Best Of

I love Year In Review lists.

Over the course of the past day I've enthusiastically devoured "Best of 2013" lists for books, gaffes, quotes, music, film, tech, women, longform journalism, and trips, just to name a few.

Combined with my weird excitement over holidays that require us to be introspective, I really anticipated writing this post to be, well, easy. A few quick looks at blog stats, some meditation on my personal journal, and I'd have a few Zen sentences to drop in here before heading off to put on a short dress and dance with my friends until midnight.

How come these things never work out the way you want them to?

Part of it, I suspect, is because 2013 was (and here my flashy vocabulary is failing me).

2013 was the biggest emotional clusterfuck of my life.

I met my favorite author and discovered my nana had breast cancer and biked a 150 miles across the state of Minnesota. I had great sex and terrible sex and wondered if I was going to be single for forever and hoped that I wouldn't have to settle down any time soon. I traveled to St. Louis and D.C. and spent more than my usual amount of time thinking about freedom and self-determination. I went to weddings for the people I love most in the world. I danced to "Call Your Girlfriend" and "Get Lucky" more times than I can count, argued about whether or not "Blurred Lines" is rapey. I argued about women in science and listened to jazz in the oldest jazz club in the United States. I drank scotch in my apartment and argued about modern feminism.I argued a lot. I smoked cigars next to a fire in Northern Minnesota and looked at the stars and talked about the impossibility of our own existence. I fell for someone. I fell out with someone.  I changed jobs, changed cities, changed directions.

As I said, an emotional clusterfuck.

For as cliched and ridiculous as it sounds, I learned so much over the past year about myself and my relationships and my mental health. I think about how I when I toast the coming of the new year tonight, I will be a profoundly, deeply different woman than the one who rang in last New Year with a panic attack.

I am a different, better person than I was a year ago.

The problem, of course, is that all of those revelations turned out to be far more personal than I had intended. And the prospect of writing about them here is just  . . . too much. For the time being, they're best left in my journal and in my head, percolating for 2014.

That said, the one revelation I'm all right talking about is this: I am surrounded by some of the smartest, kindest, most loving people in the world.  Chances are strong that if you're reading this, I know you extremely well. Because of that, let me break the fourth wall for a moment and say, simply,

Thank you.

In a thousand small ways over the past year, you have changed and saved my life. There really aren't words for the kind of love and support I've received, and it would take less of a hack than I am to talk about my gratitude and love.

So instead just trust that in some small way, your love and friendship is reflected on my personal "Best of 2013" list.