It's a whole new year!

It's 2012. How crazy is that? I swear, when I write it, I feel a little like I'm living in a sci-fi movie, and I don't know what to do about that.

It's a whole new year. Nothing's the same, yet nothing has changed. I can't put my finger on it. I can't articulate it well (which is a shame, seeing as I know a whole heck of a lot of words and can't seem to string a sentence together that expresses how this new year feels to me). All I keep thinking is that everything's the same, yet ... it isn't the same. At all.

I'm curious to see where 2012 takes me. I'm full of trepidation and yet ... hope.

When 2010 ended, I was happy to see it go. I thought that 2011 would, surely, be an easier year for me. (Insert eye roll and raucous laughter here.) ... And it's not like I think I have the power to jinx myself or anything like that, but I'm a little leery of saying, or even thinking, anything along the lines of how 2012 will, surely, be easier than 2011 was. Not that 2011 was a bust. It wasn't, by a long shot. It was hard, but it was worth it. I felt more joy, more happiness, than I'd ever thought I could. (And I'd always considered myself a pretty happy girl.) But it was a hard year. A year I don't want to repeat.

To paraphrase a quote I heard once upon a time, way back in High School English, before I had any idea what this might mean: The amount of joy we feel is, literally, commensurate to the amount of pain we have felt. 2011, literally, brought me more pain than I'd ever seen before. Commensurately, it also brought me more joy than I ever could have imagined.

Here's to hoping that 2012 will be more than a sci-fi hallucination. Here's to hoping that it's a continuation of the joy, and that 2011 put a cap on the pain.

I am truly hopeful that this will be my best year ever. I look forward to the people I'll meet, to the experiences I'll have, to the love that I know I'll feel.

I love my life. I always have. But every year, I love it (and the people in it) even more.

Happy New Year, folks! Let's make it a doozy!