FROM THE ARCHIVES: When It's the New Year and Everything Is Different

We've published hundreds of stories from 100+ writers in the last three years, so we're highlighting some of these timeless posts in our new From the Archives series. Enjoy!

As I get older I realize that each new year is like a game of Russian roulette. The odds are good that everything will be okay, that they year will go well; after all, I’m smart, intrepid and a hard-worker. Things should be fine.

But then there are those years when everything goes rogue. The bullet years. 2015 was a bit of a bullet year for me. But the thing about the bullet years is that they injure you, but you heal, you grow and you change. And at the end of it all, nothing is the same.

On New Year’s Eve last year I was talked into spending way too much money to watch a couple of guys play dueling pianos. It was a night of hilarity and champagne. Fall of 2014 had been one of the worst patches of my life, so when the clock struck midnight in downtown Fort Worth and all of the drunk people around me started singing "Auld Lang Syne," I started to sob. Not a lot. Just a little. Mostly because I was bone tired, but also because "Auld Lang Syne" is just about the saddest song for what’s supposed to be a happy occasion. Also because I hadn’t spoken to my best friends in a while. All lived in Houston. One was married, one was engaged and one had convinced me to spend way too much money to watch of couple of guys play dueling pianos. She’s a champ, though. She drank an entire bottle of champagne “because you’re designated driver Rachel, I’m doing you a favor.”

Enter 2015: the year that I learned I couldn’t keep the world together.

I couldn’t bind up other people’s problems and make everything okay. I just couldn’t. I learned that I am not superman; I can’t save people. I learned that sometimes people choose to be unhealthy, that they choose to be in dangerous situations, but that I don’t have to support bad choices. I learned that I can walk away. Sometimes walking away means that you lose a friend, but it often means that you gain some clarity and peace. I learned that I can’t please everyone because in the words of Brené Brown I’m not “the jackass whisperer.” A pretty good lesson, though a pretty hard one for me. I learned that taking care of myself and my mental health isn’t selfish, it’s responsible. So 2015 became the year that I said “and now, I’ll do what’s best for me.”

2015 broke my heart.

I applied to my dream job. I was convinced that I was qualified. It was my ticket out: out of America, out of the bad situation I was in, out of focusing day in and day out on surviving. I was so, so sure that my dream would come true.

But it didn’t. I got rejected without an interview. Dream over, for now. Most of my friends didn’t understand how absolutely broken I was. Only one person got it. I’m still irrationally angry that I didn’t get the position. I’m also still irrationally angry at the friends who couldn’t empathize with me, who told me not to be sad. I’m working on it, though. By that I mean I just don’t think about it, because if I do, hot tears start to well up and I get mad all over again.

Also, and this is mostly a side note and a cautionary tale: when I crossed the stage at graduation, I was supposed to get two diplomas, but when I opened the maroon diploma tube there was a letter that said I hadn’t passed graduation. Note to A&M: find a better system than that! Turns out it was a clerical error. I got my diplomas in the mail a week later. But I still cried silently through the entire three hour graduation ceremony. It was the saddest. 2015 man… not easy.

I had some major victories though — I got published, I worked with a team to create an amazing Capstone project, I made friends in unlikely places and I continued to help people (even when I felt helpless). I graduated (much to the chagrin of Texas A&M), and I got a job. I moved to DC without any place to live and I made some of the best friends I’ve ever had. I found a church, a place full of amazingly messed up people who love and encourage me all the time. I started running. Not quickly, but earnestly. I started reading (and writing) again. I helped a friend through a divorce. I helped myself out of a bad situation. I got really good at driving stick shift. I left Texas (though I miss it), and I have started to make a home for myself in DC. Since starting my job in June I’ve gotten a promotion and a raise, and I think I’m starting to get a hold of this whole “growing up” business. I feel as if my life is entirely potential energy. Not yet kinetic, but I’m getting there.

At the beginning of 2015 I was sad, terrified and tired. I’m still kind of tired, but I’m happier, healthier and much more hopeful. I am entirely different. Still me, but more ready. I’m still unsure about so much, but I am 100% that everything will be okay, eventually. Even though 2015 was a bullet year, and 2016 is another round of Russian roulette, I’m willing to give it a shot.

[This post was originally published on January 7, 2016.]

