In Conclusion

So I’ve reiterated where I started, told you where I’ve been, and today I want to go back to the question at hand: can 365 days change your life?  As I sit here thinking about the person I was a year ago, I can safely say that 365 days can make a difference...if you want it to.

They say whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger and last November I was beaten, battered, and bruised but I wasn’t dead yet.  A year ago, I wasn’t happy with who I was.  I wasn’t happy with the life I was living.  The overall theme to my story was that I wasn’t happy and no matter how hard I tried to get myself to that place, I couldn’t quite make it happen.  It felt like everything I wanted was constantly out of reach and I was stuck where I was rather than moving forward.  I was sinking last year, and had been for several years, and as the quick sand got higher and higher, I found myself desperately grasping for anything to keep me afloat. 

At this time last year, I realized that I had let things knock me down and I was just passively lying there waiting for things to get better on their own.  That was probably my biggest mistake because if you want to change anything about your life or yourself, you have to take control and commit to doing it.  This year was all about finding that strength to get back up and get better than I’ve ever been before.  I realized that the reason I couldn’t change was because I was still hanging on to too many things, several without even really knowing it.  I wasn’t open to finding happiness outside what I thought was going to make me happy until I asked myself the question, why are these the only things that are going to make me happy?  Am I doing things because I want to or because someone else or society tells me that’s what’s expected of me?  What happens if you throw out your perfect plan, the pretty picture of what you thought you would have when you grew up and started to find all the things you never knew you always wanted?   Everything I had been through had brought me to that current unhappy state and last year, I felt like it was curse but now I can see that it was more of a blessing.

I said that 365 days can change you but if you are so set in your ways or your wants, how can you change?  You have to let change happen, without expectations and just be open to whatever comes your way and be willing to take all of it, good, bad, and otherwise as a learning experience. 

Without plans or expectations, you can’t feel like a failure because there is no barometer to measure whether or not you lived up to anything.  At the end of the day, the only way to measure success is if you are happy and this year has been one of the best of my life.   I can 100% say that I am happy.  So in conclusion that makes my little experiment a success.

“I feel it, I see it, I know it, life is getting better all the time.” – Life Is Getting Better by Javier Colon