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Happy New Year

EG

Happy New Year to everybody.

I have a hard time with New Year’s Eve and Day, myself.  It’s one of a trio of holidays that tend to make me depressed (the other two, in case you’re wondering, are Thanksgiving and Valentine’s Day, with Thanksgiving worse than the other two by light-years).  No matter what I’ve accomplished the previous year, I tend to look back on it and feel inadequate.  Even this year, when I published a book, was nominated for three writing awards and won one, published one story and sold two, became pregnant, and moved into an awesome new home with my amazing family (best friend, best friend’s husband, godson)…somehow managed to become, in my NYE depressive brain…kind of pathetic.  (Trust me, you don’t want to know what the line of, let’s call it “reasoning,” is there.)

So if you’re like me, and the end of the year calls forth devils and difficulties, you’re not the only one.  And if you’re able to be all joyous, that’s excellent, and I hope the good cheer lasts all year for you.

Do you have resolutions?  Hopes?  Plans?  Amusing New Year’s anecdotes?  Take it away…

10 thoughts on Happy New Year

  1. Congrats on the awards, book sales and your pregnancy. I found out on Xmas that my oldest granddaughter is expecting Aug 31st. She got me a shirt that read soon to be a great grandfather 2015.

  2. Sorry to hear New Year’s makes you so depressed. I hope that 2015 gives you a happier Valentine’s day and Thanksgiving than you’ve had in the past.

  3. Wow EG, you’re had one hell of a year!

    I’m been “okay” and pretty low for the past month or so with constant intrusive thoughts of offing myself. Strangely, I feel better today than I’ve felt in months. It’s as if I think “well that year is done” and so magically the new year will be better. It’s so weirdly irrational and uncharacteristically optimistic and sanguine. Just wish this came in pill form.

  4. My New Years Eve ended in me throwing up all over myself and crying (my mistake for not knowing that mixing beer with whiskey is a terrible idea). Not exactly a nice start to the new year.

    As for resolutions, the most important one that comes to mind is “Get a job.” Being poor for half of 2014 wasn’t very nice. It would also be cool to experience a year in which my bipolar disorder doesn’t completely fuck up my life.

  6. As for me, I always feel slightly embarrassed to be so negative about myself, but I can’t really think of a single good thing that happened to me in 2014; only bad. It probably makes my list of my top ten worst years ever, which is a stiff competition! And I haven’t really been coping with everything that well, which obviously makes things harder. I think it’s almost five days now since I last left my apartment. And that’s not the longest I’ve gone in the last few months.

    Naturally I hope 2015 is a better year for me, but I’m not very optimistic; it doesn’t seem terribly likely. Especially since I have to move out of my apartment in three months and it’s apparently impossible to rent a new place in this city unless you not only have a job, but it pays an annual salary of 40x monthly rent. I’ve been looking for work for more than six months now, and I’ve had no luck at all yet. I was really hoping to get a job as an attorney working for LGBT legal rights in general or trans legal rights in particular, and there were actually two jobs of that kind available, but I was turned down for both. In favor of much younger people, not that I know that had anything to do with it, of course. But I can’t help wondering what went wrong, since it seems to me I was as qualified — and as committed to their cause — as anyone could possibly be.

    I’m discouraged, although not quite ready to give up on everything yet. But at this point, it’s hard to imagine this year being much better than the last. At least it’s still possible for me to be happy for other people, though. I’m definitely not a “misery loves company” kind of person.

  7. New Years is a hit-and-miss with me. I’m not a big fan, mostly due to expectations, along with bad memories. It was a NYE that my ex-husband told me he was moving out. It was also an NYE that I dropped a really fucking embarassing drunken FEELINGSBOMB toward one of my best friends who had, a month or two previously, let me down very gently when I expressed my romantic feelings to said best friend.

    However, it was also a NYE that I hooked up with current gentleman friend, making it a happy anniversary as well. The last few years we’ve just stayed in and played video games. We were both getting over the flu this year so I have never been so happy to have no plans whatsoever beyond eating some candy and playing 6 hours of Hatris.

  8. I have no feelings on new years either way. It’s just another day. The only thing it signifies for me is that I’m going to spend the next 6 months getting the date wrong. I will write 2014 on everything.

  9. 2015 may be better than 2014. I hope it is.
    I wrote 5 novels, did a lot of crafting and dealt with no income ($400/mo) and death in the family.

    But all 2015 looks like is an endless stretch of drudgery, punctuated with days of mandatory joyless merriment. It’s an unpleasant feeling.

  10. I always kind of like New Year’s Eve & NYD because it means I’ve survived the (for me) worst time of year: Thanksgiving through Christmas.

    I spend a lot of my time doing contra/English/Scottish dancing, so I used to attend one or another NYE dance. Then I discovered that my ex was not into do much of anythong for NYE, so I decided to plan something fun that my kids and I could do together.

    It turns out that the place where my kids used to go for weekend youth retreats does a 2-day family NYE event every year (Dec 30-Jan 1), so now we go there. I don’t have to cook or plan, we don’t have to drive on NYE, my kids get to hang out with kids they got to know during retreats, and I get to talk and make music with nice people and watch little kids (the age range is something like 2 to 80 years) scamper around like hyperactive puppies. And I can take a nap any time I want.

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