one car totalled and another de-bumpered. In the middle, I made a moderate ass of myself on Twitter, and after dropping my honors thesis I  managed (though I did not blog it at the time), to turn in a final paper in a graduate course on completely the wrong topic. Two days ago, my radiator exploded, nearly killing my cat and ruining my things.

Looking back through the year’s worth of blog posts and photos and memories, though, I’m struck by how much other excellent stuff was happening at the same time. On the last day of 2012, I was offered the job that I work know (and that I like!). I graduated college, term paper aside. I attended a birthday party that involved a slip ‘n slide. I took an improv class, and started volunteering (which is full of lovely people), and met Susan Cooper and Jen Dziura. I saw Watsky perform. I traveled to Austin and Chicago and Miami and Boston and Nashville. I helped plan a conference. My friends threw me a truly wonderful surprise birthday party, and I was published on The Toast.

Perhaps this year wasn’t awful. It was just spiky. As I’ve maintained since Dakar, spikiness is sometimes worse than consistent awfulness. It makes it hard to enjoy the good things (or even to remember half of them), and doesn’t make the bad ones any easier to handle.

But I made it through, and 2013 is nearly at its end. And that is all that there is left to say on the topic of this year.