Breinthewild

I mean, all the cool kids seem to be doing reflections on the end of the decade, so here I am just a few weeks late to the party!

The past decade took me from high school to college, from college to ministry school, from ministry school to working full time and from working full time to…uh… continuing to work full time because that’s kind of what you do now?

In addition to moving through the generic ‘early years’ of my future wikipedia page, I’ve also seen a lot of growth when it comes to my personal goals, particularly writing. The start of the decade was when I started ‘writing for real’ – or writing for myself instead of just for class assignments.

Everything changed when the fire nation attacked I took macroeconomics in high school.

My apologies to my teacher at the time. I’m sure he was very enthusiastic about the subject, it just didn’t show up on his expressionless face. Or in his monotone lectures. Or in his sleepily-swaying stance in front of a flickering powerpoint that shows up in my nightmares every now and again, with the lines for ‘supply’ and ‘demand’ bleeding out of the edges of the graph onto the floor, where they pool and slink towards me…

Ahem.

To escape boredom more than anything else, I started compiling stories in what was supposed to be my exclusive macroeconomics notebook. (Because I was going to take so many notes, see). Turns out, writing was a cure-all for boredom of every flavor! As long as I had a trusty notebook and a working pen, any amount of downtime could instantly turn into storytime.

That was a decade ago. I’ve carried a notebook with me ever since, filling each of them with thousands of words of stories, quips and quotes, character sketches (both real and imaginary) and more. It took me that many words to even get to the point where I could finish one (1) story properly. (I expect it will take me many more notebooks to become published proper, but that’s a tale for another time).

I appreciate these stacks of worn (and at this point pretty beaten-up) paper for the reminders they carry. They give a sense of weight to the work I’ve put in and I can go back, book by book, to see how far I’ve come and how much I’ve grown. Because the growth was always there, I was just too frustrated to see it sometimes.

Part of me deeply hopes 2020 reflects this for me in some regard. More growth, more writing, more moving forward.

We shall see what the next decade holds.