2016 going on ’17, getting ever better.

I will admit that I was ready to jump onto the “kill 2016” bandwagon as many others have done.  The 2016 dumpster fire felt ornament seemed so apropos after a year of many deaths of touchstone celebrities and the election of He with the Hair who Shall Not Be Named. I admit that I wasn’t as connected to these people as most of my friends were, save for Alan Rickman, whose performances in the Harry Potter films, “Dogma,” as well as that exquisite recording of him reading Shakespearean sonnets. But I understand the devastation.

However, I stepped back, not because of snarky articles insisting that a year didn’t anthropomorphize and kill all our favorite people, but because I thought of a similar realization I had not too long ago about success, location, and belonging.  For most of my life, I thought that my unhappiness was linked to living in the wrong place, so I’d pick up and move to the next place that my mind imagined would be the promised land, only to have a similar experience.  When I moved back to Milwaukee in 2013 and had a similar feeling, I finally said to myself, “now, just wait. STOP. I’m thinking it’s not just about the place.  It’s about you and your reaction to it. Moving all over has proven to be of no help.  You like a lot of things about this place, so why not work on you and your reactions to make it better?”  Of course, that is harder, and moves as slowly as a barge in frozen waters. But I’ve come to the conclusion that such microscopic steps are the ones we need to take to make life better for ourselves.

Life has a plethora of growing pains for us. For me, this year was no different. I felt like there was an inordinate amount of struggling and suffering, feeling like I didn’t fit into anything, and when attempting to tell others of the complexities of why, interruptions, eye rolls, the downplaying of the emotions met me and shut me down, which multiplied frustrations exponentially. Over the past few days in this short winter break, I’ve come to recognize that I don’t need to explain myself at all, be it to myself or to others.  We all have at least a paradox or ten in us that might be keeping us frozen in place, or we can accept that it’s there and move on.  I know I’ve thought about that before, but I feel like I took a bigger step into understanding and accepting that in the past couple of weeks.

And this thing about “better”:  our society is obsessed with improvement. Think of all the articles in Oprah magazines, or the ever-increasing self-help sections in bookstores, all of which promise to show you the path to making your life fantastic and full of perfect success.  Except, that never happens.

No, I don’t want that kind of not-really-better.  I’m talking about the microscopic-steps-forward kind of better, that which I have learned from my Couch-to-5K experiences.  And this is NOT just regarding eating and exercising!  No, I’m using this in embracing my real interests and going more out on a limb to create visual art, to write more, to improve my writing, to create some of my own music, to reinvigorate my search for extant music I might enjoy. Additionally, it’s a call for me to reach out to incite change in our systems by calling and writing members of Congress on issues that need addressing, and to help and serve others in the small ways I can.

If we all simply try to take such microsteps forward, 2017 will be a little better. And that is all I wish for us.