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The End of 23

Twenty-three has been the hardest year of my life, straight up. And I say that with zero melodrama and with the common sense that there will be years ahead that are worse and years ahead that are better. I know many of you can relate. Maybe this is just our early 20s, or maybe this is just life—this pendulum swinging between the dark and light, wandering and arriving, wondering and knowing, grief and joy.

Today I Am On A Plane: The Move to New York City

Today I am on a plane.

I have just moved to New York City. I have listened to "Empire State of Mind" 7 times. I have had 2 mimosas. I don't know what I'm doing here. I don't know how I got here.

Five days ago I was in Nashville, TN. My home for the past 4 years, my city, my happy place.

One day ago I was in Long Lake, MN. My home for the past 22 years, the only home I've ever lived in, my safe haven.

Today I am on a plane.

I have realized there is a difference between dreaming your dreams and living them.

I have also realized how hard it is.

Through the Eyes of a Child

One disappointing thing about getting older is noticing the mystique of things that used to excite you fade. Coming into the real world is met with its fair share of challenges, and the temptation to let this harden you is accessible; perhaps it’s autopilot to become jaded. To have a hopeful outlook towards the state of the world, towards your passions, even towards life at times, takes a conscious effort. The reality is you witness (and sometimes find yourself in the middle of) a lot of crash and burn scenarios as you grow up, and it is really easy to let ugly truths cloud your perspective.

Dealing With Heartbreak at 35,000 Feet

Three days after my birthday I got dumped. Plain and simple. I was about to leave for a month in Germany, followed by a more permanent residence in Alabama for graduate school, when my boyfriend said he wasn’t prepared for the distance. It hurt, I cried, and then I drank more wine than I should have.

I spent the time leading up to my trip to Berlin thinking about the what if’s: What if I wasn’t leaving for half the summer? What if I could stay in Nashville? Would things change? Three weeks of driving myself crazy with questions made me realize that I needed to go to Europe, if only to provide myself with a distraction from neurotically checking my ex’s Instagram page. I packed my bags and in mid-May settled into seat 27C on a flight from Dallas to Frankfurt, thinking that maybe this was a good way for me to take a break from the breakup.

On Making Decisions When You Are Afraid Literally Always

Like a dramatic and silent slow action shot in a cheesy multi-million dollar film, I watched in horror as the barista raised the whipped cream dispenser, taking aim at my beloved mocha. But I didn’t want whip. In fact, when ordering, I had specifically requested no whip, please. An internal battle raged within me on whether or not I should say something. Over whipped cream. I was literally contested over whether I should say something about whipped cream.

Because why rock the boat? Even if it’s as inoffensive as asking for no whip.

“Don’t say anything,” Fear instructed. Over whipped cream.

Let It All Go: On Shedding Expectations and Fear

There are a few things that happen when you graduate college. You celebrate school being finished. You send out job applications with big dreams and starry-eyes. You get rejected and ignored. You send out job applications, and LinkedIn invitations, and cover letter after cover letter—you dream about cover letters—you start losing steam. You want a job. You want a job so badly.

You get a job. You celebrate. You go to your first day in a new pencil skirt with starry-eyes. You love it, for a while. Some days you hate it. Sometimes you wish you could go back to that time when you weren’t tied down to your desk, even though that’s all you wanted. You start losing steam. You want a new job, or to travel, or to do what that girl on Instagram is doing. You want that other life so badly.

And it’s not that what you have is bad, or that it isn’t what you expected. It’s that there are so many reasons to tell yourself that you’re doing something wrong. That you didn’t choose the right path.

One Year In: 3 Lessons from That First Year of Post-Grad Life

I turn 23 at the end of July, meaning I was the baby of my grade all through my academic career. Being the youngest (among other things) somehow made me feel uncool and likely had an effect on my ridiculous effort to prove just the opposite. Self-expression was key here. I found identity in a flowy skirt, Converse sneakers and a Rolling Stones t-shirt in the 8th grade. “Woah, Lane, that look sounds way chill already—how’d you manage to make it even chiller?” you ask? Braces and a DIY hemp necklace, obviously! The universe had surely never seen anything this edgy. I remember feeling like a fraud but also a badass when asked, “Can you even name a Rolling Stones song?” and responding only with a panicked “yes—of course!” before fleeing the room immediately.

I can name close to 10 (lmao, boom) Rolling Stones songs now, but in many ways I still carry around that same confidence-meets-self-consciousness. It’s this stupid thing where I don’t care what people think about me so much so that I want them to know just how much I don’t care. I believe “caring” is what that’s actually called. So just to reiterate: sometimes it’s hard to feel like an adult.

Reflecting on the year, it bums me out to realize how hard I’ve been on myself. Whether that meant kicking myself for not living up to an expectation or kicking myself for being “too much” or kicking myself for not being enough, there was always a reason to kick. But the thing is, all we can do most of the time is try to exist as we are.

That said, I’ll keep this short and sweet with three pieces of advice for those entering their first year after college.

A Letter to the Recent Grad

I took graduating really hard. Like, really hard. I left school having absolutely nothing figured out with absolutely no answers, and spent most of the summer crying to my parents and denying the fact that I could no longer get dollar drinks at the bar (one of the rudest awakenings about post-grad life…). I felt lost without my friends, without the walls of UNH that protected us all so neatly, and without my identity as a student.

…because if I wasn't a student, then who the $%&@# was I?!?!?

An Ode to Carrie Bradshaw

It’s discouraging when you work something up in your head for so long and nothing comes of it; the moment I put something in there, I can’t let it go for the life of me. And it’s even more discouraging when you realize that what you want may not exactly be what you need. But John Steinbeck once wrote to his sons: “I have discovered that there are other rivers. A great many never come to know that there are other rivers.” I over-analyze literature like I over-analyze everything else, but what I took from this is that sometimes, we try to cling so hard onto what we know, simply because it’s what we know. But you have to allow your dreams to change so constantly because you are changing so constantly. There are other rivers, and other cities, and other places to grow in. And often, they are the ones you would never expect.

New Things, Better Things

It’s been a hell of a year, but in the very ordinary, nothing-too-tragic-has-occurred sense. You know, the kind of hell that has nothing to do with a death or an incurable illness or a divorce or an addiction, none of that. In fact, if you were to peer into the window of my life from the sidewalk a yard away, it would look to you like it’s been quite a rich year from last summer to the new one approaching us: adventures all around the country and even the world, a new job, a new house with a kitchen so beautiful it should be photographed and framed, a new kitten, by golly! So much new-ness. All good. Objectively, that is.

But I’ve been a mess through it all, a big ‘ole blumbering not-pretty-to-look-at, please-avert-your-eyes mess.

Let the Applications Roll: 5 Tips for Applying to Grad School

The moment has arrived. After months of near neuroses, you’ve narrowed down your options and you’re ready to submit your completed graduate school application(s). To anyone who has not reached this point, the idea of actually being finished with your GRE and having gathered everything to submit an application may seem too good to be true. It also might seem downright unrealistic. Our undergrad applications were essentially a joke, seeing as how Jesus Christ Himself gifted us with websites like Common App that made submitting applications into the distant memory it is today. However, forget everything you know about applying to college. Take those sweet, sweet memories of meeting with your high school guidance counselor out of that back slot in your brain and erase the files. You’re on your own now, friend.

The 5 Stages of Deciding to No Longer Date Someone

I recently stayed on a date longer than I would have liked. The night began with dinner, a dinner that was three hours long. “That’s so great!” you the reader might be thinking to yourself. “Laurel really connected with that guy and they had so much to chat about.” I so wish that was the case. The dinner lasted three hours and then the after-dinner drinks lasted another three hours because the person I went on a date with moves/speaks/blinks at the speed of Friday afternoon. The pace is certainly friendly. But you don’t want to cruise in the speed of Friday afternoon when greater things pepper your horizon. So when he asked me if I wanted to tour art museums with him - (FYI this is a wonderful date idea. It’s classy and fun.) - I knew I had to say no. And my heart sank in my chest a little bit.

I go on a lot of dates. This is not meant to be a bragging right; it is a simple fact. As a young, social human in a vibrant city bustling with single people, dating is somewhat commonplace. And there are so many wonderful pieces of advice about how to recover from rejection or a breakup that could combine to make a world full of pies. And a world full of pies would be a better place. But what I have not heard/read/listened to on a podcast is how to let someone down and how not to feel a million emotions yourself. I feel everything all the time. So, since they (someone at some point said this) say feelings are best processed with others, I have decided to share them with you.

When I have decided I no longer want to date someone, I usually travel through 5 stages.

Life, Relationships, HealthRachel MallisonJanuary 16, 2018From the ArchivesComment